My sincere hope is to hurt as few people as possible and to help as many people as I can. I will continue on the issue of children and tobacco to look for the ways we can best protect kids. We may differ a little in terms of the best mechanism, but at least everyone says that that's a common goal. Beyer said he would not have entered the thorny FDA regulatory fray had it not been for Gilmore's decision to embroil Virginia taxpayers in a lawsuit over the issue. Tobacco is a legal product in this country.
Every American adult has a right to smoke, a right to choose to smoke.
Everyone agrees that adults should have the right to smoke but kids shouldn't have access to cigarettes. When President Clinton announced plans to allow the Food and Drug Administration to move forward developing regulations that include bans on advertising geared toward youngsters and removing vending machines from areas where teens would have access to them, Payne said more than 10,000 jobs would be lost nationally. Beyer said he doesn't understand the figures that show jobs would be lost with FDA regulation. You have an exploding global market for cigarettes and tobacco. Everybody sells all they grow and at pretty good prices.