Steve Rothman: “today I am going to be introducing legislation to stop children from buying cigarettes at vending machines. It has been…”

“today I am going to be introducing legislation to stop children from buying cigarettes at vending machines. It has been well established that the cigarette manufacturers have been marketing their cigarettes to children, so say the 81 internal documents recently made public by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Every day, more than 3,000 children start smoking, resulting in 1 million new smokers every year. Ninety percent of the new smokers are children and teenagers. In New Jersey alone, where I am from, 36 percent of high school students smoke cigarettes. These children are very vulnerable to well-orchestrated advertising campaigns and to the idea that smoking is somehow an act of defiance. In this day, when so many of the negative health effects of smoking are known, we should be teaching our children to stay away from tobacco, not allow tobacco companies to market to our children. And we should be passing common sense laws to stop our children from being able to buy cigarettes. That is why today I am introducing the Stop Kids From Smoking Act.”