25th Anniversary Of The Airline Smoking Ban

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, today marks the 25th anniversary of a law that has affected millions of Americans. It was a law that came about because of a dare. It happened in an airport in Phoenix, AZ. I was catching a flight from Phoenix to St. Louis--I think to Chicago--and I was late. I ran up to the United Airlines counter, and the ticket agent started processing my ticket to get on the flight.

She said to me, ``Here is your boarding pass,'' and I looked at it and noticed she had put me in the smoking section on the airplane.

I said to her, ``I don't want to sit in the smoking section. Isn't there something you can do about this?''

She said, ``You came here too late. And incidentally, Congressman, there is something you can do about it.''

I got on that airplane and got stuck in the middle seat in the smoking section in the back of the plane, surrounded by smokers, wedged in there, and I looked around the plane and thought: This makes no sense at all. There is an older person who may have a pulmonary problem. There is a mother with a baby sitting in a nonsmoking section two rows away from me. And I thought to myself: I am going to do something to change this.

I went back to the House of Representatives. I was a relatively new Member of Congress. I introduced a bill to ban smoking on airplanes. My staff thought it was crazy. Nobody had ever beaten the tobacco lobby at anything. To take them and most of the airline industry on was a fool's errand, but I did it anyway. I got a lot of help along the way from some amazing colleagues. I finally got a chance to bring it to the floor for a vote, and to the shock and surprise of the tobacco lobby, we won. We banned smoking on airplane flights of 2 hours or more.

I called my friend Frank Lautenberg, who was a Senator from New Jersey, and I asked him if he would take up the cause in the U.S. Senate. He agreed to, and he passed the same measure.

So this day marks the 25th anniversary of the signing into law a ban on smoking on airplanes. It is obvious why it passed. Members of Congress are part of the largest frequent flyer program in the world, and they hated it as much as I did on that flight from Phoenix to Chicago. But it did something I never imagined. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called ``The Tipping Point.'' It turns out that moment was a tipping point because people all across America 25 years ago started asking a very basic question: If secondhand smoke is dangerous in an airplane, isn't it dangerous in a train, on a bus, in an office, in hospitals, in restaurants, in a tavern, in a bingo hall--and the list went on and on. All across the United States, States started changing laws and banning smoking.

Today, if you walked into the doors of the Capitol here smoking a cigarette, somebody would stop you and say: Wait a minute, we don't do that here. In the old days, nobody would think twice and there were ashtrays all over.

When I first came to the Senate, there were no rules when it came to smoking--none. We developed them after I made a few points to those in charge. But that was the culture and the situation 25 years ago.

I think that effort to take smoking off airplanes has led to a lot of other dramatic efforts to protect Americans from secondhand smoke and from dangerous situations. I think lives have been saved. There are so many of us who can tell family stories about losses related to lung cancer and pulmonary disease. I can tell my story.

I was 14 years old when my father died of lung cancer. He was 53 years old and smoked two packs of Camels a day. He died an early death. I didn't stand by his bed at the hospital and say ``I will get even with that tobacco lobby,'' but I remembered him as I started this ban.

So I just wanted to make a note in the Record today in the Senate to salute the memory of my friend Frank Lautenberg, who was my partner in passing this important legislation, and to remind us there are other things we can do to make this world a little better and a little safer. One of those things relates to e-cigarettes, a new invention tobacco companies are jumping up and down to market to children in America. We have seen in a short period of time the number of kids using these electronic cigarettes double. It has a chemical in it, the same one that is in cigarettes--nicotine--that is addictive. Tobacco companies know that if they can lure children into cigarettes or e-cigarettes, they are going to create an addiction in these young people that will be tough to break and won't be healthy at all.

I hope the Food and Drug Administration will step up and do their job and regulate these products and these e-cigarette products to protect the children across America.

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