It’s gross, it smells bad and it’s been proven to cause lung cancer, but it’s your Constitutional right.

Smoking, that is.

But the right to smoke cigarettes on campus is under review by students and faculty. A former smoker and philosophy senior is petitioning the University to make campus tobacco-free after joining ASU’s Health and Counseling Student Action Committee last year.

On Wednesday, about 40 students met to discuss the proposed ban. If the referendum is approved, the measure could be on the Undergraduate Student Government’s April ballot to go to student vote. As enticing as it sounds, it’s a mistake to banish tobacco from campus. No one wants to advocate for people to start smoking, but in smokers’ position, we wouldn’t want people to step on our rights.

The risks of secondhand — and even thirdhand — smoke are widely known, but banning all tobacco products on campus is infringing on the rights of smokers, university students or not. It’s true that you give up certain rights when you step onto a college campus, like bearing arms or consuming alcohol, but banning smoking goes too far.

Sure, smoking is annoying — it certainly isn’t the most pleasant situation to walk through a cloud of smoke on Cady Mall or be in the path of someone’s smoke ring in the middle of lunch. But if it were OK to ban anything that’s annoying, we’d throw up laws about skateboarders on crowded malls and that one big-mouthed kid who always raises his hand during lectures in an instant. While a smoking ban might make many of our lives a little bit easier, it’s wrong to get rid of completely legal actions because they’re bothersome. More than 3,500 students have signed a petition to make campus tobacco-free, but would they sign a petition to ban French fries? The tasty snack can lead to obesity and other health concerns, but that doesn’t mean campus-dwellers shouldn’t be able to keep dipping those fried potatoes into ketchup every other meal.

Instead of enacting new smoking bans, maybe it’s time to enforce the smoking laws that are already in place. Currently, state policy mandates that no one can smoke within 25 feet of a building door — a policy that isn’t exactly enforced on campus. If it was actually mandated that people only smoke far away from buildings, the majority of the University community wouldn’t be subjected to smoke on a regular basis. A total ban might be easier to monitor, but so would banishing the pushy longboarders that dominate campus sidewalks, and that isn’t happening anytime soon.

College smokers aren’t exactly running rampant around the University — a study by ASU Health Services from last spring found that only 6 percent of ASU students reported smoking on a daily basis while 16.7 percent said they smoke at least once a month — so enforcement against this small portion of the ASU community could curb the issue without infringing on its rights.

It’s not time for anyone to pick up a new Joe Camel habit right now, but if you already have one, we believe it’s your right to puff your way to lung cancer across all four of ASU’s campuses. God Bless America.