Jack Reed: “today I rise to continue my discussion of the amendment I offered last evening, an amendment which would deny the tax…”

“today I rise to continue my discussion of the amendment I offered last evening, an amendment which would deny the tax deduction for advertising expenses for those tobacco companies which disregard and violate the FDA rule with respect to advertising to children. This is an amendment that is being cosponsored by my colleagues: Senator Boxer, Senator Wyden, Senator Kennedy, Senator Daschle, Senator Durbin, Senator Wellstone, Senator Feinstein, Senator Bingaman, and Senator Conrad. In addition, it has received the widespread support of the public health community. In a recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. C. Everett Koop, David Kessler, and George Lundberg wrote about the history of the tobacco industry in the United States. In their words: For years, the tobacco industry has marketed products that it knew caused serious disease and death. Yet, it intentionally hid this truth from the public, carried out a deceitful campaign designed to undermine the public's appreciation of these risks, and marketed its addictive products to children. Numerous, numerous studies have implicated the tobacco industry's advertising and promotional activities as the cause of a continued increase in youth smoking in the United States. Research on smoking demonstrates that increases in youth smoking directly coincide with effective tobacco promotional campaigns.”