Today is a grim 33rd anniversary of my father dying at age fifty from a painful, elongated death from his tobacco/nicotine addiction. I’m planning to write extensively about the gory details at some juncture. Like so many in countless families, my dad was gone too soon. Handed loose cigarettes while growing up in Hawaii at age 12, little did he know that he would grow up to die at the same young age that his mother would.
My dad and me:
At 55 I can safely say that my siblings and I have ensured that the “family tradition” of being addicted to nicotine and dying at 50 does not continue with us, since we remember how he suffered firsthand. Thankfully none of our kids smoke, but that doesn’t mean they were not targeted. They are definitely surrounded by their peers who have now normalized vaping in front of others. I am proud to be working harder than ever with my activism, one which was triggered when Dad died. I could think of no more noble cause at the time I entered law school than to save as many lives as I could, but Big Tobacco is still trying to addict new generations with vapes, even having the audacity to suggest they are smoking cessation devices! If that’s the case, why do some e-cigarettes have the equivalent of 400 cigarettes?
The biggest drug dealers in the world are making profits off of 22% of the WORLD population. Does this CARTEL deserve that? How many needless, preventable early deaths will they be responsible for throughout history? There is no depth to which this one industry will go, and yet it continues to prosper off the blood money of our families and now our youth. Big Tobacco is the enemy. Ask me how you can help.
Can you even tell which of these are vape pens? Neither can parents or teachers when they are consumed IN CLASS.
I’m actually pleased with how it turned out even though I always get emotional talking about my dad when I start these things.
My friend and colleague Amaya’s slideshow from LGBTQ Minus Tobacco was extremely helpful for this presentation. The previous speaker had talked about second and third-hand smoke, so it was a great segue to go into all kinds of passive smoke, including fourth-hand.
This organization I spoke at is about clean air both indoors and outdoors, so it was a really good fit and the timing was right with a room full of activists, which coincidentally had my activist friend Adjoa in attedance. With her I did store surveys in January.
The genesis for the invitation was when I realized my kayak club buddy was a long-time Vallejo activist. Ken Szutu is highly honored for his environmental work and very graciously extended the invitation.
Shando and I volunteered all day at the Bearrison Street Fair in San Francisco for LGBTQ Minus Tobacco. It was wonderful to see so many of our friends and let them know about my activism of this kind throughout the Bay Area, particularly in Vallejo. Plenty of Vallejoans were present as well!
This morning a Vallejo college student and now adult former youth activist, Genesis Miguel, appeared on OZCAT radio’s Vallejo Project program here in Vallejo.
The subject matter is the activism that we’re doing to get a Tobacco Retail License (TRL) instituted here in Vallejo, which the City Council unanimously directed city staff to draft robustly for voting on in the coming weeks.
Our coalition successfully got Smoke-Free Multi-Unit Housing passed unanimously last year, but this year we want to further that health equity and protect youth even more from becoming the next generation addicted to nicotine after being targeted by Big Tobacco. Vaping is an epidemic among youth, particularly the ones who are of color and queer, as they smoke at higher rates and have been specifically targeted by Big Tobacco in their advertising. Deceptive highlighter-styled devices and other decoy products are meant to avoid detection as well.
Genesis is so right when she says, “Educate yourself on WHO is selling this.”
It’s not some kind of native American tradition to push tobacco in the forms it is now to maximize nicotine addiction. It’s historically callous, huge corporate capitalists who target new populations around the world, all the while knowing the product’s addictive potential. Here in the USA when men weren’t enough, they made it acceptable in society for women to smoke. Believe it or not, it was controversial when the first women smoked on screen (gasp). When the European descendants weren’t enough to grow profit, they went specifically for people of color, showing how “hip” they were. When hetero-normative people weren’t enough, they made sure to play upon the queer populations as a purported ally.
Big Tobacco has to keep changing their names as their true nature is revealed. Altria literally doesn’t mean anything. This is deliberate. The families who made their fortunes on tobacco (Reynolds & Tisch are just two examples) also took their names off of products once there became a stigma and people suffered too much loss, even though they put their names on HOSPITALS and medical school buildings!
The business model is always to maximize profit despite the millions of people the product quite predictably kills very prematurely and usually in the most undignified ways, all the while attempting to avoid pesky rules disallowing them from selling to impressionable, rebellious youth. Indeed, that is the only way they can keep surviving as an industry, knowing the lack of mortal thoughts that this age group has when they embark on this incorrectly assumed “safer” vaping option. The medicinal allowance for cannabis in some jurisdictions is probably making it seem like the same vape devices that can be used for tobacco are also harmless. Learning the corporate origins of these devices and the callousness with which these practically anonymous drug lords (the biggest in the world) are exploiting our youth should be the reason for the passion, provided an individual’s health and that of their family is not enough. Case in point, attempts to make tobacco companies look like altruists with big tax write-offs in recent history, like the Whitney “museum” of art. Make sure to play the one-minute audio file on the Whitney link.
I was reminded recently of how disgusting it is that this “museum” exists when I heard it mentioned casually with the other fantastic museums in New York as must-sees on CNN. Lots of museums have controversies for pillaging various cultures around the world, but this one existing at all is a complete insult. I was even invited to events at “the Whitney” when I was in law school in NYC. I let people know why I would never attend those events, nor ever step foot in that building paid for with blood money. I didn’t care what people thought of me if it helped even one more person realize the truth of its origins.
I’m very proud that I was instrumental in getting this free full-page ad for LGBTQMinusTobacco.org in the Lazybear Brochure this year! Thank you to the Lazybear Fund for showing there are those of us who care about this important aspect of gay men’s health in addition to all of the good fundraising it has done for AIDS/HIV research, their commitment to sober spaces at these events and also a mention of how important it is to respect everyone’s right to clean air from vapes and cigarettes when at events like this. Looking at Sonoma County’s unincorporated area smoking ordinances, there is definitely not enough adherence to the rights delineated for non-smokers in bar patios or resorts. There should be more responsibility taken by the business owners to ensure fresh air for all patrons.
Below is the ad I am holding above, which I’m so proud to have been involved with getting published in the Lazy Bear Week brochure. It’s a real quote from a real San Francisco bartender. Obviously, we opted to pick the most bear-ish ad for our audience out of many that LGBTQMinusTobacco.org has. For decades all aspects of the queer community have been specifically targeted by the insidious marketing tactics of Big Tobacco, so exposing this by fighting back with the diversity of the community that falls under the alphabet is helpful. Indeed, I was lucky and glad we had this on hand for the brochure when we had a tight deadline to reach to make the press. The gracious offer to include this gratis by the Lazy Bear Fund (a non-profit that has raised tens of millions of dollars over the decades for gay men’s health issues like HIV/AIDS) was in response to my email letter inquiry into the smoking culture that has unfortunately been integral even in crowded spaces at the event I’ve attended now for 17 years. To my pleasant surprise, they responded beautifully with this magnanimous offer. The brochure goes out to thousands of men who attend Lazy Bear Week, many of whom live or at least visit the San Francisco Bay Area regularly.
Happy to help where I can with this cause! Brian Davis of LGBTQ Minus Tobacco and I tabled in Concord where they had a nice pride event. It’s nice that I was recognized by a few folks despite this being over the water from where I live and still pretty far from where I lived when I was in the East Bay all those years. I did work nearby in Walnut Creek/Pleasant Hill area for six years, but this is an important cause and there is momentum with the Tobacco Retail License here that the City of Concord has in the works. I hope I was able to bring some awareness to the locals.
My friend Tom Bilbo gave me a chance to talk about the activism I’m doing with LGBTQ Minus Tobacco and a coalition of other organizations at today’s picnic. The microphone was faulty, but it was a great opportunity to also talk about the Tobacco Retail License we’re working on with the City Council in Vallejo and our accomplishment last year with the Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing ordinance that passed unanimously with City Council.
UPDATE: There was an article that mentioned us in the Vallejo Times Herald on Monday, June 13. Check it out here.
This was my first time at the Solano County Fairgrounds and I was impressed with the site. LGBTQMinusTobacco had a booth there that day. We saw lots of incredible art and enjoyed the part of the fairgrounds that we got to see.
In my activism with LGBTQ Minus Tobacco, we were invited to table at the Jesse Bethel High School mental health fair as part of Mental Health Awareness Month in May.
This was a pleasant experience. The kids were receptive to us being there and asked a lot of questions, knowing in large part how harmful smoking and vaping are to our communities. As many know, the insidious tobacco industry in particular targets communities like LGBTQ and BIPOC, causing them to smoke at higher rates.
Getting ready to work the quad (as in high school quad).
