Tobacco Wars! The Battle for a Smokefree Society

Tobacco is a truly important global issue: one out of three people worldwide are currently addicted. As a result, in coming decades smoking may kill one billion people in this century, according to the UN World Health Organization.

Tobacco Wars! The Battle for a Tobacco free Society educates and inspires college students, community members and health conference attendees. 

This speaker reaches the hearts and minds of his audiences. Patrick Reynolds opens with stories about the RJ Reynolds family, by turns colorful, humorous and moving. He speaks vividly and movingly about his memories his father's and eldest brother's deaths from smoking, and then switches gears and offers a report card on tobacco control for the State he is in. 

He'll compare your State to the rest of the nation in four areas: current State tobacco taxes, State spending this year on youth smoking prevention, spending on cessation, and your State's current laws limiting smoking in restaurants, bars and other workplaces. Finally, he'll suggest what can be done to bring about change. 

Mr. Reynolds will also offer his insightful perspective on the influence of the tobacco lobby on Congress, the UN World Health Organization's Global Treaty on Tobacco Control, ratified by 170 nations as of June, 2011, the new FDA law to regulate tobacco, and the cutting of highly successful tobacco prevention school assembly programs by most States. 

He'll provide the current number of States which have passed strong Statewide 100% smoking bans (as of 28 June, 2011). 

Time permitting, Patrick will include a powerful section from his talk for grades six through twelve: he'll recount the moving and powerful story of Sean Marsee, a young track star who died at 19 from chewing tobacco. He'll illustrate that story with shocking before and after Power Point slides and videos

For comic relief, he shows some hilarious slides which make fun of Joe Camel, depicting him in a hospital bed, and present "Malboro Country" as a group of smokers huddled in an alley behind an office building, getting their nicotine fix.