By now, CVS Caremark’s decision to stop selling tobacco products by Oct. 1 has filtered through media outlets to a public that has responded with commendation at best, and minor annoyance at worst. While even President Obama praised the company’s decision as a “powerful example” in the effort to “reduce tobacco-related deaths,” some smokers and smokeless tobacco users have bemoaned the latest in a long line of inconvenient slights against them.

On DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus, students like 18-year-old freshman Alex Harris seek out every suitable cranny to indulge in their smoke breaks during this particularly unaccommodating winter, and are now to be left without one of their nearest sources for cigarettes. “They’re way cheaper than the Mobil … so that really helps,” Harris said. “Them stopping selling, it’s like, ‘great, let me spend more money, because I don’t do that enough.'”

I can certainly relate, as I still vividly and painfully recall emerging from CVS on Lincoln Avenue every morning, eagerly packing a fresh box of Newports against the palm of my hand. Oddly enough, I’ve discovered only from coverage of the company’s recent announcement that there have been bans on tobacco products in pharmacies in my native Massachusetts for years now. I guess I never ventured much further than Blue Hill Gas Station in Quincy anyway.

At the time of writing, I am 6 hours and 10 minutes shy of 16 months without a cigarette, and I track my progress so meticulously because it is a moment-to-moment struggle more often than I admit.

I first inhaled and experienced the initial violent coughing fit and subsequent, transitory, light-headed euphoria of a cigarette 7 years ago when I was 15 years old, but I truly knew that that day would come long before it did. I will never forget having the same fascination with Joe Camel that I felt with Batman and Superman as a child, or mimicking the motions of smokers with my candy cigarettes – right down to biting little bits off of one end, and flicking away the “ash.” All this in spite of never being able to have a conversation with one of my uncles before his untimely passing, his voice box removed in a fruitless effort to fight the throat cancer that would eventually claim his life.

When my turn to pick up a cigarette came, years of indoctrination had made me ready for it. Like Alex Harris, my “whole friend group” smoked by the time I was in high school. My first time smoking a cigarette was straight out of a classic after school special- someone told me to try one, so I did. That decision led to an incredibly and unnecessarily harmful 5-and-a-half-year habit (as well as my patronage of Lincoln Avenue’s CVS), the breaking of which has been one of the most worthwhile efforts of my life.

I’m not spinning a sob story, and I fully accept the responsibility and repercussions of my own actions. However, after years of experience with and reflection on the subject, nothing can convince me that tobacco companies are anything but manipulative, unethical drug dealers who push tainted and deadly products. With that said, although I now loathe tobacco and how it ravages human beings, I still feel that people should have every right to purvey and purchase it if they so desire.

More importantly, retail entities, especially pharmaceutical ones like CVS, should be afforded the right to sell or not sell these products according to their own wishes. It’s not as if the company is going entirely health-oriented either, as they will continue to stock items including alcohol and junk food.

Still, while CVS’s cessation of tobacco sales may not yield an irreparable dent in their profits, I find it admirable that they are willing to sacrifice whatever portion of their revenue that these products constitute for the sake of public interest.

Eventually, the shelves behind CVS’s counters will be emptied, and the company will initiate information campaigns and treatment programs to assist smokers. While many students will certainly remain huddled under awnings, their smoke clouds indistinguishable from their frozen breath, some may in fact walk down Lincoln Avenue for a different reason than before.

I now know from experience how refreshing it is to walk through those revolving doors back out onto the street and draw a breath of clean, fresh air.