The profit motive is that it's rarely smart to fight a battle that you know you're going to lose. When lions fight, they stop as soon as they know who's going to win -- the losing lion would rather walk away with his life than force the winner to kill him.

CVS has basically decided that smoking is on its way out the door, and they've decided to forgo the remaining profits in selling a smaller number of cigarettes each year for the next few years. They've decided that they'll be better off getting ahead of this trend, shifting to more health-oriented branding, and opposing smoking publicly and vocally.