CAMPUS

The Subjection of Smoking: A Discussion of UNC’s New Public Area Smoking Ban Policy

UNC’s Policy Is Impractical, But Smoking Ban is Necessary to Reconcile Individual Rights

Smoking, once a common habit in American society, has become a lightning rod for controversy in recent years. Smoking sections in restaurants were rare 50 years ago, but now places like New York City have implemented blanket bans for indoor public places. Some places have even extended bans to outdoor space—and UNC’s campus might be next.

UNC already has a ban on smoking in administrative buildings and classrooms, and it extended the ban to residence halls and their breezeways in 2004. UNC Hospitals went tobacco-free and the School of Medicine and Campus Health Services went smoke-free in July. Now, there is talk of extending the ban on campus to areas within 100 feet of buildings. This would leave very few areas where smoking would be allowed, which include a narrow strip in the middle of Polk Place near the flagpole, the Davie Poplar, and the middle of the field in Kenan Stadium.

The crux of this issue is rights. Is it an infringement on smokers’ rights to ban them from smoking outdoors, or is it an imposition on nonsmokers to give them no protection against secondhand smoke? I believe it is the latter. I am a strong advocate of protecting the rights guaranteed to all Americans, but the key component of any right is that it is only preserved when it does not infringe upon the rights of anyone else.

An extreme example is in the case of murder. If murder did not infringe upon others, it would be a protected right. However, the very definition of murder involves infringing rather heavily on the victim’s right to live, so it cannot be protected.

Smoking is the same type of issue. It is difficult to understand why smoking bans are so controversial when there are similar laws in place that are universally accepted. Americans over the age of 21 have the right to consume alcohol if they choose, but the moment they get behind the wheel of a car, their choice ceases to be individual and can infringe on others.

It is for this reason that laws prohibiting driving under the influence of alcohol or other mind-altering substances are in place. No one is claiming “drinkers’ rights” in protest of these laws.
I fully support the right to smoke if one chooses to do so, but I equally support the right to breathe fresh air in a public place. The very characteristics of smoking are what make it so difficult to reconcile the rights of nonsmokers and smokers.

The smoke emitted into the air from smokers exhaling and from the tip of cigarettes is undeniably unhealthy for anyone who inhales it. According to the National Cancer Institute’s website, secondhand smoke contains at least 250 harmful chemicals, 50 of which are known carcinogens. These toxins include arsenic, a heavy metal toxin; benzene, a chemical found in gasoline; polonium-210, a chemical element that gives off radiation; and cadmium, a chemical used in batteries. The U.S. Surgeon General has classified secondhand smoke as a known cancer-causing substance; it is responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmoking American adults each year.

Other substances such as smokeless tobacco and even many illegal drugs do not share this problem. I would go as far as to support the right to do heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine or any other drug on campus, if it were legal. Someone under the influence of heroin is not emitting anything into the atmosphere that is endangering my health—so I would fully back his or her right to consume any substance they choose.

UNC is a public institution, and therefore has the obligation to protect the rights of all of its students, staff and faculty members—nonsmokers as well as smokers. Something must be done to reconcile the rights of the two. The 100-foot radius rule is ludicrous. Smokers would be clustered together in the middle of Polk Place, but most of UNC’s population walks through the middle of the quad at some point, nullifying the entire idea.

The only fair solution is a blanket ban with designated smoking areas. The smoking zones should be away from building doors and highly-populated campus areas, but not so far away as to alienate smokers and force them to trek long distances to comply. The area behind Davis Library is a possible location—it is centrally located, but not in a place where most of the campus population regularly ventures.

Liz Gregg, a graduate student and a smoker, supports the idea of a ban with designated smoking areas. “I would support a ban if there was a place to smoke that wasn’t a mile and a half away,” she said. “I don’t want to bother people (when I smoke) and feel like a jerk.”

Cigarette smoke is harmful to everyone who comes in contact with it. The problem with smoking outside on UNC’s campus is that smokers choose to breathe in the fumes, but nonsmokers are never given a choice.

A blanket ban with designated smoking areas would protect everyone’s rights; smokers could have a place to indulge their habit as is their right, but bystanders would not have to suffer as a result of it.

Kelly Esposito is a Staff Writer for The Carolina Review.

Smoking Bans Unjustly Grant Precedent to Some Rights Over Others

If one were to poll the administration here at UNC regarding their opinion of which were the most maligned minorities on campus, or in society, it is likely reasonable to assume that ‘smokers’ would not even cross their mind. Long past the racial minorities, and the sexual orientation minorities, and women, when the campus official was still searching for groups on which to bestow pity for their struggles, for which he could blame society, the notion of that particular group joining that class is still exceptionally foreign.

This is not to directly compare smokers to a race; the two are distinctly different in that smoking is purely choice. But when looking for evidence of a mass societal subjection of a race or a gender that is largely due to the fact that we either consciously pass or have been conditioned to pass judgment on that group as inferior, it might be useful to consider that that is precisely what we have done to smokers.

UNC, already a campus laden with a considerable number of smoking bans in public places, has as its most recently proposed plan a prohibition on smoking within one hundred feet of a building. As the column directly to my left observed, that leaves small sections in the middle of Polk Place, McCorkle Place, and Kenan Stadium. There are maybe a couple of parking lots on campus the middles of which are more than a hundred feet from a building.

The counterpoint sufficiently criticized the practicality of the plan; clustering all the smokers together in hoards where people walk anyway is insanity. I am going to focus on the principle of the plan and demonstrate that smoking bans in public outdoor areas are unjust in any circumstance.

It is true that the question is one of the reconciliation of rights; the rights of the nonsmoker are pitted against the rights of the smoker because the nonsmoker wishes not to inhale the hazardous smoke emitted by the cigarette of the smoker. To what degree second hand smoke actually affects the health of a nonsmoker is a separate debate, and it is one that is irrelevant to this argument; therefore it will not be addressed.

Smokers inherently have a right to smoke; it is a positive action on the part of the smoker that requires a negation by the institution, either public or private. In its most basic form, when smoking is taking place in the privacy of one’s home, smoking in no way affects the rights of any other being; therefore it is a right.

In this manner in is fundamentally different from other actions of the sort that require negation by the institution, such as murder. In the simple act of performing a murder one’s own existence, the locus of one’s inviolable property and rights, is taken.

In smoking, however, there is no direct violation of that locus; one is not coerced into standing next to a smoker, or even to walk by one. To grant one individual the right to breathe clean air while walking through a public outdoor area over the right of another to smoke in that same area is to presuppose that the nonsmoker has a greater right to the land than the smoker. The mindset that would lead someone to believe that someone smoking on the land on which they walk can only logically derive from a view that one owns that land; which is of course not the case.

This form of superiority complex, where nonsmokers have come to believe that their nonsmoking lifestyle is somehow better than that of a smoker, and therefore justifiably enforced by institutions of the state and federal governments in this country, can be seen manifested across the United States. In several states, such as New York, a private restaurant business owner cannot allow smoking in his private restaurant. In cases as these two assumptions are made: that private citizens are coerced into visiting restaurants where smoking is allowed and that smokers practice an inherently inferior behavior to nonsmokers. An American citizen ought to understand both that the first is certainly not true and that a behavior cannot be negated in this country simply because a majority of the citizens deem it inferior.

I do not smoke; I never will smoke. To me, smoking is idiocy. However, what smoking is to me is an irrelevant question in the United States’ political system. Our Constitution, generally in theme of limited government and specifically in the Ninth Amendment, protects a person’s right to be an idiot, and no one can presume that their rights take precedent over that right of another.

Smoking bans on public outdoor property of any kind, therefore, are counter to what used to be one of the most supreme American political ideals, and are arguably unconstitutional.

They should certainly not be tolerated at a university which prides itself on tolerance.

Bryan Weynand is Editor of The Carolina Review, a Collegiate Network member publication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These articles were originally featured in the October 2007 issue of The Carolina Review.