[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 16 (Thursday, February 26, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H655-H656]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       STOP OUR KIDS FROM SMOKING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Rothman) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. ROTHMAN. Mr. Speaker, 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.
  Last June's proposed tobacco settlement between the States and the 
tobacco industry contains important steps to stop smoking by minors, 
but those steps are not enough. Just getting rid of tobacco icons like 
Joe Camel or the Marlboro Man does not mean that the industry will stop 
trying to hook our kids on smoking, nor does it mean that the tobacco 
lobby will not go back to their old bag of legislative

[[Page H656]]

tricks as they did just last summer when they tried to get a $50 
billion tobacco tax credit put into the balanced budget agreement. As 
you know, we fought back, and we repealed that $50 billion tax credit. 
But that episode is just an example of what we might expect when the 
tobacco settlement that is now under discussion comes before Congress 
this year.
  It is obvious that stopping our children from buying cigarettes needs 
to be a part of the solution. But first we must have our merchants 
comply with the already existing age laws that in many States are 
already on the books. Thanks to people like Carol Wagner at the Mid-
Bergen Health Center in Bergen County, New Jersey, Carol runs a sting 
operation with local teenagers. She and those teens are helping win 
this war. The local sting operations show that merchants in Bergen and 
Hudson Counties, two counties that I represent in New Jersey, have 
already reached the national goal for the year 2000 by reducing sales 
to minors by 80 percent.

  So what then is an industrious kid to do when the stores that sell 
cigarettes over the counter check for age I.D.? Well, according to the 
U.S. Surgeon General, these young teenagers are 10 times more likely to 
then go to secret vending machines to buy their cigarettes, and they 
know which diners, hotels, bowling alleys, gas stations and restaurants 
in town have those cigarette vending machines.
  Our towns have tried to fight back by banning cigarette machines 
everywhere in their communities, but the tobacco companies make 16\1/2\ 
million dollars on under-aged smoking in New Jersey alone. That is why 
they have spent millions of dollars to bottle up these local 
ordinances, in many cases frivolous and expensive lawsuits they know 
that our local towns cannot afford to contest.
  The only way to save our towns from these lawsuits is to make it part 
of a Federal law that any American community, if they choose to, can 
ban cigarette vending machines from their community.
  This week I am informally introducing the Stop Kids From Smoking Act, 
a bill to ban all cigarette vending machines in places where children 
under the age of 18 have access, and for the 10 towns in my district 
that already ban cigarette vending machines from any part of their 
towns, the bill will contain a provision that allows them to have this 
total ban of cigarette vending machines remain valid and effective in 
their communities as long as they choose to keep these bans alive.
  The congressional hearings that began this month should focus more 
attention on the tobacco companies' marketing strategy to children 
beyond the R.J. Reynolds memo that was recently released. Once we have 
that information, Congress must not delay in passing a wide-ranging 
tobacco settlement that will protect our children.
  My Stop Kids From Smoking bill will help. That is why I am 
encouraging all of my colleagues on the Democrat and Republican side of 
the aisles to cosponsor this important bill. We need to stop kids from 
buying cigarettes at local unattended vending machines, and we need to 
do it now.

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