By: Reynaldo Leal

Seventy percent of students polled on the myUTPA website have agreed that our campus should be a “smoke-free environment.” The number of students who took the poll hovered above 6,500 before it ended on Jan. 5.

Interestingly enough, the numbers collected by the online poll mirrored those cited by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) on how many Americans consider themselves smokers and non-smokers.

What does that mean?

The majority of students and faculty at our university (like most Americans) are non-smokers, silently tolerating the cigarette smoke of others as they walk through the sliding doors of campus buildings.

It seems that the other 20 to 30 percent never got the memo on what cigarettes do to their health and ours. It’s like they refuse to let the days of the 1960s smoke-filled airplane cabins go the way of – well, 1960s smoke-filled airplane cabins. Extinct.

That same minority may feel that smoking here on campus equates to some kind of unalienable right or freedom of expression. At the least it must be chalked up to adults making their own decision on how to harm themselves, right?

No.

I will agree that every adult has the right to do with their body as they see fit; however, a completely smoke-free campus would never mean that smokers could no longer purchase or use their cigarettes. They would just need to wait and smoke somewhere else.

Perhaps the simple solution is actual enforcement of the rules on not smoking within 25 feet of building entrances. Maybe having designated smoking areas where all the “cool” people can hang out would be better.

I for one cannot stand the sight of cigarette butts littered in front of the Communications Arts and Sciences building, and would more than welcome a campus-wide cigarette ban.