Smoking in "Avatar": Necessary to "Reflect Reality"?

- Those who only warn about and condemn the natural parts of tobacco and its smoke fail to condemn the same things from candles, incense (even in churches), campfires, stoves, wood burning kits, and anything else. Arbitrariness gives away a lot. It's as if they hope to hide the Huge Importance and harms of tobacco pesticides, dioxin-producing chlorine pesticides and chlor-bleached paper, carcinogenic rads from certain fertilizers, toxic and carcinogenic AND untested additives galore, and so forth. They want to scapegoat the unpatented natural tobacco plant for all the reported illnesses and deaths. The Blame The Victim ruse is not new. With corporatized mainstream media, and with PR watchers who don't watch anything in this area, it now works better than ever.

- That RJR bought out American Spirit is a tragedy. Am. Spirit cannot fight against the slurs and lies about effects of tobacco smoke...meaning plain tobacco...because their new "boss" is one of the purveyors of the bad stuff...the fake and highly-contaminated tobacco. RJR should be an evil COMPETITOR to Am. Spirit, not it's owner. It's like Al Capone owning the cops.
As of now, Am,. Spirit can't even truthfully and importantly label it's Organic Tobacco as Organic. Did they put up a fight...perhaps to the Sup Court? No.

- How does THAT work as precedent for food producers labeling products, correctly, as organic? Will that "suggest" a safer food? No...it SAYS it's a safer food. Big Food Processing won't like that truthfulness.

-- Searches for benefits of tobacco indeed do turn up "digestive relief" often...thus explaining one reason why tobacco has been used since time began (or a bit later) after meals and otherwise. As for tobacco being an appetite suppressant, natural plants in all parts of the world have been used for that purpose for eons...khat, coca, betel nuts, etc. Guess what...they're all now "ILLEGAL". They just compete too well with the patented pharm products to do the same things.
Cannabis, which helps produce appetite, is also "illegal" generally. It's just that Nature Is Not Allowed To Interfere With Big Biz. No money in it.

-- It is absolutely absurd to say that plain tobacco, as has been used for about ten thousand years, is no different in "safety" from products that contain pesticides, dioxin-creating chlorine, burn accelerants, addiction enhancers, rads from those fertilizers, kid-attracting sweets and flavors etc., and toxins and co-carcinogens galore in the selection from lists of over 1000 UNTESTED non-tobacco cig additives. Dioxin-free ANYTHING is automatically the safer. Has Agent Orange, and Rachel Carson, been erased from the books?

It's not that "there's no safe dose of tobacco smoke", it is that certifiably there is NO Safe Dose of Dioxin...in cigarette smoke or wherever. To ignore chlorine in this "smoking'" brouhaha is to be either lying or badly misinformed.
I mean....much of the "anti smoking" establishment IS the Chlorine Industry...covering up their complicity...scapegoating both Mother Nature and the unwitting victims who think and are still viciously told it's just tobacco. The Big Lie of our era....a lie that frighteningly has corrupted so much of our vital medical science system. Just TRY to get a body burden test for pesticides and dioxin etc.
Insurance won't cover it because, likely, the for-profit insurer invests Billions in most or all of the chlorine cartel. Nice system.

How many "smoking related death" victims have been autopsied for dioxins and pesticides and that PO-210 fertilizer radiation? Any?

>>Everything you see in a movie is there on purpose

True, I was giving Cameron the benefit of the doubt. But Weaver's smoking seems increasingly aberrant the more you examine it.

Cameron claims the smoking was to present Weaver initially as unsympathetic, and to show Weaver's character didn't care about her human body. Huh? As Sigourney herself will tell you, keeping a 60-year-old body that buff is not easy. Her character obviously takes VERY good care of her body. To follow Cameron's supposed rationale, Grace Augustine should have been fat and slovenly (a more interesting choice; she could have awoken shouting, "WHERE'S MY TWINKIE?").

And crying "realism" really doesn't make it.

1. In 150 years, apparently no one smokes--EXCEPT Sigourney Weaver. Not even the military. She's the only one in the movie who smokes.

2. It's certainly unrealistic to expect nicotine addiciton to take _exactly_ the same form as it does today. 150 years ago, it was snuff, or smokeless, or cigars. NOT cigarettes, which, when used, were laboriously hand-rolled. 150 years from now, it'll be orbs, or snus, or e-cigs, or inhalers, or patches, or --you get the point. Something _else_.

3. This would be a seriously atypical scientist. 44% of cigarettes are sold to the mentally ill; most smokers are poor and uneducated.

4. Smoking in the tightly-controlled-atmosphere of a lab is unrealistic in so many ways. The tars and nicotine in tobacco smoke get _everywhere_, including sensitive electornic equipment. Tobacco mosaic virus is common on cigarette tobacco and can easily be transmitted from a smoker's hands to biological samples, contaminating them. Let alone space-flight weight restrictions, SHS regulations and coworkers' objections.

So why IS there smoking in Avatar?

You're right--considering Cameron's Titanic also, it's hard to excuse this event as "unconscious."

It's propaganda, pure and simple.

Avatar is an ad for smoking: strong, tough, healthy, independent, smart, moral, buff, heroic women smoke.

And, judging from the number of kids in the theatre, the stacks of booster seats(!) outside Avatar screenings in the multiplexes, all the reported repeat viewings, and all the prime-time TV exposure in the future--millions upon millions of kids around the world will be getting the message for decades to come.