A lot of the changes most students experience when they come to college were especially shocking for me, as I went to a stiflingly conservative Salem high school where nearly everyone was Mormon, Republican, both, or a member of a Christian youth group that encouraged young lovers to save their first kiss for the altar. I was always the odd man out (although for a while it looked like some of those youth group kids were going to beat me to the first kiss), so coming to the University was a sort of sensory overload. Atheists everywhere! Swearing professors! Premarital sex! Willickers!
But by far the most unexpected element was the number of (tobacco) smokers here at Oregon. When I was in high school, I had expected to encounter more smokers in college, but even two people lighting up would be a lot more than I had seen in four years of secondary education.
What I found exceeded my wildest expectations. All around me people were sucking on butts (cigarette butts – I don’t know about that other one, nor do I want to), from the guys on fixed gear bikes by the LLC right on up to my own professors and GTFs. I’d even see my friends from the dorms – cool, ordinary people whose company I enjoyed – huddle around the smoking station, bundled against the cold, lighting up Camels and enveloping themselves in their own cloud. Twelve years of highly righteous and moralistically influenced public education had taught me smoking was an activity exclusively reserved for Bad People, and studies had proven smokers were 30 percent more likely to tie women to train tracks while laughing maniacally. Needless to say, I checked the local railroad crossing often, just in case.
I’ve adjusted pretty quickly to campus smoking culture over the past year and a half; it looks to me like smokers are fairly ordinary people who happen to like smoking. There are the familiar sights: people squeezing the filters of their Camel Crushes to activate the menthol, feet smothering the dying embers of a discarded smoke, crowds of students outside lecture halls trying to finish their cigarettes before class, creating a sort of tar-scented mist for their classmates to walk through.
First and foremost, let me say I think smoking is a filthy and disgusting habit. All nostalgia aside, after about five seconds of inhaling cigarette smoke I’m well and truly sick of it, and after more than a minute I start to get a sore throat and a headache. I’ve seen the yellowed teeth and the yellowed fingernails, I’ve heard the raspy, phlegmy coughs, and I’ve also watched my fair share of commercials where dying people with tracheotomies explain the blatantly obvious health risks of inhaling a scientifically proven carcinogen on a daily basis.
I imagine the Clean Air Project, a student group that has been fighting for two years to make campus a “smoke-free zone,” shares my views. If its demands are met, it would be a punishable offense to smoke a cigarette on any piece of University property. It cites health concerns for the entire student body, arguing that it’s reasonable to ask smokers to smoke someplace else in the face of cancer risks.
I agree that secondhand smoke is dangerous. However, the anti-smoking forces have already won some decisive victories by banning smoking in or around University buildings. I agree with those actions because I feel secondhand smoke is considerably more dangerous when it’s circulating and recalculating in an enclosed air supply. But now that we’ve exiled smokers to the rainy and desolate spaces 10 feet away from our buildings, I think we’ve done about as much as we can to safeguard our health – forcing students and staff to leave campus to smoke a cigarette is just adding insult to injury.
The smokers will still be there once we leave campus, and if they aren’t there, then I guarantee you there will be exhaust from cars and buses to give us cancer. And if we get rid of the cars, we can always turn to the pesticides and chemicals in the foods we eat for our daily allotment of carcinogens. And if we ban food, what’s next? The sun?
Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not advocating cancer. I think we can all agree that cutting down on legitimate cancer risks is a great idea. I just can’t imagine the risk factor from outdoor secondhand smoke is great enough that we ought to infringe on the civil liberties and individual freedoms of an estimated 20 percent of students and staff, especially when there’s always going to be another, more formidable carcinogen to take their place.
What strikes me about this proposal is how similar it is to the “smokers set fire to bunnies” stance taken by the schools in my hometown. Don’t dehumanize smokers just because they’ve made a decision the American medical establishment has derided as totally bonkers. The choices they’ve made are theirs alone, and while their actions have some detrimental aspects toward bystanders, I doubt anyone ever started smoking just so he or she could get back at all of us nasty, nasty bystanders.
But members of the Clean Air Project expect little resistance, so maybe the ban will go ahead as planned. Let’s just hope Barack Obama never tries to visit us again – our president, an occasional smoker, would maybe just have to take a page from Frog’s book and speak to us from a street corner off campus.
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School stifling smokers
Daily Emerald
February 17, 2009
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