Smoking seems to be more popular than ever on campus. Sign after sign reminds students to refrain from lighting up within a certain distance of classrooms, windows and doors. Yet it’s hard to walk around campus without feeling a hint of secondhand smoke invade your lungs.
Most students who make it to higher education have heard smoking is bad, yet it doesn’t stop countless members of our student body from getting their daily little nicotine fix.
Smoking pervades our campus culture. It sickens, irritates and disgusts those who choose to abstain from smoking or just want to breathe clean air. Those who choose to poison their bodies with carcinogens have every right to continue doing so; they can do whatever they want with their own bodies. Problems begin to arise though, when one person does harm to his or her body and it begins to affect the health of others.
This is quite a conundrum because smoke travels so easily and becomes ubiquitous in a large area where someone is smoking. That combined with the fact that many people feel as though they are suffocating when they inhale smoke, but don’t want to infringe on other people’s right to kill themselves slowly makes it hard to come up with a compromise.
But certainly the 25-foot limit (or 20 foot, depending on what sign your looking at) is enough of a compromise for all people sharing this campus, right? Well, no. Especially since it is never recognized. People can be seen smoking while walking near buildings and in areas that should strictly prohibit this bad habit.
It’s so important that even the state of California and the entire CSU system have created limitations on smoking on campuses.
And yet there is little-to-no enforcement of these regulations of where and when it is appropriate to smoke. Many smokers are completely oblivious to those around them, absorbed in their small clouds of toxic air. Some kinds of penalties would better enforce the limits on where smoking is permitted, and allow the more health conscientious people who use our campus to roam freely without the periodic intrusion upon clean air.
Another alternative to this problem would be to designate certain areas of campus solely to smokers. Places like Disneyland and several baseball stadiums have set aside spaces where smokers can enjoy their habit freely, without the glaring looks of people around them. These places could be interspersed around campus, with signs designating their locations.
Whatever the solution, something needs to be done. While smokers blissfully puff away, those of us who appreciate unpolluted air are choking in the background.
