Turning on tobacco
The Herald-Palladium, 4/10/2011
Turning on tobacco
Anti-smoking advocate and grandson of tobacco magnate R.J. Reynolds brings message to St. Joe
By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO
H-P Features Writer
ST. JOSEPH — Patrick Reynolds clears his throat as he begins to talk about Sean Marsee.
Marsee was a small-town hero, not only for the 28 medals he won as a member of the Talihina High School track team, but for plucking his younger sister from the frigid water one winter when she fell through thin lake ice.
Most everyone in the Oklahoma town knew Sean Marsee - or at least of him - and expectations for his final track season were high.
That spring, Marsee approached his mother, Betty, a registered nurse, about a red sore on his tongue. A doctor’s appointment was made, tests were run.
The phone call came on a Saturday. It was cancer. Marsee’s lone vice, chewing tobacco, was to blame.
“I have this picture of him that I put up on the screen,” Reynolds says of the teen. “Here he is with his tongue removed, part of his jaw removed, part of his nose removed, part of his neck muscles removed, a feeding tube going down to his stomach and he’s got these track medals pinned to his chest. It’s as though he were saying ‘I don’t want to be remembered as some kid who got cancer. Get my track medals and we’ll pin them on my chest so they can see that I was Sean Marsee.”
Marsee died two weeks after that photograph was taken. He was 19.
Reynolds often shares that story when he talks to students and adults about the high cost of tobacco use. And on Thursday, he’ll tell the tale again during Lakeland HealthCare’s free Cancer Awareness, Recognition & Education (CARE) Fair at the Lakeland Center for Outpatient Services in St. Joseph.
But it’s Reynolds’ own story that has made him such a powerful anti-tobacco figure.
The founder of the Foundation for a Smokefree America also happens to be the grandson of R.J. Reynolds, the founder of the cigarette company that bears his name.
“As a Reynolds,” Patrick says by telephone from his Los Angeles home, “it gives me a platform to make a difference in people’s lives.”
A calling
Reynolds, 62, the son of R.J. Reynolds Jr. and actress Marianne O’Brien, was 3 years old when his parents divorced.
“My mom was an actress under contract with Warner Bros., and my dad was a playboy of the 1920s, and an heir,” Reynolds says. “She was the second of his four wives. So he went on to his next romance and paid no attention to my brother Mike and I or the four boys from his first marriage.”
When Patrick Reynolds was 9, he wrote to his father, and his father sent for him. Reynolds remembers walking across the floor to find his dad lying on his back with sandbags on his chest to exercise his lungs.
“I said ‘Dad, what’s wrong?’” Reynolds says. “‘Oh, I have asthma, son.’ But he didn’t have asthma. It turned out to be emphysema from smoking. I only got to see him five or six times after that before he died.
“My only memories of my father are of a man dying from smoking. They say you find your calling in life inside your deepest wound. And my deepest wound is my father’s absence because of smoking. That’s where I found my calling.”
Family treason
In 1986, Reynolds was touring the capitol in Washington, D.C., when he met Sen. Robert Packwood. Reynolds, who started smoking shortly after his father’s death, had spent the previous 17 years trying and repeatedly failing to quit.
“I tried everything,” Reynolds says. “Finally, I got in a program where I realized that I couldn’t take even one cigarette. On the 11th try I just kept telling myself wait five more minutes when I had a craving. That was really what got me through it.”
Aware of the difficulty he faced in his own addiction, Reynolds asked Packwood about raising cigarette taxes.
“He looked at me and said ‘You’re a Reynolds and you want to raise the tobacco tax?’” Reynolds says. “He said, ‘Well, we’re voting on the tobacco tax. Why don’t you come down and testify before the subcommittee.’”
Reynolds had already been angry with the tobacco industry, selling his stock in his family’s company in 1979. His initial public speaking engagement took place in Washington, D.C., in 1986, when he advocated for the ban on tobacco advertising on behalf of the American Lung Association.
“I said ‘The hand that once fed me is the tobacco industry and that same hand has killed millions of people,’” Reynolds says. “The media picked up on that and suddenly I was besieged with invitations to speak.”
It didn’t go over very well with the rest of the Reynolds clan.
“We had some pretty heated discussions,” Reynolds says. “One of my brothers says ‘I have stock in R.J. Reynolds and you’re going to hurt my stock.’ They said, ‘You’re going to be an embarrassment.’ So we had some unhappy conflicts.”
Honor
From his background with the industry, Reynolds is well versed on nicotine addiction. He travels the country and the world on behalf of the Foundation for a Smokefree America, the nonprofit organization he formed in 1989.
He has fought his battle largely on the economic and political fronts by lobbying for such anti-smoking measures as higher state cigarette taxes and anti-smoking legislation.
“We are seeing a surge in state tobacco taxes, and we are also seeing a tremendous trend toward smoking laws,” Reynolds says. “In recent years we’ve seen a tidal wave of laws banning smoking from all bars and all restaurants by state legislatures. Right now 28 states have banned smoking either by ballot measure or by a state assembly bill.”
Michigan is one of those states, adopting legislation that took effect May 1, 2010, prohibiting smoking in almost all public places and workplaces. Its tobacco tax, at $2 a pack, is among the highest in the nation, but the rest of the state’s efforts, Reynolds says, fall short.
The 2010 American Lung Association’s State of Tobacco Control report give’s Michigan an F in both cessation programs and tobacco prevention control and spending.
“If you look at the grades for Michigan it doesn’t augur well,” Reynolds says. “Most states are tightening their belts, but legislatures seem to think that one of the expendables is tobacco prevention and cessation spending. When you put it alongside what they are taking in from tobacco tax and settlement payments they are spending only a tiny fraction of that back. That’s where it rubs.”
Although Michigan brings in revenue from cigarette taxes as well as from the 1998 multi-state tobacco settlement (a total of $246 billion over the first 25 years), it ranks 42nd in the nation on the portion it spends on tobacco prevention programs, allocating just 2.1 percent of the amount recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s a drop in the bucket compared to what the CDC recommends,” Reynolds says. “The CDC recommends an investment of $10.53 per smoker. Michigan invests 52 cents per smoker. Sadly that’s the norm. A lot of states are getting Fs in those areas.”
Reynolds also offers even more sobering statistics: 60 percent of smokers start by the age of 14; 90 percent of smokers are firmly addicted before reaching age 19; only one in 10 smokers start smoking after age 19.
And, largely because of anti-smoking laws, there has been a steady rise in the use of smokeless tobacco products.
It’s those numbers, Reynolds says, that keeps him speaking out against tobacco - even if his family members still aren’t happy about it.
“I think I’ve brought honor to the Reynolds name,” he says. “I’ve brought honor to my family.”