Digest #32: This Month in Smoke-free News

This month's "top story" is a local one for me: Arizona State University, the largest university in the country, is one (big) step closer to becoming a tobacco-free campus. On Monday, September 17, the ASU University Senate approved a motion to ban tobacco on campus next fall. I have personally been working with the ASU Health & Counseling Student Action Committee to continue their longstanding efforts to get a policy passed, and after getting the support of over thousands of students over the past few years (including that of the undergraduate student government), university leaders now seem ready to make the change.

Meanwhile, student leaders at the University of Arizona, ASU's arch-rival, are making progress of their own, so much so that I decided to pose an unofficial online "race" to a tobacco-free campus policy on Facebook. Unless the U of A is able to get a policy passed and effective fall 2013, it appears that ASU will win this race. A new push for a tobacco-free Pima County may help the cause. With that having been said, I would hope that the U of A would not pass a policy without adequate forethought; much planning needs to be done to make any tobacco-restrictive policy work as intended.

Some ASU students are voicing legitimate concerns about moving smoking off of campus property--and onto streets and/or private property. Interestingly, since the University of Oklahoma went smoke-free this year, a street corner nicknamed 'Cancer Corner' has developed into a smoking haven. Even more interesting is that the CEO of the company that owns the property is actually accommodating the smokers, offering to install a bench, trash cans and a smoking urn to help keep the property clean. Still, one student had this to say about his experience smoking on Cancer Corner:

“People look at us like we’re meth heads, but we’re not drug users,” --University of Oklahoma freshman

...Oh, but you are--you just don't realize it.

Regardless, all of this comes at a time when the US Department of Health & Human Services is launching its National Tobacco-free College Campus Initiative, so I am hopeful that, within a couple of years, these collegiate updates will no longer be newsworthy, but rather commonplace.

Other news:

• A slap in the face of Big Tobacco: A new apartment complex in Richmond, Virginia--home of tobacco giant Philip Morris, will have a smoke-free policy.
• I ran across what I thought was a catchy campaign to get small communities to adopt tobacco-free parks, pools and playgrounds: Young Lungs at Play. I gather that the program was developed by none other than Penn State...Nobody ever hears about the good news...
• A Dairy Queen in Indiana, a state that recently passed a highly controversial smoke-free policy, has installed a "no smoking" sign on its drive-thru window. Ignoring the strong possibility that many Dairy Queen drive-thru customers have kids in the car (see recent debate in Utah about smoking with kids in the car), this is still a very interesting topic. While some would say that smokers have the right to smoke in their car, fast food workers can argue that secondhand smoke drifting through the drive-thru window endangers their health. I must I would like to see more of this kind of activity at other fast food chains, nationwide--regardless if local smoking ordinances are in place or not...but I suggest that we don't start in New York City, where sugary drinks over 16 oz. will be banned as soon as March. Let's not anger the customers too much...