The ODE issued an editorial today criticizing plans to make campus smoke-free. However, it didn’t take an absolutist stance on the issue. Instead, the editorial suggests placing designated smoking areas on campus. From the article:

Further regulating the areas where people can smoke on campus would be a more reasonable, effective and generally welcomed change. People who smoke cigarettes right outside of campus buildings are a nuisance to non-smokers who must pass through the toxic cloud on their way to class, but they shouldn’t be forced from campus. Smoking is a vice and an addiction. This is common knowledge, and as a society we have chosen, as illustrated by our laws, to maintain cigarettes as a legal right to citizens who choose to consume them. If cigarettes are indeed banned on campus, smokers will simply go elsewhere when their nicotine cravings strike, or more likely will just flout the law and light up anyway. Nevertheless, they won’t stop smoking. University officials need to realize when their attempts to regulate student behavior will have palpable effects, and when they will fall on deaf ears.

Many of the other Commentators and I believe that a much better solution than both of these proposals would be to simply enforce the existing rules that ban smoking within a certain number of feet from a building entrance. The majority of complaints about smoking on campus are due to people smoking in front of doors. If the rules were actually enforced, I don’t think the smoking ban would have half the support it does.

As advertised in the Ol’ Dirty this week, there will be two open forums held by the Smoke-Free Task Force to hear public opinion about proposing a smoking ban on campus. The first is tonight from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. and the second on Thursday from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. Both are in the Knight Library Browsing Room. Comments have a three minute time limit and must be “respectful and relevant to the topic.” It’s time to start shaking those fists toward the nicotine Nazis.