Political Quotes

“perhaps a brief review of history as to how and why we find ourselves in the position we are in in this debate is an appropriate point at which to begin. Over the years, the Congress has delicately paced around the outer edges of the controversy over tobacco, encouraging certain voluntary limitations on advertising, particularly by television, requiring certain warnings to be included on packages of cigarettes and on advertising, but never getting to the heart of the issue of the desirability or the lack of a desirability of tobacco. Those limitations can be looked at as either a glass partly full or one largely empty. It is clear the major tobacco companies have attempted to remain profitable by creating, through advertising and peer pressure and in any other method that they could, a constantly increasing supply of new smokers, almost all of whom have begun smoking with the conscious knowledge of its adverse impact on their life expectancy and on their health, although when they began young this was not something that was at the forefront of the thoughts of youth. Nevertheless, in the United States of America, over the course of the last 20 or 30 years, we have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of men and women who smoke. We, as Americans, probably smoke less than almost any other country in the world. Various individuals and groups have sued tobacco companies as a result of the adverse impacts of smoking on health.”