Family Smoking Prevention And Tobacco Control Act - Motion To Proceed - Continued

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, this week the Senate takes up a bill that is long overdue. It is a historic opportunity for us to finally protect our children in this country from tobacco addiction. I didn't realize, when I was elected to the House of Representatives, in 1982, that the issue of tobacco would be a major part of my congressional activity. My family, similar to virtually every family in America, has been touched with tobacco death. My father died when he was 53 years old of lung cancer. I was 14 years old. He smoked two packs of Camels a day back in the 1950s, when even doctors were saying in magazines how safe it was to smoke. His cough was a sound I will carry to the grave in my memory. When I hear that smoker's cough, I can pick it out of a crowd. As a kid, I heard it over and over, night after night, day after day, until he passed away on November 13, 1959. That is my story on tobacco. Every family in America has a story to tell.

Tobacco products are some of the deadliest products sold in America but, unfortunately, the least regulated.

The tobacco industry has been successful in keeping tobacco products outside the regulatory authority of the FDA. They said it is not food and it is not a drug; therefore, we are exempt. That specious argument continues until this day, when we are finally facing reality. Tobacco is, in fact, a carrier of a drug--nicotine--which is addictive. That addiction is what leads to more smoking, more tobacco exposure, and more death.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act is a strong bill that will protect the public health and reduce tobacco use, especially among kids.

Forty-three million American adults currently smoke. That is one in five. Ninety percent of them started smoking in their teenage years, before they were adults. You wonder why. Well, I remember, when I was a kid, the first time my cousin, Mike Peterson, and I decided to sneak out behind the garage with cigarettes and try them out. It was an adventure. We were being like the grownups whom we wanted to be like someday. Luckily, for me, I stopped. Mike didn't. Mike passed away 10 days ago. He was a year younger than I, but, unfortunately, the ravages of tobacco and the addiction lead to cancer, COPD, and ultimately cost him his life at the age of 63. That happens a lot. Some kids quit, some kids don't quit; those who don't quit get addicted. Their addiction can lead to death, as it did for my cousin and childhood friend, Michael Peterson.

Every day in the United States more than 3,500 kids try smoking for the first time. A thousand of them become regular daily smokers.

In Illinois, almost 20 percent of the kids smoke, and together they consume about 34 million packs of cigarettes a year. We know tobacco is the largest preventable cause of death in America. For the longest time, the tobacco lobby held Congress in the grip of its hands. It would not allow the passage of any significant legislation. It was too powerful.

We knew their power meant they would be able to continue to sell their products, leading to devastating results. A few years back, I decided to take them on. It wasn't to get even for my own family circumstance, but I thought there was an unfair and unjust situation. It resulted in a change in the law, which changed a lot of things in this country. Mine was the first bill to pass the ban smoking on airplanes. At the time, it was considered a fool's errand to try to defeat the tobacco lobby. When I offered the bill in the House of Representatives, it was opposed by the leadership on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans. Somehow or another, through faith and good luck and the help of people such as former Senator and Congressman Claude Pepper of Florida, I was able to bring this matter to the floor for a vote, and I won, to my great amazement. We banned smoking on airplanes for flights of 2 hours or less.

Eventually, Senator Lautenberg picked up the issue in the Senate, and he showed amazing leadership in passing it in the Senate. The two of us managed to make this the law of the land. I don't want to take too much credit, but once people started thinking: If secondhand smoke is unsafe in an airplane, why is it safe in a train or in a bus or in an office or in a school or in a hospital or in a hallway? Pretty soon, the dominoes started falling across America. Laws were passed--local, State, and Federal laws--which have made smoking the exception in closed quarters and have changed the way we look at smoking today, from the time just 15 or 16 years ago, when it was considered to be the normal thing to do and objecting to it was considered out of normal.

That has changed, but still there is a lot to do. The tobacco industry hasn't stopped. They are still selling and marketing their product. As they do, more and more people become addicted, get sick, and many of them die. Tobacco companies, it was found in 2006 by Judge Kessler in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, issued a final opinion finding that the tobacco companies had engaged in a decades-long scheme to deceive and defraud the American public.

Last month, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued a unanimous opinion upholding Judge Kessler's finding of liability. Let's review some of Judge Kessler's findings. He found the tobacco industry falsely denied, distorted, and minimized the significant adverse health consequences of smoking for decades. The tobacco companies were aware that smoking and nicotine are addictive, but they publicly denied it.

Just 15 years ago, the CEOs from seven major tobacco companies stood before a committee of the House of Representatives, raised their hands, and swore under oath that nicotine was not addictive.

That was the death knell of their credibility. People knew better. I knew better. My dad died from lung cancer. He couldn't stop smoking. My friend Mike Peterson died of COPD. He smoked a cigarette the night before he died. He just couldn't stop. It is a terrible addiction.

The tobacco industry falsely denied that they can and do control the level of nicotine delivered in order to create and sustain addiction. They knew they were piling that chemical into their product, and they knew that as long as they could, they had you hooked and it would be darn tough to quit.

Tobacco companies falsely marketed so-called light and low-tar cigarettes. They turned out to be just as harmful as the others.

From the 1950s to the present day, tobacco companies have intentionally marketed to kids. Of course you want to convince kids to smoke because they are not mature enough to make the right judgment. If a kid waits until he becomes an adult to decide to smoke, he is not going to do it. He will be a lot smarter. He will not be addicted. Tobacco companies track youth behavior and preferences and use marketing themes that resonate with kids.

The list goes on and on and clearly demonstrates that this industry cannot be trusted to do the right thing. That is why we need the bill that is on the floor of the Senate.

The tobacco industry has a long and disturbing history of marketing its products to kids and young people. The financial reasons are obvious. Ninety percent of adult smokers began smoking cigarettes when they were teenagers or younger.

In the 1980s, R.J. Reynolds was looking for a way to revitalize its Camel brand, which was primarily popular with older smokers. To increase Camel's appeal to younger smokers, it created the Joe Camel cartoon character. Joe Camel became as recognizable as Mickey Mouse with a lot of kids--just what the folks who made Camel cigarettes wanted. While Joe Camel is no longer around, the problem of marketing to young people still remains.

Tobacco companies doubled their marketing expenses between 1998 and 2005. They now spend over $13 billion a year on marketing. They claim they don't market to kids, but just look at this ad. How about this one: Great Camel cigarettes. They are offering a back-to-school special. That certainly is marketing to kids. We know as parents and adults exactly what they are trying to do. This picture was taken from a shop in Camden Wyoming, DE. They knew what they were trying to do--lure these kids into tobacco at an early age--and their advertising did its best to draw them in. These companies are not going to waste a penny advertising on groups they don't think they can win over. So they go after the kids.

This bill recognizes the importance of curbing marketing to kids. It would empower the Food and Drug Administration for the first time to establish reasonable marketing restrictions that adhere to our first amendment guarantees under the Constitution. For example, the bill bans outdoor advertising near schools and playgrounds, prohibits colorful and alluring images used to appeal to young people. It limits ads to only black-and-white text in newspapers and magazines with significant teen readership. It ends incentives to buy cigarettes by prohibiting free giveaways with the purchase of tobacco products. Remember all the stuff they used to peddle in the name of cigarettes? Backpacks and caps--you name it. That kind of stuff is going to end. It gives the FDA the authority to respond to the inevitable innovative attempts by tobacco companies to get around these restrictions. It strengthens restrictions on youth access to tobacco products by requiring retailers to verify the age of all over-the-counter sales of tobacco products and prohibits vending machines and self-service displays unless they are in adult-only facilities.

In addition to restricting marketing and youth access, the bill lifts the shroud of secrecy the tobacco industry has used to hide the contents of its products for decades. For virtually all other consumer products, manufacturers are required to disclose what is in their product. Walk into any grocery store, take a product off the shelf, and you will see a list of ingredients. But cigarettes and other tobacco products, some of the most dangerous products American consumers can buy, do not have to follow the same rules as other consumer products. The tobacco industry does not want you to know what is in its products, and for good reason.

Cigarettes are not just tobacco leaves rolled up in paper; they are sophisticated, highly engineered products. In addition to tobacco leaf, cigarettes contain additives and chemicals that increase the kick of nicotine and mask the harshness of tobacco smoke. The act of lighting a cigarette creates a toxic soup of more than 4,000 known chemical compounds, all carefully added to that little cigarette in the hope that you will enjoy it so darn much you will become addicted for life. According to the National Cancer Institute, there are 69 known and probable carcinogens in cigarette smoke. Is it any wonder people develop cancer from smoking?

Researchers at Harvard University School of Public Health have also discovered that tobacco companies increased nicotine levels in cigarettes by nearly 12 percent between 1997 and 2005. They were pumping nicotine into these cigarettes knowing it was more addictive, knowing they had these folks hooked for life.

This bill ends the special treatment of the tobacco industry by requiring manufacturers to disclose to the FDA the ingredients, including substances in the smoke, of each brand of tobacco product. It requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to publish a list of harmful and potentially harmful constituents in each brand of tobacco products and requires tobacco companies to provide information they have on the health effects of existing and future tobacco products. Why did it take us so long to do this? We knew for decades what was going on here. But the tobacco companies were just too powerful. They stopped us. Now we have a chance to change that. This bill on the floor will finally give consumers across America the information they need, the information which researchers need to stop this insidious addiction.

For a product as deadly as tobacco, public disclosure of ingredients is not enough. The FDA should be able to require the industry to reduce or eliminate harmful ingredients or additives to protect the public health. For decades, the industry has manipulated its products at the expense of American consumers. No other industry in America is allowed to freely choose the types and amounts of toxic substances that are in their products--only tobacco companies, and that is going to end with this bill. This bill gives the Food and Drug Administration the authority to set standards to reduce these harmful ingredients, to reduce nicotine levels, and to ban those candy and fruit-flavored cigarettes popular with kids.

Another long overdue reform is to establish a credible process for ensuring that health claims about tobacco products are scientifically proven. Almost as soon as cigarettes became a widely used product, companies started making false claims.

In the 1920s, Lorillard came up with a slogan: ``Not a Cough in a Carload.''

In the 1930s, Philip Morris said smoking their cigarettes was less irritating than other brands and ran ads advising the public to ``Ask Your Doctor About a Light Smoke.''

In the 1940s, R.J. Reynolds ran an ad campaign for Camel cigarettes with the slogan ``More Doctors Smoke Camels than Any Other Cigarette.''

In the 1950s and 1960s, tobacco companies introduced ``light'' and ``low tar'' cigarettes to ease the growing concern about the harmful effects of smoking. The marketing of these light and low-tar cigarettes was so successful that they quickly dominated the market. Some advertisements explicitly encouraged smokers to switch to these new products instead of quitting. But the tobacco companies never had to demonstrate these new products would actually reduce harm. In fact, scientific evidence has shown light and low-tar cigarettes have not lowered health risks.

Tobacco companies continue to develop new products and make health claims that cannot be validated. This bill will prohibit tobacco companies from using misleading descriptors such as ``light,'' ``mild,'' and ``low'' to describe their products. It gives the FDA authority to review a product before it can be marketed as a ``reduced harm'' product to ensure sound science is behind that claim. These are reasonable requirements for any product in America and certainly for a deadly product such as cigarettes and tobacco.

The warnings currently displayed on cigarettes and smokeless tobacco products are more than 20 years old. Let's be honest about this. The warnings on cigarette packages are widely ignored. They have been virtually the same for decades. People don't even read them or pay attention to them. But that is going to change. This legislation requires large, clearly visible warning labels on 50 percent of the front and back of a pack of cigarettes, with graphic and textual messages such as ``Warning: Cigarettes Cause Cancer.'' You will not be able to miss it. You may miss some of the advertising and colorful photographs, but the message is going to be clear for anyone who can read. Warning messages are to comprise at least 20 percent of an advertisement. That is a big change.

This is something we introduced 20 years ago to finally change these warning labels. Congressman HENRY WAXMAN has been a great champion and advocate on this subject. We just could not pull it off. The tobacco companies were too powerful. Now we have a chance to beat them with this bill on the floor. These reforms will start to reduce the terrible toll tobacco has taken on families across the Nation.

I used to say from time to time when I would reflect on this and people would say: You are going too far, DURBIN, just too much regulation, I have yet to meet the first parent who has said to me: I have great news. I just learned last night that my daughter started smoking. I never heard that said. We know intuitively as adults it is a terrible thing when a child takes up smoking and use of tobacco. It can lead to an addiction that can harm them.

The FDA is the right agency to do this. It is the only agency with the science, the regulatory experience, and the public health mission to get this job done. Through a user fee on the industry, the bill gives the agency the funding it needs to get this job done.

This is a strong public health bill and a bipartisan bill. After more than 10 years and, in my case, more than 20 years, we have never been so close to giving the FDA the authority to regulate tobacco products. I urge my colleagues to resist efforts to weaken this bill or to add provisions that jeopardize its enactment. FDA regulation of tobacco products is long overdue. The time for Congress to act is now.

I would like to say in closing that it is a shame that my colleague and friend, TEDDY KENNEDY, is not here. He is recovering, as we know, from his own battle with a brain tumor. I talked with him a couple weeks ago, and he sounded just great. I wish he could be on the floor with us because I know how much this bill means to him personally. TEDDY KENNEDY, on this issue and so many others, stood there and fought that lonely battle, faced rollcall after rollcall when he could never get enough votes. And now the moment is at hand to come up with the votes necessary. In his name and in the name of all the people over the years who have fought so valiantly for tobacco regulation, people such as Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma and TEDDY KENNEDY--all of them dreamed of the day when this would pass. We now have a chance, this Senate in this Congress this year, to finally do something to start saving lives across America and bring the kind of sensible regulation of tobacco that has been long overdue.

Madam President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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