On the recordOctober 28, 2015
Thank you, Senator Blumenthal, and Senator Merkley, thank you for organizing this. Thank you to Senator Warren and to everyone who is here. Mr. President, with Halloween just days away, I would like to share some scary facts about nicotine. Nicotine is the main ingredient in cigarettes and is also found in the new cigarettes, the e-cigarettes. Four decades of scientific research have proved the following: First, nicotine is addictive; second, nicotine affects brain development; third, nicotine combined with tobacco is responsible for claiming millions of lives. These facts are true, but for years Big Tobacco willfully, consistently, publicly, and falsely denied them. Those lies were exposed at congressional hearings, and thanks to the tireless efforts of anti-smoking and public health advocates, traditional cigarette smoking has declined from 50 percent of all adults to 18 percent of all adults in the United States. How many millions of lives have been saved because of that? Big Tobacco and the e-cigarette industry are like the undead. Traditional cigarettes are being supplanted by e-cigarettes. Today e- cigarette sales in the United States alone topped $1 billion, and e- cigarette use is growing as fast as the students who are smoking them. The use of e-cigarettes among middle and high school students has skyrocketed, tripling from 2013 to 2014, accounting for upwards of 13 percent of all high school students. That is when my father began to smoke two packs of Camels a day.…
