In one of my first posts, I shared an opinion-editorial
that I wrote for The Daily Californian about
why I think that smoking should be banned on the UC Berkeley campus. What I may
not have mentioned is that I had already begun working on such a change:
Originally, I was committed to making UC Berkeley a
smoke-free campus before I graduated. But after talking with campus
administration and realizing the incredible uphill battle it would take to
accomplish this (especially since I had just began my last semester of school),
I teamed up with TobaccNO founder and President Trit Garg to target a
smaller, yet equally important, domain: the campus residential communities,
where secondhand smoke had become quite the nuisance. With the guidance of Dr.
Joel Moskowitz, Director of the Center for Family & Community Health at
the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and Kim Homer Vagadori of the California Youth Advocacy Network, Trit and I presented a comprehensive, data-driven proposal
to the UC Berkeley Office of Student Development for smoke-free residential
communities. Although we ended up achieving designated smoking areas (due to
safety concerns in pushing student residents off campus to smoke), Trit and I
realized something very powerful: In just a matter of months, two ordinary
students were able to enact significant change to a major university’s smoking
policy. With this in mind, we felt compelled to share our work, in hopes that
other college students could draw on it to create similar proposals for their
own campuses.
On October 13, our work was published in the Journal of American College Health,
which I highly recommend to those interested in public health. JACH is also
active on Facebook, where you can read about the latest in college
public health. Look out for another article from us within the next 12-18
months, as TobaccNO will soon be launching a follow-up survey to measure the
impact of the designated smoking areas policy in the UC Berkeley residential
communities.
The Market’s Impact
on Smoke-free Apartments
Most of my posts share news about smoke-free policies or
laws, but a headline featuring another approach to the smoke-free solution
recently caught my eye: “Economics, not law, push landlords to smoke-free rules.” The reason I’m sharing this
is because I have previously discussed my firm belief in the power of
basic supply and demand in creating smoke-free
multi-unit housing. It’s simple: As smoking becomes increasingly less socially
acceptable, demand for smoke-free housing will increase, and landlords will be
more apt to ban smoking in apartment complexes. Therefore, complexes where
smoking is permitted will eventually become short in supply, driving up the
costs to rent in these complexes, ultimately deterring smokers from paying the
premium to live in “non-smoke-free” apartment complexes, effectively forcing
them to quit smoking. Landlords are further incentivized to ban smoking because,
according to Amy Doerrfeld, “it can save them a tremendous amount of money…the
cost to go in and flip an apartment a smoker lived in is a lot higher. The
smell is just hard to get rid of.” I believe that this laissez-faire approach is the right way to go with regard to
multi-unit housing smoking policy; landlords and tenants should never be
subject to government-mandated smoking bans.
Although I’m a huge proponent of public smoking bans and
have written about how terrible it is for people to live in complexes where
secondhand smoke can seep through walls, I just don’t see a more reasonable way
to establish smoking bans in these quasi-public (yet still private) residences.
With that being said, the city of San Diego is contemplating an
ordinance that would ban smoking in common areas of multi-family complexes.
Policies like these would at least address part of the issue. Still, other
cities like Boston are banning smoking from all public housing.
Who Will Win the
Pac-12 South?
Despite having been disqualified for the inaugural Pac-12
football championship and BCS bowl games, the University of Southern California
has a chance to win the Pac-12 South in another field: smoke-free campus policy
(the University of Oregon has already won the Pac-12 North, and
therefore, the Pac-12). I realize that this is old news, but I want to
point out some aspects about the Trojans’ fight for a smoke-free campus that I
haven’t seen much of elsewhere:
- An open forum: Students were invited to share their thoughts with administration at the “Smoke-Free Campus Forum.” However, only about 40 students showed up. Coincidentally, a “town hall” meeting hosted by the Columbia University senate saw a similar showing (will they win the Ivy League?).
- A student survey: As of September 21, 45 percent of the 1,227 respondents favored a smoking ban, while 40 percent favored designated smoking areas. Interestingly, only 67 percent of respondents reported as non-smokers, which tells me that the smoking population feels especially drawn to stand up for their “rights” by completing the survey.
Forty-five percent is far from compelling, so unless
something radical changes to the survey data, I think that USC students can
expect to have designated smoking areas in the near future. So, as a Cal Golden
Bear who despises USC Athletics, I challenge all Pac-12 South universities (and
Pac-12 North universities, for that matters) to BEAT USC by making their own
campuses smoke-free first. That means you, Sun Devils—you already beat them on
the football field this year, so it’s time to step up and continue where you left off.
Tobacco Use in
Baseball
There has been much talk lately about a possible ban of tobacco use from Major League Baseball. Players have long been know to
spit out sunflower seed shells while watching from the dugouts, chew gum in the
batter’s box and on the field, and—unfortunately—chew and spit smokeless
tobacco pretty much anywhere. In nearly all cases, I could care less if someone
is chewing and spitting tobacco near me—it’s entirely repulsive, but it doesn’t
hurt me. Baseball players chewing an spitting is a million times better than when
Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland used to smoke in the dugout. But here’s the
problem: Young kids attending or watching baseball games on TV look up to these
players and tend to mimic everything they do at their own baseball games, from
conforming to the ways in which players fold (or don’t fold) the bills of their
caps, to gesturing a brief time-out to the umpire between pitches, to spitting
out sunflower seed shells, to—God forbid—chewing tobacco. Pittsburgh Pirates
pitcher Joel Hanrahan acknowledges the problem wih his habit, but does his best
to hide it:
“We are role models…I don’t go out on the field and throw a dip in. In batting practice, I’ll kind of turn to the side and let them [the kids] use their imagination for what’s in my back pocket. I feel like I’m kind of decent at hiding it – sometimes.” – Joel Hanrahan, Pittsburgh Pirates
Still, why do I care? After all, this blog is entitled
“Smoke-free Digest.” I care because, with tobacco permitted on the baseball
field, impressionable kids will be more inclined to take up smokeless tobacco
themselves, at which point cigarette smoking seems all the more reasonable. In
other words, I am concerned that smokeless tobacco acts as a sort of “gateway
drug” to cigarettes.
I often make jokes about the relative lack of athletic
ability necessary to be a good baseball player, but the prevalence of tobacco
in this “sport” only makes it seem more like just a “game” (a claim to which many
baseball players would take offense). As basketball great Charles Barkley has been rumored to have said, "If you can smoke and drink while doing it, it’s not a sport." If the
MLB bans smokeless tobacco, I will be much more confident in calling baseball a
sport.
Other Recent
Developments:
- A student leader at the University of Illinois is determined to add her campus to the list of nearly 600 smoke-free campuses in the United States. Her school’s associate vice chancellor of student affairs is using other campuses’ success in establishing smoke-free policies as fodder for the change. He says, “It’s a matter of changing the culture of the campus rather than just putting a sign up…It’s a great idea; it’s just a matter of making sure everyone has input.”
- Boston University appears to be heading toward a designated smoking areas policy on campus. The interesting thing about this scenario—and several urban campuses for that matter—is that many people not affiliated with the university walk through the campus on a daily basis, some of whom are bound to be smokers. Therefore, enforcement—as with many of these changes—is going to be the largest challenge faced by administration.
- The Maricopa Community College system, one of the largest of its kind in the country, announced, via YouTube, that smoking will be banned on all campuses starting july 1, 2012. It’s about time, Arizona!
- Since the start of the fall semester, Arkansas State University has issued 20 citations who have violated the campus’ Clean Air on Campus Act. Violators’ fines range from $100-$500. Now that’s proper enforcement!
- With the help of the State Island Smoke-Free Partnership and the NYC Coalition for a Smoke-Free City, a student-actor from Wagner College is taking a unique approach to educating Staten Island youth about the health hazards of smoking and the manipulative marketing tactics used by the tobacco industry: by dramatizing them through a play that is set to run 25 times, mostly performed at middle schools and high schools on Staten Island. I hope this play gets replicated elsewhere and makes it to Broadway (I dream big).
- Inmates in Florida prisons are now prohibited from smoking. The ban was justified on two grounds: 1) The state spent nearly $9 million on medical bills for inmates with tobacco-related illnesses (presumably within the past year), and 2) lighters can also be used to make weapons, or used as weapons themselves. Inmates were not forced to quit ‘cold turkey,’ though, as opportunities for purchasing cigarettes were gradually cut over the past six months and nicotine patches are now being sold in lieu of cigarettes.
- The Columbia, South Carolina city council has proposed a code of conduct for cab drivers, which—among other things—would mandate smoke-free vehicles. Considering my stance on smoking and driving, I think this is a great idea. It’s never pleasant when you hop into a taxi that reeks of secondhand and/or thirdhand smoke. You’ll never see me tip those drives generously…
- The city of Philadelphia is hosting a series of community discussions to determine the most viable option of nine ideas for a citywide tobacco policy. Hopefully, there will be more news to come…
