Bill Clinton: “Let me just make one other request of all of you. I will certainly try to do what you've asked me to do; that is, I'm…”

“Let me just make one other request of all of you. I will certainly try to do what you've asked me to do; that is, I'm going to do my dead-level best to get the legislation passed this year that will not only dramatically reduce teen smoking, but will provide some certainty to you and some legitimate protection for the tobacco farmers and the warehouses and their communities. So I will try to do that. But let me ask you to do something, because you've really piqued my interest here, both what our pastor said and what Marissa said, what you said, Bill, what you said, Mattie, about parents' responsibility. I have spent quite a bit of time with young people's groups, the youth organizations all over the country, from New York City to small towns in California, of young people who are organized to try to get their peers not to smoke and who also often go from store to store to store to test whether the sellers of cigarettes are actually even making modest efforts to do anything about it. And I respect that because I think it's wrong to put all the responsibility here on the manufacturers. It's not like these children and their parents and their families and their schools and their churches are just ciphers that have no will, have no knowledge, have no nothing. I mean, they get up every day and go through life, too. And I wish you would give some thought to--as a practical matter, I don't know that the Government could offer every 18-year-old $1,000 on their 18th birthday if they could prove they never smoked a cigarette, but there may be some other things we could do in the area of getting young people to assume more responsibility and providing some rewards and doing some things that we haven't thought. And Marissa, the other thing, we may not have been as creative about that whole element of this as we can be, and I'd be willing to think about that. Ms. Vaught. There is a teacher who talked to me about this, and he said maybe college scholarships for nonsmokers, maybe a non-smoking scholarship for students who happen to do well in school and are non-smokers.”