I am all for this and love the idea, but that’s probably
because I’m not a smoker. Recently, the
college I attend, Oakland University (OU), passed a campus wide smoking ban
starting in Fall 2013. There were talks
about doing this for years, and finally they put it through. Is that too
much? Is it taking away the rights of
those that do smoke?
It was passed because Oakland is all about promoting a
positive and healthy environment for its students. I was reading up on the
Oakland Posts’ Facebook page (our school newspaper) and was disgusted by the
horrible comments people were leaving about the ban. Many smokers were saying that “if they are
going to ban smoking to promote a healthier environment, then they should ban
all the fatty foods too, because banning smoking was taking away our
rights. Students pay a lot of money to
go to college and now they don’t have the right to have a cigarette if needed?” First of all, eating unhealthy foods is your
choice. Oakland offers many alternatives so you don’t have to eat unhealthy. If YOU eat unhealthy fried foods, it DOES NOT
affect MY health. However, smoking DOES
affect MY health. That is where we
separate the two. Second hand smoke is
the third leading cause of preventable death in the United States, killing
roughly 53,000 nonsmokers per year. With that said, smoking is a major concern
not just to your health, but to everyone around you too that choose not to
smoke.
So why couldn’t college’s like Oakland University limit to
where smokers could smoke rather than banning it from the whole campus? Well, they tried. They made it a rule that smokers MUST smoke
AT LEAST 50 feet from designated buildings.
However, it was NEVER followed. I
have attended OU for a few years and have yet to see one smoker follow that
rule. Everyone stands outside the doors,
so other students have to walk through the smoke to get inside. And when it’s windy….forget about it, the
smoke always seems to blow in the direction we are walking, which makes it a
problem when we are walking behind a smoker or a group of smokers. However, this was also partly on OU’s fault.
They never enforced the rule, so smokers were able to get away with it.
For all the smokers that still want to smoke on campus and
call us non smokers whiners: stop telling me to hold my breath and deal with it
while I walk through your cloud of smoke. How about you just not light it up?
Your lack of smoking 50 feet from the building, leaving cigarette butts
everywhere and just generally not following the rules that the campus provided…..you
brought this upon yourselves and to solve it, Oakland chose to put a ban on
smoking. Some students have stated that
they are allergic to smoke as well, so I’m sure they are happy with this
decision OU has made.
On another side note to smoking….smoking outside to the
front doors almost everywhere I go is starting to get on my nerves. Many
places, not just OU, have a certain distance they want you to be from their
building to smoke. So it’s not just OU where this rule was not followed. The common saying I hear (for smoking near
the doors) is that it’s too cold out etc.
Boo freaking hoo! Deal with
it! If you don’t like the cold, then don’t
smoke, it’s really as simple as that. I guess that’s a consequence of smoking,
you have to deal with the weather changes, gee whiz.
Now, my only concern is this: I wonder how Oakland
University is going to enforce it, since they never enforced the 50 feet rule.
I’m hoping they have more police around campus, or that students will report if
they see another student smoking. I can only imagine that many students will
still bring their packs to school and smoke where they want to. So let’s do a better job this time OU and
enforce this!
And just for the record, I have nothing against smokers
themselves; I just don’t agree with your choice to smoke. It’s not my life though, so smoke if you want
to (off campus).
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