[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 84 (Monday, May 20, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2964-S2967]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
By Mr. McCONNELL (for himself and Mr. Kaine):
S. 1541. A bill to increase the minimum age for sale of tobacco
products to 21; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, today, I am introducing Federal
legislation to make 21 the new minimum age for purchasing any tobacco
product anywhere in the United States. Let me say that again--a new age
nationwide for purchasing anything classified as a tobacco product--
cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vapor products, and everything else. It
shouldn't be 18 any longer; it should be 21, and this legislation will
make that happen.
I recognize I might seem like an unusual candidate to lead this
charge. I am the senior Senator from Kentucky. I have consistently
stood up for our Kentucky farmers, including our tobacco farmers. I
championed the tobacco buyout back in 2004. But actually my long
experience with this subject and my commitment to farm families are
part of what has convinced me that now is the right time to do this. I
would like to say a few words about why.
Tobacco has been deeply intertwined in our Nation's history from the
very beginning. Native Americans grew it and used it before European
explorers ever arrived. John Rolfe--the famous settler who later
married Pocahontas--kick-started Virginia's export economy using
foreign tobacco seeds in 1612.
By the eve of the Revolution, tobacco was a major export and a huge
part of
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our colony's prosperity. Many tobacco farmers were energetic early
backers of independence. George Washington grew tobacco at Mount
Vernon, at first as his primary crop. In Benjamin Franklin's
newspapers, some of the earliest ads for American tobacco ran alongside
the essays urging Americans to stand up for freedom. Several million
pounds of tobacco were actually used as collateral to help secure the
loans they needed from France. Years later, Lewis and Clark used it as
a peace offering to the Native Tribes they met while they were headed
west. And, like too many other parts of early American history,
tobacco's development was closely linked with the sin of slavery.
So tobacco has been a part of this country right from the start--so
much so, in fact, that right here in the U.S. Capitol, artisans
replaced the traditional designs in many of the Roman-style columns and
chiseled American tobacco leaves in their place. Right here in this
Chamber, we still have some old spittoons. We used to have Senate snuff
boxes filled on the taxpayers' dime. The residue on the floors used to
be so considerable that Charles Dickens warned fellow visitors not to
pick up anything they dropped unless they had a pair of gloves on. One
of the Senators Dickens actually admired most from that visit was Henry
Clay. And, befitting the Commonwealth of Kentucky and our own rich
history with the crop, that legendary Kentuckian was also a legendary
tobacco enthusiast.
When the first settlers came over the Appalachians into what is now
Kentucky, tobacco offered the perfect opportunity to jump-start their
new lives. A pocketful of seeds was enough for a downpayment on a new,
economically secure future for your family. Kentucky had fertile soil.
We had favorable summers. We had inland waterways and access to the
Mississippi for shipping.
Before long, burley tobacco was a staple crop for literally tens of
thousands of Kentucky farms. For a time, we led even Virginia and North
Carolina as the No. 1 tobacco State. Generations of farmers, even if
they weren't primarily tobacco growers, would plant a little corner of
it to help float the rest of the operation. Farming tobacco put shoes
on kids' feet. It put dinner on the table. For many in Kentucky,
tobacco made the American dream possible. It is a central pillar of our
State's history.
In fact, back in the early 1900s, there was literally an armed
conflict called the Black Patch War that revolved around tobacco
prices. Farmers were against farmers. We are talking about beatings and
horse whippings. Barns were burned. Eventually, martial law was
declared in part of Kentucky. We are talking about neighbor-on-neighbor
violence that was reminiscent of the Civil War--all over tobacco
prices. The conflict was actually memorialized in the book ``Night
Rider,'' the first novel by Robert Penn Warren, the famous Kentucky-
born writer who won multiple Pulitzers and served as U.S. Poet
Laureate.
A few decades later, in the late 1930s, Senator Alben Barkley--the
only other Kentuckian to serve as majority leader--set up a top-down
quota system that got Washington heavily involved in the tobacco market
to try to provide price special assurance for farmers.
So when I first arrived here in the Senate in 1985, more than two-
thirds of Kentucky's farmers grew some tobacco, and it accounted for
almost half of the value of all the agricultural production in my
State. But, of course, demand for U.S. tobacco has gone down as, among
other factors, our knowledge of the health consequences has gone up.
Even as early as the late 1800s, when the transition began from all
the varied forms of tobacco toward the modern, mass-marketed, mass-
produced cigarette industry, there was concern. Those concerns went
mainstream with the Surgeon General's report on smoking in the 1960s,
and of course our understanding has only grown with more research. By
2004, these concerns, plus foreign competition, were making that quota
system less of a helpful backstop and more of a stranglehold. So there
was interest on all sides in unwinding this archaic system without
pulling the rug out from under our growers.
I secured the Fair and Equitable Tobacco Reform Act, known as the
tobacco buyout, which President Bush 43 signed into law. It wound down
the special treatment for tobacco, while also providing the farmers who
had invested heavily in these quotas 10 years of buyout payments to
ease their transition.
What has happened since then has been a very exciting story. Just as
Kentucky farmers once led the Nation in cultivating tobacco and helped
write that important chapter in American history, they are now helping
to write the next chapter of innovation.
We aren't interested in banning tobacco. We aren't interested in
turning our backs on adults who choose to use these products or
pretending we aren't proud of the Kentuckians who still grow it. But as
the market has settled, many of our farmers have seized the opportunity
to try new things.
Just a few years before the buyout, almost 30,000 Kentucky farms were
still growing tobacco. It still made up about one-quarter of all of our
farmers' cash receipts statewide. But the 10-year buyout program ended
in 2014. These days, instead of 30,000 farms growing tobacco in the
Commonwealth, it is more like 2,600. It still brings in hundreds of
millions of dollars, but now it is only 6 percent of our total receipts
from agriculture. Freed from the sunk costs of a quota system, our
farmers have been able to participate in a more free market and reap
the benefits. In fact, overall cash receipts from agriculture actually
set a new record in 2014--the very same year the buyout ended. I am
proud the 2004 policy I achieved has been a success. Kentucky farmers
have taken the ball, however, and they have run with it.
I mentioned that George Washington initially planted a whole lot of
tobacco at Mount Vernon before a variety of factors led him to scale it
back and experiment with other things. One of those new crops was hemp.
That was all the way back in the 1770s. As usual, George Washington
knew what he was doing.
Industrial hemp is making a comeback today, and Kentucky farmers
asked for help to change the outdated Federal laws that confused the
plant with cannabis and prevented them from exploring the crop.
In 2014, I fought and won for farmers the right to explore hemp
through State pilot projects. In last year's farm bill, my provision
finished the job and made hemp a fully legal commodity nationwide. Now
we are seeing the future take shape right before our eyes. Farmers in
99 of 120 counties are growing hemp. Processors are reporting more than
$50 million in gross sales. And this is just one of the new crops our
farmers are using to chart new directions and connect Kentucky's past
with its future.
I realize this has been quite a history lesson, but Kentuckians are
used to hearing sweeping statements about our tobacco industry from
folks outside the State who know none of this history and yet have no
problem forming strong opinions. We are proud of our past. We are proud
of who we are. But Kentucky farmers don't want their children to get
hooked on tobacco products while they are in middle school or high
school any more than any parents anywhere want that to happen. Kentucky
is proud of what we make, but we also take pride in the health and
development of our children.
The sad reality is that Kentucky has been the home to the highest
rates of cancer in the country. We lead the entire Nation in the
percentage of cancer cases tied directly to smoking. Our State once
grew tobacco like none other, and now we are being hit by the health
consequences of tobacco use like none other.
Nationwide, we are in the middle of a completely new public health
epidemic that is really threatening our progress in youth tobacco use--
the use of e-cigarettes and vaping. This spike has been concentrated in
teenagers--and not just 18-year-olds. Moms and dads across the country
are seeing their middle and high schoolers take up this new habit and
start down a deadly path that our society has previously spent decades
working hard to close down.
From 2017 to 2018, high school students' use of what are classified
as tobacco products shot up by nearly 40 percent. That is a staggering
figure, especially in a single year. That increase is driven almost
entirely by vaping.
[[Page S2966]]
The brain is still developing at this young age. When teenagers use
tobacco, they are quite literally altering their brain's chemistry and
making it more susceptible to addiction. Many young vape users aren't
buying the products themselves but sharing them with a friend. And
remember, 90 percent of adult daily smokers say they used their first
tobacco product before age 19.
Youth vaping is a public health crisis. It is our responsibility, as
parents and public servants, to do everything we can to keep these
harmful products out of high schools and out of youth culture. We need
to put the national age of purchase at 21.
That is why I am introducing this legislation in recognition of
tobacco's storied past in Kentucky and aware of the threat that all
tobacco products pose now and for future generations. I am proud to
partner on this effort with Senator Tim Kaine, who represents another
Commonwealth with a long history of growing tobacco. I know there is
interest from Members on both sides of the aisle, including Senators
Young, Romney, Schatz, and others. This is not a zero-sum choice
between farmers and public health. We can support both. We need to
support both, but the health of our children is literally at stake.
That is why I will make enacting this legislation one of my highest
priorities, and I look forward to working with all of our colleagues to
make that happen.
Mr. KAINE. Mr. President, I rise to support the words of my
colleague, Leader McConnell, and to thank him for working on this
important piece of legislation, the Tobacco-Free Youth Act. I will
offer some thoughts about why I have been happy to work with Leader
McConnell and with other Senators who share the goal of raising the
national tobacco age to 21.
Like Senator McConnell, I come from a tobacco State. The Jamestown-
based Virginia Company was chartered by King James, landing at
Jamestown in 1607, and beginning the English colonization of the United
States. They almost didn't make it. They could easily have failed like
other English settlements in the Outer Banks of North Carolina or
others, but two things saved them.
The first was the magnanimity of the Powhatan Indians, who, in those
early years, when times were tough, helped them to survive and helped
them to get over times of drought and hunger. The second thing was the
discovery of, as Leader McConnell mentioned, the tobacco seeds in
Virginia that, through the efforts of John Roth and others, became such
a powerful driver of the Virginia agricultural economy. Had it not been
for tobacco and had it not been for the Powhatan Indians, the Jamestown
colony would likely have disappeared.
Tobacco has such a place in our history that in the ceiling of both
of the legislative chambers in the Virginia Capitol, designed by Thomas
Jefferson, the ceiling is circled by gold-embossed tobacco leaves. We
restored the capitol in 2000 and restored the gold embossing because we
understand that it was tobacco that helped create modern Virginia.
In the city of Richmond, where I live and where I served as mayor,
one of the largest cigarette-producing manufacturers in the world is
the Philip Morris plant in South Richmond, which over decades has been
a fantastic employer of local Virginians and local residents.
As Governor, I was proud to work on tobacco initiatives because, as
the leader indicated, as we become more aware of public health
consequences, there has been more need to try to stem the challenges
that these health consequences create.
When I was Governor, I worked in tandem with my Republican speaker of
the house to ban smoking in restaurants and bars, which was a tough,
tough sell at that time back in 2009, but we made it happen. Probably
my happiest day as a Governor, vis-a-vis tobacco, was the day where I
went to Chesterfield County in suburban Richmond, and, together with
bipartisan legislators, we celebrated the results that had just come
out that showed that for the first time in recorded history the youth
smoking rate in Virginia was below the national average. Much like
Kentucky, we have been above the national average because in a State
where it is a product that you are proud of, everyone is encouraged to
use it. But by about 2009, we were below the national average, and we
felt very good about that.
I am here with Senator McConnell, partly because of our history, but
really I am here, as he indicated, because of the current challenge. We
are backsliding. We are backsliding. The recent increases in youth
tobacco use demonstrate that we need to do more.
Current youth tobacco product use has increased dramatically from
2017 to 2018, completely erasing the decline in tobacco product use
among youth that had been happening for many years. From the CDC, this
increase is driven largely by e-cigarettes. More than 1 in 4 high
schoolers in 2018 and 1 in 14 middle schoolers in 2018 had used a
tobacco product in the last 30 days--a dramatic increase from 2017--and
1.5 million more young people used e-cigarettes in 2018 than in 2017.
E-cigarettes are the most commonly used product among the young, and
they are frequently used in combination with other tobacco products.
The recent increase in the use of tobacco products is heavily, heavily
driven by the popularity of e-cigarettes, shaped like a flash drive,
able to be shared with friends, and sold in kid-friendly flavors with a
high nicotine content.
Disturbingly, it is not only e-cigarettes. The use of any tobacco
product grew by more than 38 percent among high schoolers from 2017 to
2018, and in Virginia, where we had celebrated in our State that it was
below the national average, we are seeing dramatic increases. And 16.3
percent of high school youth are reporting using any tobacco product,
and 6.5 percent of those--one-third of those--smoke cigarettes.
According to the CDC, any use of tobacco products by the young is
considered unsafe. The leader laid out how the use of these e-
cigarettes alter the chemistry of the brain and actually make a young
person more prone for the rest of their life to becoming addicted. And
it is not just addiction. It is also learning, memory, attention,
impulse control, and cognition. The use of tobacco also increases among
the young the likelihood of developing mood disorders like anxiety and
depression.
So there is a strong rationale for this bill, and I was honored when
the majority leader asked about a month ago if I would work together
with him on a bipartisan bill as two Senators from tobacco States,
joining others to find a way to raise the age from 18 to 21.
Now, 95 percent of adult smokers begin smoking before the age of 21.
The Institute of Medicine, now the National Academy of Medicine, did
research recently showing that increasing the tobacco age to 21 will,
over time, significantly reduce the number of young and young adult
smoking, as well as smoking-caused deaths, and improve public health
and save lives.
What does our bill do? Our bill raises the Federal minimum age to
purchase any tobacco products from 18 to 21. We direct the FDA to
update their current regulations and enforcement structure for the
current 18 age minimum and apply to it to the new 21 age minimum. We
encourage States to pass their own laws raising the age to 21 and
require the States to enforce those laws and meet other requirements,
as they currently do, pursuant to the Synar Amendment. Our legislation
would apply to all populations and to all types of tobacco products,
including e-cigarettes.
As a father of a marine and as a member of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, I strongly feel that we should extend the same public health
protections to members of the military as we do though their civilian
counterparts. I look forward to working with the majority leader and so
many others on both sides of the aisle to do a good thing for public
health, to do a good thing for our young people, and raise the tobacco
age to 21.
As the leader mentioned, there are other Senators--Senators Romney
and Young, Senators Schatz and Durbin, and Senator Murray--who have
invested their energies in this effort. We pledge to work together with
all of them. We can come together to do this on behalf of our young
people.
Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text
of the bill be printed in the Record.
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There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be
printed in the Record, as follows:
S. 1541
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Tobacco-Free Youth Act''.
SEC. 2. MINIMUM AGE OF SALE OF TOBACCO PRODUCTS.
(a) Establishing Minimum Age of 21 for Sale of Tobacco
Products.--Section 1926 of the Public Health Service Act (42
U.S.C. 300x-26) is amended--
(1) in the section heading, by striking ``age of 18'' and
inserting ``age of 21'';
(2) by striking ``age of 18'' each place such phrase
appears and inserting ``age of 21'';
(3) in subsection (a)--
(A) in paragraph (1), by striking ``fiscal year 1994'' and
inserting ``fiscal year 2021''; and
(B) in paragraph (2)--
(i) by striking ``fiscal year 1993'' and inserting ``fiscal
year 2020'';
(ii) by striking ``fiscal year 1994'' and inserting
``fiscal year 2021''; and
(iii) by striking ``fiscal year 1995'' and inserting
``fiscal year 2022''; and
(4) in subsection (d)--
(A) in paragraph (1), by striking ``1995'' and inserting
``2022'';
(B) in paragraph (2)--
(i) by striking ``1994'' and inserting ``2021''; and
(ii) by striking the period and inserting ``; and'';
(C) by redesignating paragraphs (1) and (2) as
subparagraphs (A) and (B), respectively, and adjusting the
margins accordingly;
(D) by striking ``this section, the term'' and inserting
``this section--
``(1) the term''; and
(E) by adding at the end the following:
``(2) the term `tobacco product' has the meaning given such
term in section 201(rr) of the Federal Food, Drug, and
Cosmetic Act.''.
(b) FDA.--
(1) In general.--Section 906(d) of the Federal Food, Drug,
and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 387f(d)) is amended--
(A) in paragraph (3)(A)(ii), by striking ``18 years'' and
inserting ``21 years''; and
(B) by adding at the end the following:
``(5) Minimum age of sale.--It shall be unlawful for any
retailer to sell a tobacco product to any person younger than
21 years of age, consistent with section 1140.14 of title 21,
Code of Federal Regulations (or any successor
regulations).''.
(2) Regulations.--Not later than 180 days after the date of
enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Health and Human
Services shall update regulations issued under chapter IX of
the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (21 U.S.C. 387 et
seq.) as appropriate to carry out the amendments made by
paragraph (1).
(c) Non-preemption.--Nothing in the amendments made by
subsection (a) or (b) shall be construed to prevent a State
or local governmental entity from establishing, enforcing, or
maintaining a law with respect to sales of tobacco products
to individuals below a minimum age, provided that such State
or local law is in addition to, or more stringent than,
Federal law.
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