On March 9, 2001, University of Houston conceived its tobacco-free campus policy. Since then, it has gone through many revisions, widening in scale each time.
The policy’s intention was to create a safer campus while adhering to the going “green” approach as highlighted in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification. LEED also brings forth financial incentives such as tax credits and grants for future construction.
While walking to class this summer, I passed by an ongoing heated argument: An older woman yelled at a younger man because of his cigarette. She said he needed to follow the rules, and he claimed that smoking was his right as a tax-paying adult.
The argument ended with the man walking away. Although the generation gap is easily seen as a factor in this quarrel, there is still an issue regarding people’s rights versus policies of institutions.
When I first took classes here in Fall 2014, there were areas in which students and, on the rare occasion, a professor would sit and smoke. Farish Hall is a memorable one because I tried to avoid the cigarette odor while passing by.
These designated areas bring all smokers to a particular corner of the campus, allowing everyone to “walk at their own risk.” To dispose of the finished cigarettes there were ash trays, which concentrated all the litter in one place.
By taking away the smoking areas and ash trays, the University eradicated one of the rights that students have as adults. They created a prohibition culture on campus. Like the ban on liquor in the 1920s, this, too, will also be a failure.
A repeal of this policy is needed.
While I understand the opposition to smoking — the health issues, litter or annoyance — they all can be dealt with civilly. It is our right to make our own decisions sans the organizational implementation of policies, namely 07.02.02.
If this policy is for the health of the students, then I say: We can handle ourselves. If it is to avoid the cigarette butts, then supply ash trays.
Smoking is a right, and smoking sections can help everyone out. When tax credits are involved, you see where we stand as students and citizens.
Guest columnist Chance A. Smith is an undergraduate researcher and president of the Sociological Students Association. He can be reached at [email protected].
The school implemented no means of enforcing it’s global ban on smoking other than encouraging others to chastise the people doing it. Quite literally in the fashion you say you saw someone doing that.
That ‘oversight’ means the school clearly only instituted such an overarching policy for the grants and tax credits.
The latest version of the ban was created because of grants. The University gets a huge sum of money for cancer research and one of the conditions of that grant is that there can not be any smoking in a certain amount of space of the buildings that it is taking place but it happens in many buildings that it covers a huge area of the campus proper.
Repeal this draconian smoking ban!
Why do others have to be forced to breathe in someone’s “right to smoke”? Why do we try to legitimize our addictions by calling them rights? You have the privilege to drink alcohol (if you can afford it), but you cannot go out and commit intoxicated manslaughter.
You have the freedom by right to choose, but cannot impose that on others, who have the same right to not smoke – second-hand. Smoke all you want, just do it not in my children’s or my air space. I have the right to not be forced to smoke.
BTW – it is illegal to kill yourself and others. Is that imposing on your rights?
Whether it’s from cigarettes or a candle, smoke leaves a greasy residue on walls and the ceiling, as it floats through the air and settles on the first hard surface it comes in contact with. The majority of the residue attaches to high areas like the upper half of walls and the ceilings. Simple answer repaint walls and add the ionic paint additive
to the paint.
You don’t have a ‘right’ to smoke. The rule is there follow it.
I’m guessing many of those objecting to cigarette smoke drive cars. I don’t. But I have to breath the air they willingly pollute with their filth, day in and day out. I have to be mindful of “ozone alerts,” which are anthropomorphic. But let them see a cigarette 50 feet away with no detectable harm, and they shriek about pollution. No planet’s ozone layer was ever depleted by cigarette smoke. Yet our natural resources are being obliterated by carbon-based pollutants. So, enjoy your self-righteous indignation, non-smokers, while you intoxicate the planet I have to inhabit with toxins you create but I have to breath. Good job.