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Marty Meehan: Tobacco's Enemy

Congressman Marty Meehan is one of the leading Congressional critics of the powerful tobacco industry. Indeed, in recognition of Marty's extensive work on tobacco control, the American Heart Association presented Marty with its National Public Service Award in September of 2000. Marty believes that tobacco companies and their executives must be stopped from and held accountable for marketing to children and misleading the public and federal agencies as to the addictiveness of nicotine.

Marty serves as the Democratic Co-Chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Tobacco and Health. Along with Republican Jim Hansen of Utah, Marty leads 90 of his colleagues in legislative battles aimed at ensuring that the federal government is doing all it can to protect America's youth from the dangers of tobacco.

Using his skills as a former prosecutor, Marty drafted a 111-page prosecution memorandum outlining numerous federal crimes Big Tobacco and its executives may have committed, including perjury and fraud. In December of 1994, he submitted the prosecution memo to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. The Justice Department subsequently filed a civil suit against the nation's largest cigarette companies, charging them with conspiracy and fraud for collaborating to mislead the public about the dangers of smoking.

Marty believes that in waiving its claim to a portion of the $246 billion litigation settlement reached between the states and the tobacco industry, the federal government passed up an opportunity to fund programs that could have significantly reduced the number of children who become addicted to tobacco. Instead of protecting our nation's children, the tobacco settlement funds now go toward countless unrelated political projects -- from building roads and sidewalks to reducing property taxes. In the 106th Congress, Marty introduced legislation (H.R. 1232) with Hansen which requires states to spend twenty-five percent of tobacco settlement funds on tobacco control and cessation programs.

Moreover, Marty is a leading Congressional advocate of empowering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate tobacco products and particularly to curb marketing of these products to children. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in March of 2000 that the FDA currently lacked the authority to regulate tobacco, Marty joined Congressmen Henry Waxman and Hansen in introducing two bills (H.R. 4041 and H.R. 4042) to provide the FDA the authority it needs to protect America's youth.

In the 106th Congress, Marty also introduced two bipartisan bills to regulate the sale of tobacco products over the Internet. The first (H.R. 2914) would prevent kids from buying tobacco products over the Internet, and the second (H.R. 3007) would require Internet web-sites that advertise and/or sell tobacco products to display the Surgeon General's warning regarding the dangers of smoking. These two bills will close a large loophole in current law by applying federal and state tobacco safety laws to the Internet.