Senator Dick Durbin is one of the most vocal anti-nicotine lawmakers in Congress. During a speech on the Senate floor on March 12, Durbin focused on President Trump’s pick to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary, MD. Durbin warned lawmakers that the next FDA commissioner must be prepared to take on entrenched interests, including the major tobacco companies.

Durbin stressed the agency’s immense influence over public health and the economy, noting that his recent meeting with the Makary left him with mixed impressions. Durbin said that he made it clear to Makary that the new FDA chief must have the fortitude to resist pressure from powerful industry lobbies, especially Big Tobacco.

“The FDA requires a commissioner who is willing to withstand pressure—from Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, or maybe even the President—to protect public health. We cannot afford an FDA Commissioner who gets chewed up by Elon Musk’s chainsaw or stands idly by as RFK Jr. pushes his deadly bias against vaccines,” said Durbin. “To safeguard and regulate the food we eat and the drugs we use, we need a leader at FDA with the courage to say ‘no.’”

Durbin warned that the fight against nicotine products is far from over. He said that while traditional cigarette consumption, which causes over 480,000 preventable deaths each year, next-generation nicotine products such as e-cigarettes are only driving a new generation of customers towards addiction to nicotine.

“While we have succeeded in reducing youth smoking rates, anyone who thought Big Tobacco would disappear was mistaken. They re-branded with flashy new products: vaping [and] e-cigarettes,” he said. “And they followed the same playbook used to drive sales of Marlboros: target kids. For years, FDA utterly failed to protect children from a lifetime of addiction fueled by e-cigarettes, many of which are sold by the largest tobacco companies.”

Durbin claimed that the legal requirement that vaping companies prove their products are “appropriate for the protection of public health” before market entry has been largely overlooked, resulting in a flood of products that “have hooked a generation of young users.” Durbin then asked if Makary would “follow the science and the law to protect children or will he align with the tobacco corporations that peddle this poison?”

Durbin also attacked Trump and Elon Musk’s “cruel decision” to fire thousands of federal health workers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and FDA.

“For goodness’ sake, we have a measles outbreak in Texas that has killed two and sickened 220 people, mostly unvaccinated children. It is the worst measles outbreak in a generation. Instead of encouraging vaccinations to save these kids, (Trump’s health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.) diminished their significance by falsely stating that measles outbreaks are not unusual,” said Durbin. “You cannot claim that you want to Make America Healthy Again, and then allow preventable diseases to come roaring back … Will he stand up to the buzz of Elon Musk’s chainsaw? To Big Tobacco? I hope that he will.”

Durbin has long been a vocal anti-nicotine zealot. Last summer, Durbin held an anti-vaping committee hearing in the Senate that lasted more than two hours. During his opening statement, Durbin said that deaths from tobacco products “touch virtually every family in this country, including my own.”

Ironically, several studies have shown that if promoted appropriately, products such as e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches have the potential to prevent many of those 480,000 deaths. However, Durbin wants to ban them.

On March 4, Durbin, the U.S. Senate Democratic Whip, alongside Senator Ron Wyden, Representative Raja Krishnamoothi, and several other colleagues introduced the End Tobacco Loopholes Act.

The sweeping legislation seeks to curb tobacco use and lower healthcare costs by raising taxes on nicotine and tobacco products, including establishing a federal tax on e-cigarettes, updating the federal cigarette tax rate, and harmonizing taxes across all nicotine products including nicotine pouches.