For the third time, I attended the Jesse Bethel High School’s annual Mental Health Fair with colleagues from LGBTQ Minus Tobacco during lunch. We were well received by the students and staff. We were there with many excellent local programs set on making this city better. The kids seemed eager to learn about the harms of tobacco-related illnesses and cessation services.

I was very frustrated by these bumpers with the amazing Quinta Brunson from a recent Saturday Night Live episode. Then I received an email touting “Black excellence” with this third picture, which reminded me of an opinion letter I wrote back in 1996. I was still a law student and made sure to write articles about the tobacco industry for my law school newspaper regularly, but The National Jurist is a nationwide periodical that still exists today.

I include the picture I complained about on the cover. They published my complaint in a subsequent issue. Nothing has changed in thirty years! While I would have worded it differently, the targeting of the Black community, women, queers and other marginalized community by commercial tobacco is unending.

For anyone who thinks that my efforts to fight Big Tobacco stem from a more recent passion, this should be evidence that I have been consistent about it for decades.

At the JFK Library here in Vallejo, when meeting fellow activists on commercial tobacco control issues, I saw a couple of signs I couldn’t resist taking selfies with. I’ve been to meetings at this room before, but never quite captured the appropriate signage. They must have known I was moving here when they named this years ago.

In April 2024 I was invited to attend the End Game Summit hosted by Action on Smoking in Health in Washington DC. It was a wonderful experience and I really got to see a lot of DC that I hadn’t seen before. That was my first real “trip” after the fire.

I also met Dr. Jeremiah Mack when I was wandering around the national mall. He had recognized my beard and me from the summit. He also lives in the Bay Area. We hung out a bit at the museums and then he told me about this symposium, which I was not aware of in time in 2024. I’m so glad I went and that it is on my home turf. I took the day off my remote job and went into San Francisco like a real commuter, which I hadn’t done in many years, taking the ferry both ways. I was a ferry rider for four years in New York City years ago.

Not judging well how long public transportation would take me when I got off the ferry, I did cheat a little and take Uber in both directions, but I did not want to be too late to the symposium, nor did I want it to miss the next of the infrequent ferries back to Vallejo.

Here are pictures from my commute and the lobby of UCSF:

Here are pictures from the symposium itself, with just a handful of the amazing fellow activists in this area, from all over the country. Some of them are involved with tobacco control globally, too.

In a gorgeous building in San Leandro I was honored to join in person today a very rewarding event. After 2.5 hours of sleep because of a work event last night, I managed to drive over there. The annual award meeting of this coalition took place. I wanted to be there in person knowing I was to be one of the honorees. I’m proud to work in Alameda County, even though I haven’t been a resident for five years. It’s so important that we work on coalition building throughout the Bay Area, California, the rest of the USA, and all other countries to fight Big Tobacco, which still gets away with selling POISON.

Here is the video of my acceptance that Shea captured. Unfortunately, the dais is off-camera in this video, but you can hear me talk about some of the many ties my family has had to Alameda County since I was a young child.

As Co-Chair of Tobacco Free Solano I spoke for a while at this event by Solano County Department of Health on the success of the two ordinance to control tobacco in Vallejo over the past few years. I’m so honored to be doing this work locally to be making a difference in our county’s largest city (where I live) and making a better life with less lethal addiction to the youth of Vallejo, who deserve a smoke-free world.

The audio quality is not the greatest, but hopefully people will be able to interpret what I’m saying. It might behoove one to turn on captions.

As we were celebrating the win of the Vallejo Tobacco Retail license passing here in Vallejo with lots of strength, I was honored with a certificate for the many hours our coalition worked together to get this passed, not to mention the Smokefree Multi-Unit Housing that we passed several years ago.

Shea joined me in a celebration of local success in saving lives from tobacco in Oakland. Advocates with our coalition led by LGBTQ Minus Tobacco were instrumental in a new ordinance for smoke-free bar patios there. Hopefully, San Francisco will soon follow so that more lives can be saved from Big Tobacco. Now patrons and staff at bars can safely traverse the open spaces without being subjected to toxic smoke as is the case in restaurants already.

I love the mosaic art in this community center on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland where we gathered.

Most people know that I’m a second-generation Californian and most of my rearing when we were not in NYC, Spain, and Italy was in the East Bay, so the same county as Oakland. Oakland has long been a leading large city in the effort to reduce death by tobacco, even though this is the area we were living in when my father died from his tobacco addiction. He only lived to be 50 years old, as did his mom who also died of tobacco-related illness.

I spoke at Vallejo City Council twice last night. One of the times was on the tobacco retailer fee amounts for the recently adopted Tobacco Retail License that my coalition and I worked so hard to get adopted here with youth activists who have the most to lose if we do not do something about the rampant youth tobacco sales in Vallejo which heretofore had no enforcement mechanisms for laws that been on the books for decades to not sell tobacco to minors, for example.

As Councilmember Bregenzer said, it’s sad that we’re already watering down the ordinance. Youth advocates came to City Council begging for help in improving their lives, but instead, the concentration and the bulk of the time spent on this was to benefit tobacco retailers who keep pushing for unlimited restrictions on selling their businesses with the privilege of continuing to sell poison. No attention was paid that next door in Benicia, for example, no such right exists AT ALL, as is often the case with these tobacco retail licenses.

Here is the video with my first comment on tobacco retail license fees:

What I said (almost verbatim) was:

With all the hullabaloo about the number of years to give tobacco sellers transferability to maximize profit on resale, which appears to mean zero consideration in changing business models to sell healthy products that nourish our community rather than poisoning it, I want to point out that the state of California and other progressive jurisdictions are already working on different ways of reducing the suffering caused by tobacco addiction and curtailing the privilege of selling addictive products that kill when used as directed.  

Pollution caused by disposable tobacco products, including cigarette filters and disposable vapes, is becoming intolerable to many cities and counties. 

• Santa Cruz just passed the First-in-the-World Cigarette Filter Ban to mitigate pollution.  
• Many cities in Massachusetts are forbidding anyone born after [I said probably “before” by mistake] 2004 to purchase tobacco products for their entire lives.
• Some cities in California like Burlingame are already not issuing any more tobacco retail licenses PERIOD.
• Manhattan Beach and Beverly Hills in southern California completely disallow commercial tobacco sales within their city limits.  

Accordingly, a lot of these transferability arguments are moot whether the transfer is in two years or twenty given current trends, despite Big Tobacco coming up with new poisonous products meant to skirt these laws as we enact them.  

All the procrastination of reaching the reduced number of tobacco retailers in Vallejo may make a few people profiting off of the pain of our families feel somewhat vindicated, but I don’t know how it helps anyone sleep better at night. 

What should always be paramount is the health of our population, especially our children.  Every day Big Tobacco finds opportunities to normalize the media portrayal of ingesting carcinogens that have no medicinal or nutritional benefit.  Anything they can get away with to prolong addiction and find new customers is delaying the inevitable if empirical evidence and science even matter anymore. 

Here is the video with my second comment on tobacco license transferability:

What I said (almost verbatim) was:

While I’m very pleased Vallejo now has a Tobacco Retail License, making it the second city in Solano County to have one, I’m still disappointed that the mandate of at least one yearly check per retailer was not included as per the language of the Public Health Law Center model, particularly when almost all other elements of the model were wholly adopted in Vallejo. 

Presuming the TRL will indeed be properly enforced, I once again ask that reporting to the city council be brought at regular intervals.  Quarterly reports on how many retailers were checked and how many follow-ups were done on those retailers who did not comply should be an obvious goal here.  I would think after all of the time and effort the city council put into the enactment of the ordinance, the progress should be presented for Vallejoans to see and appreciate.  As a reminder, the intent of this was to always be revenue neutral, so not just the compliance checks, but the follow-ups should be budgeted when taking into account the fee for tobacco retailers.  

If there is any concern as to why the fees are so high to begin with, one only needs to remember that Vallejo was proven to be the jurisdiction with the worst tobacco youth sale rates in the entire Bay Area.  That’s literally why we came to the city council with this daunting problem.  Even Benicia next door with the TRL they passed in 2019 had the reality of knowing that youth in their city and other nearby cities could easily just come to Vallejo to reliably get tobacco products.  Vallejo needs to do everything it can to make sure that this is never the reality again, and like magic some of the blight will diminish.  Thank you.

Here is a video of the entire drama on December 30th’s meeting: