Family Smoking Prevention

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I rise to mark the 5-year anniversary of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This legislation was a landmark in the decades-long fight against the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the United States--tobacco use.

The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act passed in 2009--15 years after Dr. Kessler, the FDA Commissioner, began trying to regulate tobacco and 45 years after the Surgeon General's landmark report on tobacco use and lung cancer. For the first time in history, this law gave the FDA the authority to regulate the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of tobacco products.

One express aim of the law was to reduce rates of tobacco use among children. The law achieved this by restricting sales to minors, banning flavored cigarettes, banning tobacco-brand sponsorships of sport and entertainment events, banning free samples, restricting advertisements to children, and more.

The results speak for themselves. Just this month, the CDC reported that cigarette smoking among U.S. high school students has dropped to the lowest level in 22 years. According to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the percentage of students who reported smoking a cigarette in the last 30 days fell from 27.5 percent in 1991 to 15.7 percent in 2013. In Illinois, the percentage of students who are current smokers dropped by more than half between 1993 and 2013.

The FDA's implementation of this law is incomplete, and it needs to act now to reverse worrying trends. The CDC reports that e-cigarette use among middle and high school students more than doubled in 1 year, from 2011 to 2012. The same study found that one in five middle school students who reported using e-cigarettes had never tried conventional cigarettes. E-cigarettes could be a gateway to nicotine addiction and smoking. A new study released in the JAMA Pediatrics goes even further. This study found that middle and high school students who used e-cigarettes were more likely to smoke traditional cigarettes and less likely to quit smoking. If current smoking trends continue, 5.6 million American kids will die prematurely from a smoking-related illness.

I commend FDA for its most recent efforts to bring e-cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and other forms of tobacco under its authority. However, FDA's proposed regulations remain dangerously silent on one of the most pressing questions of all--the marketing of these addictive products to children.

In April, ten of my congressional colleagues and I released a report documenting how leading e-cigarette manufacturers are marketing e-cigarettes to young people. The industry is deploying the same advertising techniques it used to hook previous generations of cigarette smokers. Many of these companies hired glamorous celebrities to push their brands through TV and radio ads, and sponsored events with heavy social media promotion. For example, NJOY advertised its products during the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards, and on ESPN--all programs with substantial children and teen viewership. In just 2 years, from 2012 to 2013, 6 of the surveyed companies sponsored or provided free samples at 348 events--many geared toward youth audiences.

These e-cigarette companies have even revived cartoon characters in a way that calls to mind Joe Camel--the deadliest cartoon of the 20th century. While many of these companies argue that they do not market to children, a robust analysis recently published in the journal Pediatrics suggests otherwise. Between 2011 and 2013, exposure to e-cigarette marketing by children aged 12 to 17 rose 256 percent. Mr. President, 24 million children saw these ads. Not only is the marketing and packaging intended to appeal to young people, so is the product itself. Let me read a list of e-cigarette flavors being marketed today--vivid vanilla, gummy bears, chocolate treat, and cherry crush. In the face of this mounting evidence, rather than accelerating its efforts, the FDA bowed to industry pressure last week and extended the comment period on its proposed regulations. Every day, 3,200 kids smoke their first cigarette. Every day that the FDA fails to take action costs lives.

As we move to protect kids from new threats like e-cigarettes, we also have to redouble our fight against tobacco use in the military. Nearly 30 years have passed since the first Department of Defense report on high rates of tobacco use among servicemembers and its devastating impact on readiness, productivity, and medical costs. While overall rates of use have declined significantly, smoking rates among servicemembers are nearly 20 percent higher than civilian rates. The use of smokeless tobacco is more than 450 percent higher for servicemembers than civilians. One in three military smokers began doing so after enlisting.

The Department of Defense spends more than $1.6 billion every year on tobacco-related medical care and lost days of work, and the VA spends an additional $5 billion a year to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, primarily caused by smoking.

In 1993, after reading about the dangers of secondhand smoke, CAPT Stanley W. Bryant, commander of the U.S.S. Roosevelt, declared that his ship would be smoke-free. He said, ``I'm the commanding officer of these kids and I can't have them inhaling secondhand smoke. I wouldn't put them in the line of fire. I'm not going to put them in the line of smoke.'' Captain Bryant is one of many leaders in our Armed Forces who have tried to protect the men and women under their command from the dangers of tobacco, but at every turn, their efforts have come under fire from the tobacco industry and its allies. Even Bryant's victory was short-lived. Within the year the tobacco industry forced in a new tobacco policy that stripped ships' captains of their authority over ships' stores and mandated that cigarettes be sold on ships.

One of the central problems is the widespread availability of cheap tobacco products on military installations and ships. The Department of Defense policy requires that exchanges set tobacco prices 5 percent below the lowest local competitor. In practice, these discounts are greater. A 19-year-old soldier walking into a PX can buy a pack of Marlboro cigarettes for 25 percent less, on average, than at the nearest Walmart, according to a recent study in JAMA. These discounts are deadly. Extensive research shows that raising tobacco prices is one of the most effective ways to reduce use. Efforts to end these discounts began in the late 1980s, but nearly every attempt has been blocked due to industry pressure.

This spring, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus announced that he is considering a ban on tobacco sales at all bases and ships. As the Department of Defense has acknowledged, our ultimate goal should be a tobacco-free military. When I asked about this last week at a hearing, I was heartened to hear that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel was conducting a Department-wide review of tobacco sale policies. I urge Secretaries Hagel and Mabus to set concrete goals, policies, and timelines--starting with an end to these discounts that cost lives just as surely as do wars.

The Tobacco Control Act is one of this administration's greatest legacies. I urge the administration to continue its leadership by protecting children from e-cigarettes and our men and women in uniform from the harms of smoking.

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