Smoking is unhealthy. That’s a fact that cannot be refuted or denied by anyone. However, this fact alone has lead many people to believe that just because they are personally opposed to smoking that they can be treated any way at all with impunity.
The SGA’s proposed ban that would have eliminated smoking on campus is a prime example of how a small number of people in positions of “authority” think that they can and should be able to control the lives of individuals from a portion of society that they do not agree with. Although the SGA’s proposal doesn’t amount to the “nazism” that some smokers have branded the ban as being, whenever governing bodies start to interject in the lives of others based solely on there opinions, society begins to make its way down the slippery slope of tyranny.
One of the most problematic elements of the smoking ban that members of the SGA seem to have overlooked when they proposed legislation is how such a rule would actually be implemented. In the words of President Andrew Jackson, “They have made their law, now let them enforce it.”
Enforcing such a rule would require some entity on campus to be placed in charge of making sure nobody smokes. The group that would most likely be charged with this responsibility would be the Public Safety department. However, the chief of Public Safety, Jasper Cooke, said that he wouldn’t be required to enforce the ban if it was passed because the ban would be a school policy, not an actual law.
“I’m not the smoking police or the policy police,” Cooke said. “I am the criminal police.”
If Public Safety was required to enforce a ban on smoking, the time they would spend hunting down smokers would be just one more additional duty that would detract from the vast amount of responsibilities that they are already required to carry out.
My question for the SGA is this: “Why would we want to jeopardize the immediate safety of people on campus in order to protect them from the long-term risks of being exposed to cigarette smoke?”
Instead of creating policies for our school that will only benefit their own individual agendas, members of the SGA should focus their attention on trying to propose policies that will benefit everyone as a whole. Not having smoking on campus would make some people happy, but it would also create a logistical dilemma that would cause the policy to either not be enforced or for enforcement of the policy to create far worse problems than those caused by cigarette smoking.
Creating rules and laws to control the behavior of individuals is an ineffective way to prevent people from engaging in certain activities. After all, just look at all of problems caused by laws designed to curb drug use. Although illicit drugs are bad enough all by themselves, government prohibition of them has created even more problems that are oftentimes more detrimental than the drugs themselves. Gangs, murder and violence are all the result of a drug trade that has been made profitable solely because drugs are illegal.
If people want to reduce the negative impact of smoking on campus, they must act on their own to make a difference. If you’re a nonsmoker, try to distance yourself from large groups of people that are smoking. If you are a smoker yourself, exercise common courtesy and don’t smoke in areas that people have to walk by, including the doors to campus buildings and the back part of Allgood Hall. Once we realize that we are personally responsible for the welfare of campus life, we will all be better off.