Today, my dad would have been 86. His birthday sometimes falls on Thanksgiving. He died at 50 due to tobacco-related illness, which decreased his quality of life for years before death, and certainly his health. Statistically, I keep telling everyone he could have still been alive and well at this age, but for Camel’s cigarettes that he was handed as a kid for free outside of a package while growing up in Oahu. The addiction was encouraged in society, and certainly when he himself joined the military. After his quintuple bypass at age 48, it only took him one month to beg my mom to buy him cigarettes that he was too weak to go to the store to purchase for himself. She later told me that she regretfully acquiesced because he was incessant. In my tobacco activism, I really grit my teeth when tobacco retailers (poison-pushing peddlers) complain that if we limit the amount of addictive product that they sell to their community, we are “hurting their retirement.” WHAT ABOUT MY DAD’S RETIREMENT? Do you think dying at 50 is what he planned for, and his mother before him, who died at the same age from her own smoking? I’m not talking about people who died in the 19th century here. This is in the latter half of the 20th century! To say nothing of my cousin Ivan Benenati, who died THIS millennium from osteosarcoma from his smoking when he was only 35!!! EIGHT MILLION people die from tobacco-related illness every year. It is THE MOST PREVENTABLE cause of death, and yet it’s still okay to have product placement in nearly every movie, no matter what the mise-en-scene — EVEN SCIENCE FICTION! How does this continue to be normalized!?!