Published in the Bay Area Reporter on August 23, 2024.

By Joseph A. Hayden, J.D.

I am a (gay) father. My daughter never had the chance to meet her grandfather who died two years before she was born. I barely got to meet my grandmother once, it appears, judging from a single photo of us together that I only found in recent years. Of course, I never got to know her, because she died at the same age that my father died — FIFTY!

The median age for those who start smoking or vaping is 13. That’s how old my father was when he was handed loose cigarettes on the beaches of Waikiki where he grew up. He suffered a quintuple bypass after years of heart attacks by the time he was 48 and by 50 he died of a hemorrhage from an aortic aneurysm in a very painful death after sitting in traffic on the San Mateo Bridge trying to get to the hospital while his body was bleeding uncontrollably from the same blood vessels that had been made brittle and broken in his body, choking him alive. This is only one of many ways that tobacco can kill, and it’s not pretty. I was warned not to even look at his body after he died because of the damage it had been put through.

Do I sound pissed?

Damn right I am! I’m far from the only one who has lost loved ones to nicotine addiction. It is an invisible epidemic that kills 8 million people worldwide, including 480,000 in the U.S. and 40,000 in California every year, and we just accept it as normal because it has gone on for so long. We need to stop accepting it and start doing more to fight back against the tobacco/vape industry that is responsible, not just for our families, but for the LGBTQ+ community. We smoke and vape a lot more than straight folks, largely because of the stress caused by the discrimination we face.

I’m pissed about that discrimination just as we all are, but I’m also pissed at the tobacco/vape industry that takes advantage of it to get us to smoke more. They’ve been advertising cigarettes, and now so-called vapes (that are technically known as Electronic Smoking Devices, but I’ll call them what everyone else does for clarity) as fun, cool, and even healthy for over 100 years. These ads have even appeared in the queer press saying things like “Take Pride in Your Flavor.” One ad that appeared in the queer press during Pride month in 2005 listed a bunch of “freedoms” including the freedom to marry and the freedom to “inhale.” The tag line read, “It’s all good.”

This is what we’re up against, an industry that claims to be on our side, despite being one of the top corporate donors to the Republican Party for decades. Sure, they gave some money to AIDS groups during the darkest time of that epidemic, but they gave tons more to our enemies at the time, like Jesse Helms, and spent way more on advertising congratulating themselves on the crumbs they tossed our way and other ads promoting their deadly product.

Vaping is smoking!

Vaping is a delivery system that is not benign. One vape device can have the nicotine equivalent of FOUR HUNDRED cigarettes. It only takes one long drag, especially from a youth who has never experienced the masked flavor-laden versions of tobacco, which by itself, tastes repugnant, to get the sensation that one’s capillaries are expanding. Later, when that nicotine has dissipated, guess what? They constrict! This is how the very heavy-handed addiction of tobacco works on bodies and makes them (shortened) lifelong smokers, just as the tobacco industry has planned. Vaping is NOT A CESSATION TOOL. It is a way to make one more addicted to nicotine and mask the true ugliness of the poison and its intended ravaging of one’s body.

So, what can we do?

We can get involved with groups like the one I volunteer for, LGBTQ Minus Tobacco. They’re working in my city, Vallejo, on, among other things, stopping the sale of all vape products and reducing illegal tobacco sales to youth. They’re also working in San Francisco and Oakland on smoke-free bar patios to protect workers and patrons in our community spaces from secondhand smoke.

Also, the queer press could stop taking advertisements from the tobacco/vape industry. I know this is a hard thing to do when media companies are struggling to survive in the digital age of news, but I ask them to think about all the people in this world who are struggling to survive right now, some taking their last breaths far too soon partly due to tobacco advertising.

As I write this, I am 56 with my daughter fully grown. I await a grandchild of my own hopefully in the next few years, and I expect to live long enough to watch any future grandchild of mine prosper and learn who I am, despite the family “tradition.” How I wish that this child will be born into a world where he or she is not targeted for yet a new generation of smokers as I was and as my daughter was, particularly as the gay man that I am and the woman of color she is.

The job of our governments, including our local governments, is to protect citizens. The slave trade that will forever mark the origin story of the USA is bad enough, but our country continues to allow those who profit from the commercial European-style tobacco products — that were created by those who kidnapped Africans and brought them here to HARVEST this poison — to target the descendants of that very same population with specificity to consume those products. Where is the outrage!?

Regarding the Vallejo Tobacco Retail License I’ve been working on for two years, our coalition had numerous opportunities to speak at a community workshop with tobacco retailers. As you can see in the video it sometimes got heated, but everyone remained civil. I had an opportunity to stand up numerous times and give my point of view on the work we’ve done with this, particularly since I’m a resident and all my activism in this area is as a volunteer.

The two issues the retailers supposedly had were pack size and transferability, and they obviously weren’t amenable to my repeated suggestion of foregoing their opportunity to transfer the business as a penalty for violating the already existing law of selling to minors.  Because it wasn’t a hill they were willing to die on, I don’t see why we need to negotiate the ABC model for liquor.  The liquor model doesn’t scare them much.  Suspension of even one month (and forfeiture of the poison product, which was listed) scares them.  The false equivalency of tobacco and alcohol was what got me most frustrated last night, but I did find the retailers at our table to be cordial.  They admitted they had lost members of their own families to cancer, presumably from smoking.

That being said, I find it hypocritical that retailers swear they don’t sell to minors and yet they want “a break” in case it happens.  The retailers at my table voluntarily admitted they were already caught selling liquor to minors and were punished for it.  When pushed by me they claimed they could not swear their stores would not accidentally sell tobacco to minors, which means they have historically been laissez-faire about checking identification.  That translates to me that they aren’t all the good guys they were purporting to be.

The audacity that retailers claimed THEY are the best judges of how much addiction is going on in the community is absolutely absurd and based on nothing concrete.  Those claiming they were the best “experts” on that didn’t want to hear about what kind of empirical evidence actually improved the outcomes of the tobacco scourge in other jurisdictions.

All the talk about the black market was also a red herring.  Anyone who resorts to saying someone else is breaking the law as a reason not to try to create an enforcement of a law already on the books, has already lost the argument to me and is not worth sparring with.  Someone even had the guts to imply that they would be subject to more armed robberies if we increased the price, as if tobacco products are worth their weight in gold.

I stand by the ordinance as it was modeled after the Public Health Law Center. TRL’s already exist in well over 200 jurisdictions in California alone, including next door in Benicia, not to mention other states.

Despite the laws being on the books for a dozen years that there is to be no smoking at resorts within 25 feet of a window, pool or door, the smoking is rampant again this year. Last year there was an effort at the entrance to every event because I worked with the Sonoma County Department of Health to put the resorts and bars on notice. This year there’s some signage, but I was literally told by the manager of West Sonoma Inn that *I* should talk to the DJ about making an announcement because the shitty temporary signs that they have at the West Sonoma Inn (shown below) which are BARELY visible were not enough to stem the rampant smoking around large groups of gay men, many of which we know to be statistically immuno-compromised. After Covid and MPOX, one would think that this event, Lazybear, which was found specifically to raise money for AIDS and gay men’s health, would be a little more conscious.

These recently extinguished combustible cigarette butts in a dry FIELD say nothing of the plethora of vape devices that were used.

Only the signage of the feckless manager’s office at WSI seems to be permanent, while the signage for the event is so shitty and temporary as to imply that the law is not in effect year-round!

As you can see, there is no enforcement with the recently extinguished cigarette butts in a dry field while wildfires are raging all over northern California.

What could possibly go wrong?