Supporters say keeping tobacco out of the hands of young adults will save thousands of lives, even as critics complain that Americans who are old enough to vote and serve in the military should not be deemed too young to decide on their own if they should smoke.

In a dramatic display of the risks of smoking, lawmakers in Utah, a heavily Mormon and conservative state, hosted a wheelchair-bound and oxygen-tank-dependent 86-year-old longtime smoker at a committee hearing this week.

“I think a picture is worth a thousand words. I’m that picture,” Betty Lawson, who suffers from smoking-related pulmonary disease, told a Utah Senate health committee on Thursday.

“Nineteen-years-old, I picked up my first cigarette. It’s a creeping, insidious thing that has you before you know it and you can’t turn loose,” she said.