Saluting CVS Health

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, the No. 1 preventable cause of death in America today: tobacco. People who use tobacco--smoking or chewing--develop a myriad of health problems, and many die prematurely.

Tobacco companies are a big business in America. They have been for a long time. And they really try their best to recruit new customers when they go into junior high and high schools. Now they are in the e-cigarette business too, but I want to stick with tobacco for a moment. The notion, of course, is, if you can addict a child to nicotine, they will continue to smoke and eventually become a lifelong user of tobacco products.

It has been a long time since I have engaged this industry in political contest. It was a little over 25 years ago when I was a Member of the House of Representatives that I boarded an airplane in Phoenix, AZ, at the last minute--a United airplane. I went to the ticket counter and said to the woman at the counter: Can I get on this plane?

She said: If you hurry, you can get on there. Here is where you are going to be seated.

And I said: Wait a minute. This is in the smoking section of the airplane and you have me in a center seat in the smoking section. Isn't there something you can do?

She looked at my ticket and said: No, Congressman, there is something you can do.

So I got on that plane and flew from Phoenix to Chicago in the smoking section of the airplane--there used to be such things--and thought to myself: This is madness. Here I sit, a nonsmoker, breathing in all this secondhand smoke, and there is an elderly person in the so-called nonsmoking section two rows away, and there is a lady with a baby, and why in the world do we have to be subjected to this?

So I came back to Washington and introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to ban smoking on airplanes. After a lot of work and a lot of good luck, I found out that the largest frequent flyer club in America--the House of Representatives--did not much like smoking on airplanes either, and I won--it surprised a lot of people--beat the tobacco lobby.

I called my friend Frank Lautenberg, the Senator from New Jersey, and asked him if he would take up the cause in the Senate. He did it masterfully. The two of us passed the law and changed the way America looked at smoking on airplanes.

Neither Senator Lautenberg nor I knew this was a tipping point in history. I did not know it. But people started thinking: If secondhand smoke is dangerous on an airplane, why isn't it dangerous on a train, in a bus, in an office building, in a hospital, in a restaurant? Today, 25-plus years later, if you walked into someone's office on Capitol Hill and they had an ashtray in the middle of the table, you would think: What are they thinking? People do not do that anymore.

It used to be standard and no one thought twice about lighting up. That was just your personal preference. Things have changed in America, and the number of people using tobacco products has declined because they have come to understand it is dangerous, it can kill you.

But we are not the only country on Earth that has figured this out. Many other countries are ahead of us in terms of regulating tobacco. If you travel overseas, take a look at cigarette packages. Ours still look pretty fancy. They have a little label on them. But in other countries, the cigarette packages are very stark and very limited in what they can say about the product. Most of what they contain are health care warnings: Tobacco can kill you. Tobacco can harm a fetus in a pregnant woman. These stark reminders are to discourage people from using tobacco products because countries overseas, just like the United States, understand how dangerous they are.

So it was in that context that I was amazed to read something a few weeks ago. The New York Times published a devastating series of articles on how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been playing a global strategy to fight against effective tobacco control laws in other countries--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fighting tobacco control laws in other countries.

Why would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--once considered a pillar of the American business community--be a champion promoting the sale and consumption of a deadly tobacco product in another country? It does not compute. One reason? The power, the money, and the influence of Big Tobacco is still very strong. The stories and letters published by the New York Times made it clear that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has effectively rented out its letterhead to the tobacco industry, jeopardizing not only the reputation of the Chamber but all the member companies that belong to it.

I stand here today to salute one company that has fought back at this revelation of this activity by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. CVS Health--you know them from their drugstores and pharmacies--announced it was going to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the Chamber's efforts to promote tobacco conflict with the CVS corporate policy that decided over a year ago to stop selling tobacco products in their drugstores.

I congratulate CVS Health. It is pretty bold when they decide they are going to walk out on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of these rotten policies they have in discouraging tobacco control overseas. Maybe this decision by CVS will give the Chamber of Commerce a reason to think twice about a policy that is going to result in deadly addictions and terrible disease. It should. The Chamber should end this insidious campaign as quickly as possible. Without question, CVS Health has shown again, as they did last year, that protecting the public health is good business and it is essential to good, responsible corporate citizenship.

The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco kills more than 6 million people worldwide every year. In the 21st century, 1 billion people--1 billion--are expected to die as a result of tobacco. And many of these deaths are in the poorest nations on Earth--8 out of 10 of today's smokers living in low-income and middle-income countries. It is unconscionable that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is going after the laws to protect the people in these poor countries.

More than a decade ago, the World Health Organization adopted an international treaty focused on reducing tobacco consumption. This treaty, supported by 180 countries, obligates nations to employ practices to reduce tobacco use. We have made a lot of progress in the last 10 years. Madam President, 49 countries have passed comprehensive smoke-free laws protecting over 1 billion people. Madam President, 42 countries have strong, graphic warning labels, covering almost 20 percent of the population that buys these products. These policies save lives and prevent cancer, heart disease, and lung cancer.

It is hard to imagine how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce can rationalize policies that literally promote the death of innocent people from the use of tobacco.

Hats off to the CVS Health corporation for stepping up and showing responsible corporate citizenship in resigning from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Maybe if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce comes to its senses, CVS might consider rejoining it.

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