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Patricia’s gumption, and her desire to do the right thing, would carry her into battle against a huge corporation she knew had lied to her—and which was lying to and recklessly endangering all of our children. When her legal battle ended, she directed a portion of the monetary gain to the Patricia Henley Foundation supporting opportunities for children in the performing arts.
When Patricia was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 1997, and given four months to live, she researched and discovered thousands of documents from the tobacco industry indicating that they lied about the additives in cigarettes, and the dangers of these ingredients to their customers. Her response to those who had trouble reconciling her righteous wrath with her lifetime of smoking was to point out the unethical marketing to teens. . ..
successfully sued Phillip Morris and the jury awarded her $51 million. It was, at that time, the first award in an anti-tobacco case in California, and the first case in the United States where punitive damages were upheld against a tobacco company. Appeals, over seven years, reduced the award to $10.5 million.
The Patricia Henley Foundation was finally funded in Santa Barbara in 2005 after the State Supreme Court refused to lower the judgment another time. Patricia, defying the medical professionals’ estimates of her longevity, focused the foundation on the mission on “inspiring the voice of youth through creative arts.”
The result was the Theatre of Life for Children (TLC), whose production of “A Tribute to the Musical” sold out three shows at The Marjorie Luke Theatre. . . .
Patricia never told anyone to stop smoking but only to make informed decisions. She described for performing cast members how her voice descended from soprano to lower-than-alto as a result of smoking. She was scheduled to cut a country western CD called Hard Lovin’ Lady (a title she gave herself after three marriages). But her voice had become so raspy that her guitarist joked, “I don’t think they make music in your key.”
In her opening statement during the trial, Patricia’s attorney Madelyn Chamber held up a pack of cigarettes and told the jury, “This is a case about a pack of lies.” . . .
Their high-powered attorneys’ attempts to confuse the issues didn’t sway one juror from finding the Phillip Morris executives guilty. . . .
It sent shock waves around the world when Patricia won this historic lawsuit. “HENLEY IS A HERO,” shouted a headline in a French newspaper. Patricia appeared on 20/20 and was featured in People and Forbes magazines. After her victory, she didn’t stop; she diligently wrote letters to corporations such as Disney to ask them to make Disneyland and Disney World smoke-free.
Fall of 2008 brought an end to the remission of the cancer that was supposed to have taken Patricia a decade earlier. She held on, with her usual courage, until July 31, 2009.
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Actor Patrick Swayze has died at the age of 57 after struggling with pancreatic cancer for almost two years, his publicist says. . . .
Swayze was also known for being a heavy smoker. In a January interview Patrick said one of the reasons that he would still continue to smoke was to lesson his daily battles.
"It's just I've been dealing with one thing as it comes at time, you know… in the… order that it's trying to kill me. Will stopping smoking now stop anything, change anything? No. But, when it looks like I may live longer than five minutes, I'll drop cigarettes like a hot potato," he told ABC on January 6, 2009.
The ticking stopwatch. Hidden cameras. Ambush journalism. In 36 years, "60 Minutes" has reflected and shaped popular pop culture. Its correspondents, from Mike Wallace to Ed Bradley, are instantly recognizable. It inspired a Saturday Night Live parody starring Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd. In the late '90s, two PBS documentaries, "Smoke in the Eye" (1996) and "Inside the Tobacco Deal" (1998), were made about a "60 Minutes" episode that was delayed and ultimately aired in a watered-down way that left no one happy except perhaps the lawyers who were involved. A 1999 feature film called "The Insider" and starring Russell Crowe further popularized the same episode.
That segment, which has become the show's most infamous, got its start in 1994 when Wallace and producer Lowell Bergman proposed featuring a biochemist named Jeffrey Wigand, a former executive at the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company. Wigand was willing to say on air that his former employers had deceived the public by ignoring evidence of the health hazards of their cigarettes.
Ultimately, Laurence Tisch, then the chairman of the network, and his lawyers did not allow Wigand's segment to be aired. That decision was made as Tisch was attempting to sell CBS to Westinghouse, and it was feared that an expensive lawsuit brought by the tobacco companies would decrease his company's value. The debate over the decision and Hewitt's role in accepting it will probably never end.
As Hewitt described it to me in 2004, he had no choice. "The only way I could have got that broadcast on the air would have been to go out and hire a bunch of guerrillas and take the transmitter at gunpoint," he says.
Russell built on the belief that it was tar, not nicotine, that killed smokers
By the 1960s, the emerging evidence of the danger of cigarette smoking was clear, but there was very little understanding of why people smoked. Cigarette smoking was generally thought of as a habit, with pharmacological factors receiving little or no attention.
Michael Russell, who has died at the age of 77 from a heart attack, was the man who did most to revolutionise our understanding. His research led to the 1988 report of the US surgeon general, Nicotine Addiction, which finally brought recognition that cigarette smoking is a classic drug dependence.
Russell was a psychiatrist in training at the Maudsley hospital, in south London, when he chose the topic of cigarette smoking for his research thesis in 1967. Based on his review of what was then fragmentary research literature, he concluded in a 1971 paper that the drug nicotine was the motivating force underlying smoking behaviour. He made the study of the interacting pharmacological and psychological determinants of tobacco dependence his life's work. . . .
But Russell is probably best known in the cessation field for a non-pharmacological intervention. In 1979 he published a trial examining the effectiveness of brief advice to quit smoking given by GPs in the course of routine consultations. The one-year success rate was 5%, compared with less than 1% in controls. A successful trial of nicotine chewing gum combined with brief advice in primary care followed. Russell moved towards the concept of an integrated district smoking cessation service, in which routine delivery of advice and pharmacological therapy in primary care was combined with intensive clinic support. That vision has now been realised in the NHS.
George Weissman, who helped transform Philip Morris from a midlevel tobacco company to a diversified conglomerate known for contributions to the arts, and who then led Lincoln Center for nearly a decade, died on July 24 in Greenwich, Conn. He was 90.
The cause was complications of a recent fall at his home in Rye, N.Y., his son Paul said.
Mr. Weissman began his corporate ascent in the movie and public relations businesses, and one of his early tasks as a young marketing executive at Philip Morris -- which became part of the Altria group in 2003 -- was to help develop the very effective masculine mythology of Marlboro cigarettes. . . .
Mr. Weissman also pushed Philip Morris to become a major donor to arts groups, particularly experimental undertakings like the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He said in an interview with The New York Times in 1990 that the arts initiative began with a traveling exhibition of modern art in 1965.
"We wanted to demonstrate to our own employees that we were an open-minded company seeking creativity in all aspects of our business," Mr. Weissman said. "And we were determined to do this by sponsoring things that made a difference, that were really dangerous." . . .
When Mr. Weissman became chairman and chief executive of Philip Morris in 1978, he told Fortune magazine that he saw himself as the quintessential Marlboro man.
"I'm no cowboy and I don't ride horseback," he said, "but I like to think I have the freedom the Marlboro man exemplifies. He's the man who doesn't punch a clock. He's not computerized. He's a free spirit." . . .
Under his leadership, Philip Morris employed blacks in prominent executive positions, resulting in boycotts in some places in the South. . . .
Mr. Weissman joined other business leaders in signing petitions against the Vietnam War. When the Nixon administration's "enemies list" . . .
Mr. Weissman told Forbes in 1980 that he felt Philip Morris had a "Masada complex,"
I'm no cowboy and I don't ride horseback, but I like to think I have the freedom the Marlboro man exemplifies. He's the man who doesn't punch a clock. He's not computerized. He's a free spirit.George Weissman, who helped transform Philip Morris from a midlevel tobacco company to a diversified conglomerate known for contributions to the arts, and who then led Lincoln Center for nearly a decade.
We wanted to demonstrate to our own employees that we were an open-minded company seeking creativity in all aspects of our business. And we were determined to do this by sponsoring things that made a difference, that were really dangerous. Former Philip Morris exec George Weissman, on the company's extensive arts donations.
Aaron Gray chronicled his mother's death from lung cancer in a heartbreaking short film that can be seen on YouTube titled, "Thanks Tobacco: You Killed My Mom." . . .
And he remembers hiding her cigarettes. Breaking them in half. Doing whatever a child could do to try and make things better. But it wasn't until his mother died of lung cancer at age 56 that he could do something to make a difference.
He told her story.
"If I didn't do this, she'd just be another nameless grave," said Gray, 37, of Redondo Beach. "I wanted to do something to make her life matter." . . .
Charlotte Patricia Gray was born Aug. 21, 1950, and took up smoking cigarettes in 1963 at age 13 - long before the public knew about the dangers of smoking. A single mom, she tried numerous times to quit but couldn't beat the addiction.
"She had tried hypnosis. She had tried acupuncture, the patch, Nicorette gum, candy. She had tried going cold turkey," said Gray. In October 2006, she was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer. A month later, she suffered a stroke that put her in the hospital, where she died four months later.
Dr. Howard A. Engle, the veteran Miami Beach pediatrician who lent his name to a landmark class action suit against Big Tobacco, died Wednesday at home, said son David Engle. He was 89 and suffered from smoking-related respiratory disease and lymphoma.
He had been in hospice care since last fall -- when he finally quit smoking.
Decades before he signed on as lead plaintiff in what became known as the ``sick smokers of Florida'' suit, Engle was an institution in Miami Beach, where he treated multiple generations of many families before retiring from private practice in 1997.
He was also revered in Miami's black community for refusing to segregate his practice in the pre-civil rights era and for opening an office in Liberty City.
Famously gruff and forthright, Engle was nonetheless single-mindedly dedicated to his young patients.
``He treated all his patients as if they were his own kids,'' son David said. ``He'd stay up all night with a sick kid who was thought to be hopeless.''
Anyone who knew Howard Engle understood that he cared far more about his role as a doctor than as a litigant -- even though Engle, et al. v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., et al, marked a seismic shift in the legal battle against a once-invincible industry. . . .
``Goddammit! I'm an addict!'' he growled to a Herald reporter in 2006, lighting a Marlboro Medium as he gasped and coughed.
Goddammit! I'm an addict!Dr. Howard A. Engle, the veteran Miami Beach pediatrician who lent his name to the landmark class action suit, in 2006. The revered pediatrician died Wednesday at 89.
At memorial services, people sometimes offer up items which the deceased liked, or wanted to have, during their life. In the late former President Roh Moo-hyun's case, it was a cigarette.
Some mourners gingerly lit up a cigarette and offered it to the late President at memorial altars in his hometown in southeastern Bongha Village and other locations across the nation.
Their offerings of lit cigarettes instead of laying flowers or burning incense were prompted by the news that Roh asked for a smoke from a security guard before killing himself. . . . Mourners are apparently feeling sorry for him because he couldn't smoke at the last moment of his life.
Roh used to be a heavy smoker, going through more than two packs of cigarettes a day. He quit smoking in October 2001, but about a year later, began to smoke again as his approval rate for the presidential candidacy was only around 10 percent.
It was, in many ways, the perfect homage to someone who had been celebrated for his singular style, for his cool, for a Philadelphia lifetime known as Harry the K.
Shane Victorino, Ryan Howard, Scott Eyre and several other Phillies players couldn't possibly find a truckload of pastel sportcoats to highjack on such short notice so they did the next best thing, sharing a cigarette in the dugout before yesterday's game at Nationals Park.
"I asked for it and a couple of other guys thought it would be cool to do," Victorino said. "It was like, why not? So we called who we could - I forget who had 'em, but we got 'em."
Kalas, who collapsed in the TV booth before the game against the Nationals, was a longtime smoker, the habit a well-known element of his persona. Captured by television cameras, the images of the players' tribute was all over the Internet by the end of the game, a 9-8 win.
The online reaction was positive and could pretty much be summed up in two words: very cool.
Ron Silver, the controversial stage and screen actor who re-cast himself as one of George W Bush's few Hollywood supporters, died yesterday at the age of 62. A longtime smoker, Silver had been battling cancer of the oesophagus for nearly two years.
BY THE time he posted his last blog, on February 16th, life was getting rough for Alan Landers. Radiation treatment every day for tonsillar cancer was filling his throat and mouth with sores. This made it hard to swallow and harder to speak . . .
Mr Landers never had any doubt about who was to blame for his condition. The big tobacco companies had intentionally hooked their customers on nicotine; they had conspired to conceal the fact that cigarettes were deadly; and he had been lured into “the biggest con of the 20th century”. To help shatter the illusion that cigarettes were cool he visited schools, testified to Congress and gave public lectures, pulling off his shirt to show the operation scars that wrapped halfway round his back. . . .
No one forced him to indulge the false glamour of the weed. Besides, from 1966 every packet of Winstons had carried the warning that "smoking may be hazardous to your health". And if he doubted that, he had only to note that in his own hard-smoking family a grandfather, an uncle and an aunt had all died of lung cancer.
Mr Landers argued back that he was too far gone by then, and that the government warnings had never been forceful enough. In an up-and-down life, including a brush with cocaine in the 1980s that wiped out his finances and got him convicted for armed robbery, it was hard to quit. He tried the patches and the gum with no success, and stopped smoking at last only when his medical prognosis got too grim to ignore.
He was desperately ashamed that he had ever promoted tobacco. To the end, in a rough and ever-fainter whisper, he condemned it. Whether he could out-argue those clean-cut fireside frolics, with "real pleasure" dangling from his lower lip, he never knew. He hoped so.
Alan Landers, who was known as the Winston Man, lost his battle with the disease just one month before he was due to testify in court against cigarette manufacturer RJ Reynolds.
The 68-year-old had led a multi-million dollar crusade against the tobacco industry, four decades after he first appeared on billboards and in magazine adverts across the U.S. to promote cigarettes as cool.
He was lined up as one of 9,000 tobacco victims in Florida suing cigarette manufacturers for failing to warn back in the 1960s and 1970s that smoking carried major health risks and could be deadly.
'Looking back on my career, I am ashamed that I helped promote such a lethal and addictive product to the children and adults of this country,' he explained before his death.
'Had I understood then what I now understand - that cigarettes are an addictive poison that kills almost 50 per cent of their users - I would never have participated in their mass marketing.'
He added: 'I was expected to portray smoking as stylish, pleasurable and attractive....at no time was I ever told cigarettes could be dangerous to my health.
'I knew some people believed them to be unhealthy but the cigarette manufacturers denied that their product is harmful.' . . .
Landers, who died at his home in Lauderhill, Florida, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1987 and received a new diagnosis of throat cancer earlier this year.
Up until his death he was on weekly chemotherapy, daily radiotherapy, also suffered with emphysema and struggled to breathe and talk.
He is not the first 'poster-boy' for the tobacco industry to lose his life to the very habit he promoted.
Two of the so-called 'Marlboro Men', actors Wayne McLaren, David McLean and Dick Hammer, all died of lung cancer, years after modelling for Marlboro cigarettes. . . .
'I was required to smoke on the set; constant smoking was required to achieve the correct appearance of the cigarette, ash and butt length,' he recalled. . . .
'I call upon the lawmakers of this country to protect our children from this dangerous substance. Tobacco products should be regulated as the addictive products they are.
'I call upon the tobacco industry to compensate its victims, its former customers, who are suffering and dying from its products.'
Alan Landers, a former cigarette pitchman turned anti-smoking advocate, died at his Lauderhill home Friday.
He was 68.
The self-proclaimed "Winston Man" had been in a 14-year legal battle with R.J. Reynolds and other tobacco companies, claiming smoking caused his health problems. His case was scheduled for trial in April.
A survivor of two lung cancers, Mr. Landers was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for recently diagnosed tonsillar cancer. He also suffered from emphysema. . . .
In the late '60s and early '70s, during the peak of his modeling career, Mr. Landers appeared in Winston ads on billboards and in magazines.
But by the late '80s, he faced a series of illnesses that he attributed to a lifetime of heavy smoking.
In 1995, he signed on to a class-action suit alleging that cigarette companies intentionally hooked people on nicotine and conspired to hide information about smoking's hazards.
Ultimately, the Florida Supreme Court threw out a record $145 billion class-action jury award in that suit in 2006. But individuals were allowed to sue on their own. As a result, Mr. Landers was one of as many as 9,000 people in Florida with legal suits involving tobacco companies. His attorney says no decision has been made on whether to pursue his case.
When someone asked to smoke at his home, he'd hand them a wooden ashtray shaped like a coffin with a sticker: "Please don't smoke. You might croak." He also had a cigarette lighter that, when flicked, unleashed a horrific, hacking cough.
Friends and family say such antics were vintage Althafer, a health educator who oversaw anti-smoking campaigns in a decades-long career with the Centers for Disease Control.
Charles "Charlie" Althafer, 77, of Tucker, died Feb. 9 of heart failure at his home in Tucker. A memorial service will be 1 p.m. Saturday at Living Grace Lutheran Church in Tucker. Wages & Sons Funeral Home in Stone Mountain is in charge of arrangements.
In the 1960s, Mr. Althafer was acting director for a project of the National Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health that researched smoking and its consequences in San Diego. He joined the CDC in the mid-1970s as deputy director of a federal anti-smoking program . . .
Charlie was one of the pioneers who just kept working at it, saying it was something we had to change. He was involved not only in the usual anti-smoking programs, but in developing surgeon general reports that came out on smoking. You can see the results now of his work in this country."
And then there were the jokes. Mr. Althafer, who had been a radar specialist with the Marines during the Korean War, had one for any occasion.
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. . . .
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the "chastely severe, time-honored classics" he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his "wooden Harvard chair," cigarette in hand.