According to public health surveys conducted by the Center for Disease Control, 52 percent of men and 34 percent of women smoked cigarettes in 1960. Just decades ago, smoking was common in restaurants, movie theaters and even in the workplace. As people began to understand the detrimental effects of smoking, these numbers started to drop.
Justin Ackerman | Argonaut
Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, states began banning tobacco use in numerous public places, only allowing for the consumption of tobacco under certain specific circumstances. Thankfully for University of Idaho’s smokers, the right to smoke on campus is still intact. Yet, there has recently been a push on campus to ban tobacco use entirely from the faculty senate by 2015. The ban will inconvenience smokers, and it should.
According to the CDC, secondhand smoke exposure increases one’s risk for heart disease by 25-30 percent, and this increased risk accounted for nearly 34,000 deaths annually from 2005-2009.
There are many reasons to support a tobacco ban, the health effects of secondhand smoke are just one of them.
It seems like a no brainer. Idaho State University implemented a smoking ban in 2012, and Boise State University’s has been in place since 2009. As it stands now, five out of the eight institutions of higher education in Idaho have evolved past the 1960s — , UI is not one of them.
Smokers are technically allowed to smoke outside of 25 feet of all buildings, but that rule is more often than not ignored. Clouds of secondhand smoke can often be found right outside any of the more frequently used buildings, such as the TLC and the library.
Even if the 25 feet rule was more strictly enforced, how would the university make sure it’s enough?
Limiting smokers to 25 feet away from the entrance of campus buildings does not solve the problem of smoking on any number of sidewalks to and from campus.
People are going to smoke wherever they please, campus is just too large to ensure any meaningful enforcement of smoking policy.
Thankfully, modern technology has given us one possible solution. Banning only the smoking of tobacco on campus would still permit the use of smokeless tobacco such as chewing tobacco or other products such as vapor pens and electronic cigarettes. Even if the 25-feet rule was enforced, smoking poses a threat for other students that smokeless methods do not.
The right to use tobacco freely in public is a dying one, as it should be. My grandmother smoked most of her life, in the workplace, restaurants and everywhere else. When that ability was taken away from generations of smokers who smoked freely almost everywhere, they didn’t have the luxury of many smokeless options afforded to smokers today.
If you want to use tobacco on campus be my guest, but I shouldn’t have to join you. Using of any of the numerous smokeless methods available today keeps tobacco around and protects everybody else.
Justin Ackerman can be reached at [email protected]