Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

It's impossible to describe the sadness and rage at the world in general with which I write this. I want my Dad back. This cannot be.

The hospital stay killed my father. But he checked himself into the hospital because he didn't have the breath to do things he could do just months ago, even get to the bathroom sometimes, using a container instead.

Emphysema from cigarette smoke is the reason my dad is dead now.

I watched Dad die. I was with him most of the month in the hospital and the entire night of his death. I'm nowhere near over it. I'm in denial in some part of my mind, I want things to be different, and while in almost every case things that should be different can be different, death cannot be changed.

Of course, it's easier to be sad and angry than suck it up and be a credit to him.

So I will help change the unfairness in this world which he never accepted.

Specifically related to his death, I will work to vastly improve the way medical treatment is done (all information shared with patients and their advocates as a matter of course, competent care where the doctors actually know the full situation, insanely attentive care in the hospital or treat at home, and of course access for all). I will try to make sure extra taxes on cigarettes actually go to mitigating, if not curing, smoking related illnesses.

But like my father, I am a radical: to the root. We never liked the showy focus on researching a cure for cancer, for instance, while ignoring completely the known and potential causes of cancer. Stopping the use of cancerous products and environmental pollution might step on some people's toes, might interfere with business as usual. Likewise, the cause of the emphysema that cut short my Dad's life – he had rarely been sick or to doctors or the hospital before in his life, and was in fantastic shape except for his lungs – was cigarettes.

Making substances illegal hurts ordinary people and has proven worse than useless at reducing harm from alcohol and drugs. It's a matter of freedom to do whatever you want to yourself. Regulating poison and discouraging its use does make sense, however, and that particularly applies to all the other poisons in cigarettes with the tobacco, although inhaling soot must be harmful on its own. More importantly, there are bank and investment accounts fattened by profits from pushing an addictive substance that kills: cigarettes. That is blood money and no one has a right to keep it. (Much the same applies to people, including myself, who receive dividends from oil corporations while global warming kills and our energy infrastructure rusts.) We in the United States have a particular responsibility to stop the pushing of cigarettes onto the people of other countries. Neither the substance nor its trade or exchange has to be prohibited, but no-one should expect to make money from anything that does more harm than good. I will support bans on smoking in indoor public places; Dad said multiple times at the last stay in the hospital how he had worked most of his life in smoke-filled environments at restaurants, bars, and clubs. And I will ask everyone I remotely care about, which is the vast majority of humanity, to never smoke, and to quit smoking if they do smoke.

So you. With the cigarette. Stop smoking.