Bill Clinton Quotes
We must help parents protect their children from the gravest health threat that they face -- an epidemic of teen smoking, spread by multimillion dollar marketing campaigns. I challenge Congress -- let's pass bipartisan, comprehensive legislation that will improve public health, protect our tobacco farmers and change the way tobacco companies do business forever. Let's do what it takes to bring teen smoking down. Let's raise the price of cigarettes by up to $1.50 a pack over the next 10 years with penalties on the tobacco industry if it keeps marketing to our children.
William Clinton, 42nd President of the United States (Democrat, AR), State of the Union Address, January 27, 1998
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Bloomberg was the first public official in the world to push for and pass a law banning smoking in all offices, hotels, restaurants, and other public places despite huge opposition funded by the tobacco companies and many of the business and restaurant owners. Despite the fact that it would literally save thousands of lives a year, a ban was feared by politicians as it might harm business, tourism and their own political positions. However, after New York banned smoking, other cities started to do the same, not only in America but all over the world. This saved millions of lives. One courageous man, a single politician, changed much of the world, and saved many more lives than most doctors will.
The 1963 Civil Rights Bill passage infuriated the Southern Racists, and the Republicans invited them to switch parties in revenge and by 1990 the shift was almost total.
This was the first cigarette company that admitted what by then had been known by the cigarette companies for almost 50 years during which they continued to knowingly kill people and deny that there was any harm that could come from smoking.
The. law was enforced and upheld by the Tennessee Supreme Court (Austin v State) which recognized the health danger of tobacco. Tennessee was an agricultural state where tobacco was grown and the law was repealed as the result of political pressure. But this is the first and only absolute state prohibition on tobacco that has been enacted in the United States.
This is a classic example of the interaction between legislation, health and science. In 1931 the State of Michigan passed a law to protect the public health. It was written to ensure that there would not be unhealthy or dangerous substances added to cigarettes or the tobacco in cigarettes. No “ingredient deleterious to health” could be put in a cigarette. However, although it was not generally known at the time, there are few substances known to man that are as “deleterious to health” as the tobacco itself. The law protected public health, but the enforcement did not concentrate on the right ingredients.
This quotation not only illustrates Ford’s wide ranging concern about public affairs but illustrates that the addictive properties of cigarettes were known long before the cancer and other disease causing properties of tobacco were understood. Yet the addictive properties were the last deleterious effects of smoking that the tobacco companies would admit to. At the end of the 20th century, the CEO’s of the major tobacco company all lied to Congress in hearings, claiming that cigarettes were not addictive. Ford and millions of people knew better generations ago.
Marijuana had been made legal in a number of states at that time. Based on the example of New York City, many other cities of the world were just then passing ordinances to make it illegal to smoke in any public place or any private establishment that serves the public.
Big Tobacco was very successful in forestalling the loss of their profits.
The World Health Organization, a component of the United Nations, advocated national restrictive legislation to control and eliminate smoking. The smoking addict, hooked on nicotine was caught between public health efforts to regulate and eliminate tobacco and the efforts to treat the addicts and respect the individual’s right to freedom of choice.
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who was the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Clinton was previously Governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992, and the Arkansas Attorney General from 1977 to 1979. Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III – he changed to his stepfather's name at age 15.
