Dick Durbin: “today marks the 25th anniversary of a law that has affected millions of Americans. It was a law that came about because…”

“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.…”