John Kerry: “We reduced drug use in America by two-thirds, according to the Senator from Georgia, between 1979 and 1992. He has just…”

“We reduced drug use in America by two-thirds, according to the Senator from Georgia, between 1979 and 1992. He has just made the argument for not doing what his own amendment seeks to do, because if you look at how we reduced that drug use by two-thirds between 1979 and 1992, it was because Nancy Reagan and the Reagan administration, to their credit, augmented our outreach efforts, our advertising efforts, the counteradvertising. We brought role models--sports figures and others--into the communities. We had an aggressive effort in the United States to reach into our communities and teach kids not to. That is precisely what this tobacco legislation is seeking to do with respect to cigarettes, and there is no reason in the world that you can't dovetail all of the drug efforts into that so that smoking, drugs, all of it, are dependent on the same disciplines. They are dependent on kids being raised with enough awareness of the downside and with enough self-esteem and enough structure around them to be able to make good decisions. What the Coverdell amendment does is reduce the capacity of kids to make those decisions. If we want to reduce drugs in America by two-thirds, we need to do what this tobacco legislation set out to do, and I believe we can do that by melding some of what the Senator from Georgia seeks to do. That is what the Democratic alternative seeks to do. I yield back the remainder of my time.”