Colleges tell smokers, ‘You’re not welcome here’

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This summer, a group of University of Kentucky students and staff has been patrolling campus grounds—scouting out any student, employee or visitor lighting a cigarette.

Unlike hall monitors who cite students for bad behavior, the Tobacco-free Take Action! volunteers approach smokers, respectfully ask them to dispose of the cigarette and provide information about quit-smoking resources available on campus.

The University of Kentucky is one of more than 500 college campuses across the country that have enacted 100% smoke-free or tobacco-free policies as of July 1. Although policy enforcement varies from school to school, most prohibit smoking on all campus grounds, including athletic stadiums, restaurants and parking lots.

An increasing number of colleges adopted smoke-free or tobacco-free policies in the past few years, according to American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation Project Manager Liz Williams. In the past year alone, 120 campuses were added to the smoke-free list.

The most successful policies have been grass-roots efforts driven by students and campus employees.

“They typically come about because students and faculty are questioning the role of tobacco in an educational setting and deciding to discourage its use and exposure,” Williams said.

About 46 million Americans age 18 and older smoke cigarettes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2010 American College Health Association report found that out of 30,093 students surveyed at 39 colleges, 4.4% had smoked every day in the past 30 days.

Since the first surgeon general report declaring the negative effects of smoking in 1964, smoking has become “socially less acceptable” among people of all ages, especially college students, says Laura Talbott-Forbes, chairwoman of the health association’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs Coalition.

“There’s a very health-conscious, socially aware student that we have on campus these days,” she said.

Should smoking be banned in public?

The smoke-free spree

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that 100% smoke-free campuses began popping up across the United States.

Ty Patterson, the former vice president of Student Affairs at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Missouri, says he started the first smoke-free campus in 2003, but the idea was planted in 1999.

“The president came to me and said, ‘Ty, we’ve got problems. You can’t get in and out of doorways without going through a corridor of smoke,’ “ Patterson recalled.

Patterson, who had quit smoking two years prior, set out to find a higher education institution that had managed to eliminate tobacco on campus. To Patterson’s dismay, there weren’t any.

“When I explained to (schools) what we were thinking about doing, they said ... ‘We’d love to be able to do that, but we don’t know how,’ “ he said.

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