Leonard: Expand No-Smoking Zones
By Ryan Frank, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Jan. 9–Portland city Commissioner Randy Leonard, a former firefighter, is pushing a health agenda from City Hall sparked by his career tending to lifelong smokers and shaped by his own heart ailments.
Leonard, who last year had heart surgery, toyed with pursuing a ban on trans fats in Portland restaurants. This week, he wants to outlaw smoking in all Portland parks, including golf courses and Portland International Raceway.
Next up: a possible sidewalk smoking ban.
Leonard says his push for a healthier Portland is grounded in his own health scare from 2001 and more than two decades of putting out cigarette-ignited fires and aiding smokers on their final days. “It’s among the most horrible images you can imagine,” he said.
It also might not be a bad political play. The commissioner from outer Southeast faces re-election in 2008 to represent the city rated America’s second healthiest and the place where REI gear is a Pearl District fashion statement.
Leonard, 54, has become one of those health-kick converts.
He grew up in an Irvington house where both his parents smoked. His two brothers and sister picked up the habit, but he stayed away.
As a firefighter, he kept up with regular exercise but not his diet. He grabbed egg sandwiches and hashbrowns for breakfast at McDonald’s. His treat was homemade French fries cooked in Crisco. His version of dinner was two meats and bread, his wife, Julie, said. “I don’t think he ever met a vegetable or salad,” she said. “He was one of those guys who thought he was pretty much invincible when I first met him.”
That changed in 2001, when Leonard took an extensive battery of tests given to all Portland firefighters. He flunked.
Doctors got him off the treadmill and found a congenital problem with his heart that restricted blood flow. “It’s from that point on that I felt mortal,” Leonard said.
Today, breakfast is a grapefruit. Dinner is chicken or fish. The French fries are still there, but they’re in canola oil. Leonard’s ride to work is his Trek road bike, and around lunchtime he often can be spotted carrying a Subway salami sandwich.
He doesn’t exactly have “Body by Jake,” but Leonard works at it. “I just feel better,” he said.
That’s where the trans fats come in.
Leonard says he has a hard time knowing which restaurant meals include trans fats. The hydrogenated oils are said to yield better texture and taste and longer shelf life. But trans fats are out of fad given studies that show they’re bad for you.
“You often don’t have a choice, that’s the problem, particularly for the working poor,” Leonard said. “Maybe for a person in Lake Oswego that wouldn’t apply.”
Leonard backed off the trans fat ban as the Multnomah County board of commissioners appears ready to take it up.
But he’s pushing on with smoking restrictions. Leonard’s opposition to smoking grew after calls like one in the early 1990s, when he found a man dead from coughing up tissue from his lungs.
Next to his bed was an ashtray. “It was a scene of horror,” Leonard said.
Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who runs the parks, had suggested outlawing smoking within 25 feet of children’s playgrounds. (Saltzman already got the ban for Pioneer Courthouse Square).
But Leonard wants to go further when the council votes on the new rules Thursday. “In parks, in my view, there’s no place for it,” Leonard said.
Leonard expects to hear from smokers who don’t like snuffing out. But he says secondhand smoke is not an individual choice. “Your rights end where my nose begins,” Leonard said.
Golf course clubhouses, though, would remain smoky. State law doesn’t allow any more cities to ban smoking inside bars or restaurants, Leonard said.
Bus-riding and lunch-break smokers won’t be so lucky.
Leonard wants to outlaw their ability to light up on sidewalks citywide to prevent that waft of smoke from invading non-smokers’ noses.
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