解放军文职招聘考试The Fight against Youth Smoking

The Fight against Youth Smoking

Since I took office I’ve done everything in my power to protect our children from harm. We've worked to make their streets and their schools safer, to give them something positive to do after school and before their parents get home. We've worked to teach our children that drugs are dangerous, illegal and wrong.

Today, I want to talk to you about the historic op­portunity we now have to protect our nation's children from an even more deadly threat: smoking. Smoking kills more people every day than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, murders, suicides, drugs and fires com­bined. Nearly 90 percent of those smokers lit their first cigarette before they turned 18. Consider this: 3,000 children start to smoke every day illegally, and 1,000 of them will die sooner because of it.

This is a national tragedy that every American should be honor-bound to help prevent. For more than five years we've worked to stop our children from smok­ing before they start, launching a nationwide campaign to educate them about the dangers of smoking, to re­duce their access to tobacco products, and to severely restrict tobacco companies from advertising to young people. If we do these, we'll cut teen smoking by al­most half over the next five years. That means if we act now, we have it in our power to stop 3 million children from smoking—and to save a million lives as a result.