Huntington Plaintiff Retains Craving Despite Losing Voice

The urge to smoke was just too great for James Ellis.

Low-tar, low-nicotine cigarettes didn’t work. Nicotine gum didn’t work, nor did nicotine patches. Treatment centers, where he was pumped full of shots and pills for months, didn’t work. He puffed on cigarettes through it all, as he had since 1956.

Even the removal of a polyp from his vocal cords in 1991 barely deterred him. “I was smoking almost before I could talk again,” the Huntington Beach resident said.

For the last three years, though, Ellis, 58, hasn’t touched a cigarette. He can’t. Cancer took his vocal cords and he now breathes through a hole in his throat, the result of a tracheotomy that was part of a 23 1/2-hour operation.

“I woke up from surgery and still wanted a cigarette,” he said, with the help of a mechanical larynx that he must use.

Such was the power of his addiction.

On Wednesday, Ellis filed a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, not to seek damages for himself, but to force cigarette companies to disclose their long-secret reports on nicotine and smoking and to correct misleading advertising.

“We have to get across to younger generations that smoking is addictive and smoking is harmful to health,” said Ellis, who was forced to take a disability retirement from his software engineering job at a Hughes Aircraft unit in Irvine in 1993.

His lawyer, Mark Robinson of Laguna Niguel, is part of a cadre of plaintiffs’ attorneys nationwide filing lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

The group has been filing a single suit in each state--with California becoming the fifth Wednesday--since a federal appeals court in New Orleans rejected a massive class action in May. The court said the action on behalf of millions of allegedly nicotine-dependent Americans was unmanageable, partly because of conflicting state liability laws.

The lawsuit, Robinson said, is aimed at stopping cigarette companies from targeting children and from continuing to issue a host of misleading information through advertisements. It asks that corporate profits from cigarettes be turned over to the state to help pay for smoking-cessation programs.

“They had a product they knew was addictive and, consistently since 1954, have constructed a public approach to create doubt,” the lawyer said. “Their game plan has been to create doubt about addiction and doubt about the link between smoking and diseases like emphysema, heart disease and cancer.”

Industry officials generally declined comment Wednesday, but a spokesman for Philip Morris called the suit the latest in an “almost senseless but politically correct bandwagon of litigation.” He predicted it would fail.

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Back in the 1950s, Ellis started smoking in boot camp like many young men his age. In the Marine Corps, as in other branches of the Armed Forces, he said, “They gave you cigarettes; they promoted it. Smoking was relaxing. It helped you get through the day.”

Later, his wife and their three children tried to encourage him to quit his daily pack-and-a-half habit. They never smoked, he said, and his wife would often leave the room, or make him leave, when he smoked.

By the late 1970s, he said, he knew he had to try to stop. Simply quitting worked only for short periods. But the addiction was so strong, he said, that nothing worked.

In March 1993, doctors found squamous cell carcinoma on his vocal cords. He would need an operation. But first, he wanted to go fishing.

“We were about 600 miles out to sea off Baja on a party boat,” he said. “We were two days into a nine-day trip, and my neck swelled up. I was not able to eat. My windpipe was closing, and it was difficult to breathe.”

When the boat docked, he took the next plane home, getting in at midnight. He was in the hospital nine hours later taking antibiotics for a cancer-induced infection.

“One more day at sea and I would have been 6 feet under,” he said.

After consulting with cancer specialists elsewhere, Ellis underwent surgery at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach. The daylong operation involved the removal of his larynx and other tissue and numerous skin grafts to patch his esophagus and other vital organs.

“It was one of the worst things that can happen to you,” he said. “It was five times worse than open-heart surgery.”

He needed follow-up radiation as well, and has been cancer-free so far.

But the operation, he said, still hasn’t curbed his craving for cigarettes.