Regulating Tobacco

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. I also invite my colleagues to jump in at any point to exchange views as well.

This issue is one that we have known about for a very long period of time, which is that tobacco addiction destroys lives. I grew up in a family where my mother didn't smoke and my father didn't smoke, but they both came from large families--many brothers and sisters--and it seemed as though every single year when I was young, one of my aunts or one of my uncles died from smoking. They died from cancer. They died from heart disease. They died from emphysema. This carnage was all too apparent.

Anyone who has taken the slightest look at this issue knows that the statistics are just unbelievable, the number of deaths and illnesses caused, the number of years lost, the degradation of the quality of life of individuals. For this reason, it had long been a topic here in the Senate that nicotine--the primary acting element in tobacco--should be considered a drug. It is a drug. It has all of these impacts. We have a Food and Drug Administration, and the Food and Drug Administration should be able to regulate it for the health and welfare of our Nation.

Back in 2009, we debated just such a law here on the floor of the Senate and across the way in the House, and that law was adopted. So we anticipated that in short order regulations would be issued and they would help address particularly the effort of tobacco companies to produce new products designed to essentially produce nicotine tobacco addicts among our children, to entice our children into smoking or chewing and this whole new variety, this continuum of products.

Here we are years later. It is no longer 2009; it is 2015--6 years later and we have no regulation. During that time, a great deal has happened. Many new products have been introduced in the never-ending quest of the tobacco companies to find what they call replacement smokers; that is, young folks who will continue to buy their products as their current customers die because they use their products.

So 6 years have passed and no action out of the administration. Year after year, we have pushed, we have called as Senators, we have talked about it on the floor, we have held meetings with the key officials, and it has always been: We are almost there. We are working on it. We know how important it is.

But while this process has gone along so slowly, millions more of our children have become addicted to tobacco.

One of the main instruments the tobacco industry is using are flavors designed to target children. We can see here on the chart particularly flavors in the e-cigarette category. We have a whole variety. We have coffee. We have cherry. We have apple. We have cherry bomb flavoring. I was told today on the phone that there is a Captain Kangaroo flavor and there is a Scooby Doo flavor. There is a gummy bear flavor. These flavors are not designed to entice adults into becoming smokers because the industry knows that very rarely does an individual start to use tobacco products after the age of 21. It is the youth who experiment, and then the nicotine, as an addictive drug, does its work and turns them into lifetime users. That is where, of course, the money is.

I was asked in an interview today how it is that the tobacco companies say these products are not targeted to children. I responded very simply. It is the big lie. No one, no individual can look at the flavors of these products and not know they are targeting our children.

So what has happened in the last few years is the e-cigarette industry is the most successful of the products that tobacco companies have tested. In fact, in just the last year alone, use by our high school students has tripled. That means we now have 2 million high school--the survey was the previous 30 days, and in the previous 30 days, 2 million of our high school students had utilized e-cigarettes. So the tobacco campaign is working, which means they are hard at work compromising the health and welfare of our children and leading them down a path to suffering and death. That is unacceptable.

So we are here today--a number of us--to simply say to our own administration, our executive branch: Get the regulations done. They have now been forwarded from the Food and Drug Administration, from the FDA, to the Office of Management and Budget, which does the final review of those regulations. Get the regulations done, and make sure they are strong regulations. Do not put in a clause that grandfathers all the products and exempts them from regulations that have been produced up until now. Such a grandfather clause would tear the heart out, tear the guts out of the entire effort to regulate these killer products. And certainly regulate the flavors. That is the key, core strategy of addicting our children. Do not ignore that key, core strategy.

This is something very real that this body debated and decided to do and turn it over to the executive branch. It is way past time for the executive branch to act. So we are asking for quick and powerful, forceful action to stop the carnage that is ensuing from the failure of these regulations.

Several colleagues are coming to the floor to join this conversation. The Senator from Connecticut, Mr. Blumenthal, is planning to jump in next, followed by Senator Markey and then Senator Warren.

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I would like very much to thank my colleagues for coming to the floor and speaking to this issue, my colleagues from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal; from Massachusetts, Senator Markey; and Senator Warren, also from Massachusetts.

I must say that this topic of addiction to tobacco and tobacco products being targeted at our children is not one that is only relevant to one State or this State or that State, it affects children in rural America, in urban America, and in every State and corner of our Nation. So there is basically a universal impact. That is probably part of the reason the Senate came together, during a period in which there has been substantial dysfunction and substantial paralysis, and said, no, it is time to regulate these tobacco products as the drugs that they are, but during the 6 years since the bill was passed, we have had no regulation. So I appreciate my colleagues coming to the floor and trying to amplify the message that this is unacceptable, because children will be addicted, they will develop diseases, they will suffer, and they will die because of the inaction in putting the regulations forward.

This is completely unacceptable. During this time, there have been a lot of experimental products put out by the tobacco industry. They have put out finely ground tobacco in the form of mints. They put them into hour glass-shaped candy holders so that when students would put them in our pockets, it would look like a cell phone.

That may not make sense in this age of smartphones, but just a few years ago, in 2009, when this was being test-marketed in my State of Oregon and test-marketed in Ohio, the shape of the most popular cellphones kind of had a little bit of an hourglass shape to it. So the idea was it would look like a cellphone and not like tobacco when you were in school.

They came out with a product of toothpicks made out of finely ground tobacco. They came out with a product of breath strips that you put on your tongue. Can you imagine tobacco to freshen your breath? They were experimenting with everything, but the payday was not toothpicks, it was not mints, and it was not breath strips; the payday product is e-cigarettes.

I am going to put the chart back up about the e-cigarettes. There are two fundamental myths propagated by the tobacco industry. The first is that they are not marketing to youth. Well, let's examine the type of flavors in these products. We have apple--these are just the ones on this chart. We have cotton candy. We have gummy bear. We have watermelon. We have candy crave. We have Red Bull. We have peach.

These candy and fruit flavors are designed to appeal to children and to mask some of the nastiness of smoking. Well, so that is big lie No. 1 from the tobacco industry, that they are not targeting our children. It is absolutely clear they are.

Furthermore, they have to because they know that replacement smokers--getting new smokers to replace those who are dying because of their products requires targeting children because very few people start smoking when they are adults or start using tobacco products when they are adults. The mind of the teenager is the perfect moment to gain traction and produce addiction. That is why the tobacco companies are targeting our children.

The second myth they put forward is that e-cigarettes are simply a wonderful health aid designed to get people to quit smoking. Maybe it is healthier than a cigarette with a tobacco leaf ground up inside of it or a clear liquid nicotine rather than a cigarette or a cigar. Do not believe for a moment that tobacco companies are trying to help individuals stop smoking. They did not do billions of dollars in commerce by getting people to stop smoking. Everything about targeting kids is not about getting individuals to stop smoking but to start smoking. That is the goal, to start smoking, to lead them into a life in which they will spend an enormous amount of money buying a product that is destroying their body.

Eventually they will suffer. Eventually they will die. It will be a heart attack. It will be lung cancer. It will be a whole host of--emphysema. OK. Maybe not every single individual, but a huge number of folks who become addicted in their youth will suffer substantial health consequences. Even those who don't have cancer or full-blown emphysema will experience other health impacts that make them a less healthy individual and compromise their quality of life.

Again, I thank my colleagues so much for coming to the floor to accentuate this message that we have waited far too long for the regulations to get done to take on this industry and that we are demanding that when the regulation is published--and hopefully that will be very soon, as in days or weeks--that will be a regulation that is written in a forceful, comprehensive fashion, that will not have a grandfather clause that excludes existing products from regulation, and it will not fail to address this powerful instrument being used to target our children, which are fruit and candy flavors.

We ask, now that the Food and Drug Administration has forwarded this decision to the Office of Management and Budget for final decisionmaking, that OMB come out quickly, forcefully, and strongly to address this tremendous blight on our society.

I yield the floor.

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