Congressman who said smoking lettuce was like cigarettes becomes lobbyist for R.J. Reynolds

Steve Buyer, a Republican congressman from Indiana from 1993 to 2011, had been the beneficiary of over $100,000 in Reynolds donations over the years and pushed the company’s legislative goals.

In 2009, he gave a famously colorful speech on the House floor endorsing smokeless tobacco: “You could have smoked that lettuce and you still end up with the same problems. You could cut the grass in your yard, dry it, and roll it up in a cigarette, and smoke it — and you’re still going to have a lot of problems,” he said. “It is the smoke that kills, not the nicotine.”