Buyer Promotes Better Public Health Policy

Press Release

The House of Representatives today passed the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1256, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority to regulate tobacco products. The FDA is already an over-stressed and under-resourced federal agency which will now be burdened with responsibilities that goes against its core mission—ensuring the safety of our nation's food, drugs, and medical devices—to regulate an inherently risky product. Congressman Steve Buyer's (IN-04) mission is to improve the nation's public health, and he believes there is better policy to help smokers quit than the Senate Amendment to H.R. 1256.

"H.R. 1256 will fail to effectively end smoking in America and decrease morbidity and mortality rates among smokers. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates H.R. 1256 will reduce cigarette smoking in America by only 2 percent over 10 years. The bill on the floor today offers smokers only one option—quit smoking or die," stated Buyer.

Congressman Buyer believes the regulation of tobacco through the FDA falls short of sound public policy. The Congressman introduced alternative legislation in the House in March that called for a workable regulatory framework to better protect our children from tobacco use and increase public health benefits through the creation of a harm reduction strategy based on a continuum of risk of all tobacco products. The Buyer bill, the Youth Prevention and Tobacco Harm Reduction Act, H.R. 1261, gained bipartisan support and created a streamlined and focused Tobacco Harm Reduction Center housed within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to regulate tobacco—completely separate from the FDA.

"I believe adopting harm reduction strategies will encourage and enable smokers to reduce their risk of tobacco-related illness and death by switching to less hazardous, smokeless tobacco products. Scientists and public-health officials estimate that smokeless tobacco use presents about 90 percent less overall health risks than cigarette smoking," commented Buyer. "Moving smokers from the highest risk smoking products to less harmful tobacco products gives adult smokers new options to significantly decrease their health risks. This is important for smokers who cannot, or will not, end their addiction to nicotine. We apply harm reduction strategies to many other aspects of life—using seatbelts, wearing helmets, and using needle exchange programs. Why, as lawmakers, would we ignore harm reduction practices for tobacco use and refuse to truly improve public health?"

Congressman Buyer warns that "H.R. 1256 will freeze the tobacco market and will prohibit innovation and market competition that encourage development of less harmful tobacco products. Smokers will be left with the same dangerous products that are on the market today, and efforts to provide smokers with significantly less harmful products will not be allowed."

H.R. 1256 will likely end up in the Supreme Court because of the extraordinary limitations on commercial speech that are included in the bill. This type of drastic speech censorship is almost certain to lead to challenges in the federal courts and the eventual ban on these provisions because they infringe on First Amendment rights.

The Senate Amendment to H.R. 1256 passed the House by a vote 307 to 97 with Congressman Buyer opposing the legislation.

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