Smoking Should be Prohibited on Campus

Allowing smoking on campus is an institutional endorsement to disregard public health. Smokers, as people and as members of this institution, have rights. I’m going to maintain that smokers even have the right to smoke Bond, just like any one of us has the right to go to Five Guys every day and ingest burgers and fries to our future heart disease’s content. However, like eating foods with high levels of saturated fat, smoking is a health hazard.


I am not proposing that outside, secondhand smoke itself is enough of a health hazard to justify this ban. However, in physically allowing the presence of smoking on campus, the University is encouraging students to slowly develop health disorders. If lung cancer could be attained from a reckless decision in the short term, the conversation about smoking would be very different.

Smoking is like binge drinking—people know it’s unhealthy, but it can be tempting when it is an integral part of a social scene. I enjoy the occasional “smoke break” even though I have never smoked a cigarette. I enjoy taking a break from a party to stand outside for a few minutes with a friend. I enjoy stepping out of a bar to lower my body temperature and speak to someone who can hear me without leaning in and turning his or her head. Sometimes, when I’m writing a paper in Butler, I need to go sit outside and talk to someone or simply think about nothing.

Yet I can do all those things without a cigarette. Even if the reason I often go is because a friend wants to smoke a cigarette, the “smoke break” is a healthy, enjoyable, and usually productive act. This raises a question: How can we institutionally encourage the separation between the healthy effects of social interaction and fresh air—the social culture surrounding smoking—and the hazardous effects of actually smoking cigarettes?

We as a community must differentiate between the habits associated with smoking and smoking as a habit. It is important to emphasize that smokers are not being banned from standing near campus buildings—smoking is. Some of my friends who smoke cigarettes believe in smokers’ rights, and some don’t. However, no one can refute that smoking is a severely unhealthy habit, and the belief in smokers’ rights is just stubbornness against the increased resistance to the habit and to the increasing inconvenience of it. Smoking is a personal decision. If that decision is institutionalized by the allowed visible placement of smokers on our campus, then the institution should change its policy such that students’ private decisions about smoking are not structurally encouraged by their physical placement on campus.

With the proposed smoking ban and a little enforcement, at least some smokers will feel the need to hide. Then, instead of being joined and asked to bum a cigarette as a friend walks by, smokers may put out their cigarettes to go chat with that friend or at least feel a little silly for hiding.

Even if the reality of the policy would be that smokers will remain on campus, albeit less visibly, this would still be an improvement in the sense that it changes the social structure of the habit. If the proposed smoking ban will create a horde of smokers outside the gates, I still believe that horde will be smaller than the one that currently exists outside Butler. This small addition of work necessary in order to smoke that cigarette will, from a logistical standpoint, serve to make students smoke fewer cigarettes.

Therefore, with this displacement will come inconvenience—and a separation between spaces for smoking and spaces where little social moments can find their way into the busiest of weeks. Decreased smokers’ rights will decrease the habit of smoking and increase health. This is only a further step in an ongoing process.