The Freedom to Smoke

By Joseph Forte

You wouldn't ban junk food on campus. You wouldn't ban televisions on campus. Santa Clara doesn't even ban drinking on campus. So why should we ban smoking?

The UC schools have already wrongfully pledged to implement a campus-wide smoking ban by 2014. At Santa Clara, it would represent a blatant disregard for students' personal freedoms. Worse, it would set a dangerous, arrogant precedent of university leadership meddling in the lives of the very students who pay the ever-increasing tuition that keeps the school afloat.

Proponents of smoking bans often point to the health dangers of second-hand smoke as the primary reason for a ban.

This argument is easily rendered invalid by existing scientific research. Second-hand smoke's effects have indeed been well documented with regards to prolonged indoor exposure, such as a child receives growing up in a home where the parents smoke inside. However, scientific evidence supporting a ban withers when it ventures into the great outdoors.

For example, in 2007, Neil Klepeis conducted a study of outdoor smokers at Stanford that found that smoke levels were comparable to indoor levels generally only within 1.5 feet. Smoke levels plummeted with distance and at 6.5 feet levels were "close to background," i.e., normal.

Do we really need a rule to keep non-smokers who fear for their health from standing right next to smokers? We already have sensible smoking rules that prevent smoking within 25 feet of buildings. The only reasonable way a non-smoker is going to be exposed to significant smoke today is for a brief moment as he or she passes a smoker on the way to class. The notion that this requires a campus-wide smoking ban is baffling.

Some people who support a ban simply dislike the smell of tobacco smoke. Does the minor, fleeting inconvenience of smelling smoke necessitates the implementation of a greater inconvenience for the smoker (that is, walking all the way off campus to smoke). To suggest so seems to assume an innate superiority of the non-smoker's wants over the smoker's.

I recommend that these people do as they do whenever they share the sidewalk with someone with body odor — abide by the rules of decency and say nothing for the several seconds it takes to pass.

The most troubling aspect of a hypothetical ban on smoking is the startlingly pessimistic world view it requires. Don't we trust smokers not to light up right next to non-smokers? Don't we trust non-smokers to politely ask a smoker to move if he or she does? A smoking ban sends the message that we don't. Instead of assuming the worst about our students, we should treat them with the respect that self-governing, tuition-paying adults blessed with the power of common courtesy deserve.

A final thought for consideration — the UC smoking ban explicitly bans chewing tobacco in addition to cigarettes. Even Dr. Lauren Hidalgo of the Cowell Center, who favors a smoking ban, agrees that banning chewing tobacco crosses the line. "I encourage patients not to chew because of risk for mouth cancer," says Hidalgo, "but I do not feel it should be banned because it doesn't impact others."

Don't make the mistake the UC schools made — treat young adults as young adults.

Joseph Forte is a senior combined science major.