my name is bob gordon, a member of the san francisco tobacco free coalition. i realize we are talking about a specific issue here, but i just want to put the issue in perspective, and that is overall, according to the centers for disease prevention and control, we are talking about more people dying in the united states every year from tobacco-related -- more than from voter vehicles, homicide, suicide, -- more than from motor vehicles, homicide, suicide, and hiv combined. i want to share an article that was in "seinfeld daily -- "science daily" just last month. hooka use among a certain age group is rising rapidly according to the san diego school of medicine. now, the researchers say that the increased popularity of the hooka, a water pipe smoking tobacco -- there is a misguided belief that it is less harmful than cigarettes. most users reports smoking hooka with friends, and this is according to an associate professor in the department of family and preventive medicine. according to him, the public interest cigarette smoking is banned in california, hooka u

slade gordon was enormously helpful in the keeping the senate republican leadership in touch with what we were doing. we had tim roamer on the democratic side of the house who went around -- >> guest: boberrey. >> guest: bob kerrey was very helpful in the senate, but we didn't have anybody talking to the republican house leadership, and they were the audience we needed most because they were the most wary of the commission, the most worried about us and, eventually, the most hostile to us. and i think communications being all important, had we done a better job of bringing them along and communicating with them all the way along, i think we wouldn't have those problems at the end where they were fighting our relations twea and fighting the end of the commission and giving us all sorts of problems and the extension and all of that. we hadn't kept in proper touch with them, and we should have. >> host: lee, anything that you remember? >> guest: well, i think we spent far too much time arguing about access. and we should have pushed that harder earlier. >> host: ah. >> >> guest: so that we could have spent a lot more time and atlantic on the recommendations -- deliberation on the recommen