Lincoln Chafee: “over the past several days it seems to me that the Senate debate on the tobacco bill has taken a very unfortunate turn.…”

“over the past several days it seems to me that the Senate debate on the tobacco bill has taken a very unfortunate turn. It is a turn away from what I strongly believe are the purposes and objectives of the legislation. I want to remind my colleagues that the very name of the bill that we are dealing with is the National Tobacco Policy and Youth Smoking Reduction Act. I want to accent the ``Youth Smoking Reduction Act'' portion of the title. Now, the purpose of this tobacco legislation is to fundamentally change the way tobacco products are marketed and sold in this country. Clearly, there is an epidemic sweeping the Nation. That is the rapid growth of teenage smoking and tobacco use. The Centers for Disease Control, as has been said many times on the floor, estimates that every day 3,000 young American children, teenagers, take up smoking and that one-third of these 3,000 will die prematurely because of smoking-related diseases. Thus, if you multiply that out, it is a million children a year, a million young American children under the age of 18, who join the ranks of adult smokers, and more than 300,000 of them will die prematurely. Over a 25-year period, that amounts to 8 million Americans dying early because of smoking. That is more Americans than were lost in all the major wars that our Nation has been involved with. As has been pointed out also frequently, tobacco use is the largest preventable cause of death in America today.”