[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11347-11348]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          SALUTING CVS HEALTH

  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, the No. 1 preventable cause of death in 
America today: tobacco. People who use tobacco--smoking or chewing--
develop a myriad of health problems, and many die prematurely.
  Tobacco companies are a big business in America. They have been for a 
long time. And they really try their best to recruit new customers when 
they go into junior high and high schools. Now they are in the e-
cigarette business too, but I want to stick with tobacco for a moment. 
The notion, of course, is, if you can addict a child to nicotine, they 
will continue to smoke and eventually become a lifelong user of tobacco 
products.
  It has been a long time since I have engaged this industry in 
political contest. It was a little over 25 years ago when I was a 
Member of the House of Representatives that I boarded an airplane in 
Phoenix, AZ, at the last minute--a United airplane. I went to the 
ticket counter and said to the woman at the counter: Can I get on this 
plane?
  She said: If you hurry, you can get on there. Here is where you are 
going to be seated.
  And I said: Wait a minute. This is in the smoking section of the 
airplane and you have me in a center seat in the smoking section. Isn't 
there something you can do?
  She looked at my ticket and said: No, Congressman, there is something 
you can do.
  So I got on that plane and flew from Phoenix to Chicago in the 
smoking section of the airplane--there used to be such things--and 
thought to myself: This is madness. Here I sit, a nonsmoker, breathing 
in all this secondhand smoke, and there is an elderly person in the so-
called nonsmoking section two rows away, and there is a lady with a 
baby, and why in the world do we have to be subjected to this?
  So I came back to Washington and introduced a bill in the House of 
Representatives to ban smoking on airplanes. After a lot of work and a 
lot of good luck, I found out that the largest frequent flyer club in 
America--the House of Representatives--did not much like smoking on 
airplanes either, and I won--it surprised a lot of people--beat the 
tobacco lobby.
  I called my friend Frank Lautenberg, the Senator from New Jersey, and 
asked him if he would take up the cause in the Senate. He did it 
masterfully. The two of us passed the law and changed the way America 
looked at smoking on airplanes.
  Neither Senator Lautenberg nor I knew this was a tipping point in 
history. I did not know it. But people started thinking: If secondhand 
smoke is dangerous on an airplane, why isn't it dangerous on a train, 
in a bus, in an office building, in a hospital, in a restaurant? Today, 
25-plus years later, if you walked into someone's office on Capitol 
Hill and they had an ashtray in the middle of the table, you would 
think: What are they thinking? People do not do that anymore.
  It used to be standard and no one thought twice about lighting up. 
That was just your personal preference. Things have changed in America, 
and the number of people using tobacco products has declined because 
they have come to understand it is dangerous, it can kill you.
  But we are not the only country on Earth that has figured this out. 
Many other countries are ahead of us in terms of regulating tobacco. If 
you travel overseas, take a look at cigarette packages. Ours still look 
pretty fancy. They have a little label on them. But in other countries, 
the cigarette packages are very stark and very limited in what they can 
say about the product. Most of what they contain are health care 
warnings: Tobacco can kill you. Tobacco can harm a fetus in a pregnant 
woman. These stark reminders are to discourage people from using 
tobacco products because countries overseas, just like the United 
States, understand how dangerous they are.
  So it was in that context that I was amazed to read something a few 
weeks ago. The New York Times published a devastating series of 
articles on how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been playing a global 
strategy to fight against effective tobacco control laws in other 
countries--the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fighting tobacco control laws 
in other countries.
  Why would the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--once considered a pillar of 
the American business community--be a champion promoting the sale and 
consumption of a deadly tobacco product in another country? It does not 
compute. One reason? The power, the money, and the influence of Big 
Tobacco is still very strong. The stories and letters published by the 
New York Times made it clear that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has 
effectively rented out its letterhead to the tobacco industry, 
jeopardizing not only the reputation of the Chamber but all the member 
companies that belong to it.
  I stand here today to salute one company that has fought back at this 
revelation of this activity by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. CVS 
Health--you know them from their drugstores and pharmacies--announced 
it was going to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because the Chamber's 
efforts to promote tobacco conflict with the CVS corporate policy that 
decided over a year ago to stop selling tobacco products in their 
drugstores.
  I congratulate CVS Health. It is pretty bold when they decide they 
are going to walk out on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of these 
rotten policies they have in discouraging tobacco control overseas. 
Maybe this decision by CVS will give the Chamber of Commerce a reason 
to think twice about a policy that is going to result in deadly 
addictions and terrible disease. It should. The Chamber should end this 
insidious campaign as quickly as possible. Without question, CVS Health 
has shown again, as they did last year, that protecting the public 
health is good business and it is essential to good, responsible 
corporate citizenship.
  The World Health Organization estimates that tobacco kills more than 
6 million people worldwide every year. In the 21st century, 1 billion 
people--1 billion--are expected to die as a result of tobacco. And many 
of these deaths are in the poorest nations on Earth--8 out of 10 of 
today's smokers living in low-income and middle-income countries.

[[Page 11348]]

It is unconscionable that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is going after 
the laws to protect the people in these poor countries.
  More than a decade ago, the World Health Organization adopted an 
international treaty focused on reducing tobacco consumption. This 
treaty, supported by 180 countries, obligates nations to employ 
practices to reduce tobacco use. We have made a lot of progress in the 
last 10 years. Madam President, 49 countries have passed comprehensive 
smoke-free laws protecting over 1 billion people. Madam President, 42 
countries have strong, graphic warning labels, covering almost 20 
percent of the population that buys these products. These policies save 
lives and prevent cancer, heart disease, and lung cancer.
  It is hard to imagine how the U.S. Chamber of Commerce can 
rationalize policies that literally promote the death of innocent 
people from the use of tobacco.
  Hats off to the CVS Health corporation for stepping up and showing 
responsible corporate citizenship in resigning from the U.S. Chamber of 
Commerce. Maybe if the U.S. Chamber of Commerce comes to its senses, 
CVS might consider rejoining it.

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