Smoking bans have their advantages. That is clear to anyone who remembers going out for drinks or dinner, or even flying on an airplane, before no-smoking signs lit up for good.
Cigarettes were kicked out of bars and restaurants because smoke is irritating and harmful to bystanders, and because as more people quit smoking due to health concerns, more and more people became bystanders. Smokers were pushed further and further to the margins, kicked first out of confined spaces to smoking areas, then to the sidewalk, and now often across the street, where smokers are harming no one but themselves.
At the same time, smoking rates have plummeted, from 42.4 percent of adults in 1965, to 33 percent by 1980, 25 percent in 1993, and now, 19 percent. Really, the bans are just as much to credit for the drop as the undisputed and grave medical evidence. For many people, it’s not that it is too deadly to smoke, it’s that it is too inconvenient. And if smoking bans began as a way to make the world healthier for nonsmokers, they quickly became more about making life difficult for smokers.
That’s the premise behind the smoking bans that are becoming commonplace at colleges and universities throughout the United States. The University System of Maryland, the City University of New York system, and the Ohio public college system are all in the process of implementing tobacco bans, as is the University of California system. Even Clemson, in the heart of tobacco country in Columbia, S.C., will ban all tobacco products within two years. In fact, according to the Christian Science Monitor, as of January 2012, 648 college and universities in the U.S. had total bans, up from 466 in January 2011.
“Our young students who come here as freshmen, who don’t smoke but come to college and start experimenting, maybe they won’t choose to smoke now,” Trish Ratto, manager of UC Berkeley’s Health Matters wellness program, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That would be a huge gain.”
On Jan. 1, the University of Southern Maine campuses in Gorham, Portland and Lewiston will ban all tobacco products on campus, joining the University of Maine and the University of Maine at Farmington. At the same time, the University of Maine at Augusta will go smoke-free. At the University of New England in Biddeford, smoking is prohibited “in all facilities, partially enclosed areas such as breezeways and covered walkways, and vehicles owned, leased, or rented by the University.” Smoking is also banned within 50 feet of all buildings.
And it’s not just colleges and universities. South Portland and Scarborough have banned smoking on municipally owned property, as have Westbrook, Portland and Lewiston. Biddeford, too, has banned smoking at the city’s parks and beaches. Old Orchard Beach encourages people not to smoke on the beaches, though it stops short of an outright ban.
At USM, a report from a committee backing the ban said the designated smoking areas in use now are “not effective in reducing the health hazards associated with exposure to secondhand smoke and tobacco waste.” It’s too bad that smokers seemingly could not use these areas correctly, as they seem a reasonable compromise on a vast, wide-open campus where the output of a relatively few number of smokers can be carried away quickly in the wind.
It’s hard to begrudge a policy that will likely make people healthier. But these policies must also take into account individual freedom – as long as no one else is harmed – and ask where the line will be drawn when prohibiting bad habits.
Ben Bragdon, managing editor
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