The proposed smoking ban on ASU’s Tempe campus is unnecessary and oppressive. The best systems of government are those with the most freedom and opportunity; where the benefits of individual rights are correctly balanced against the harms. In America, smoking tobacco is a right currently afforded to those 18 years and older. Unlike freedom of speech or the right to bear arms, it is not an active right. It is a passive right, like the right to wear plaid or the right to sit on benches. In order to ensure individual rights, smoking on campus should be allowed within reason.
American legal precedent considers smoke a public nuisance, much like bad smells or noise. Citizens have a right to play loud music in public as long as it does not create a significant disturbance, and businesses like construction firms have a right to enter into private contracts where they create large amounts of noise. Undoubtedly, at the end of my life, I will have amassed measurable hearing loss from other people’s noise, whether from jet engines or the jerk who blasts Weezy from his car stereo.
And that’s the cost of freedom. In a system that works, one that isn’t oppressive and soul crushing, you’re bound to get a certain negligible amount of harm from the public nuisances that come when other people exercise their rights.
At the end of your life, it is far more likely that the majority of your hearing loss will be due to situations you placed yourself in. Unless you’ve got a campus stalker who follows you from class to class with cigarette in hand, smoking is the same way. By the time you’re old and grey, the majority of negative health effects that you will have amassed from secondhand smoke will be because you chose to put yourself in situations where people smoke.
On campus and in other public places, secondhand smoke is a negligible nuisance, not a huge hazard.
In a recent interview with The State Press Dr. Allan Markus, Campus Health Services Director, said an overall goal of the proposed ban is to help smokers to quit. But that’s not true; in reality, the overall goal is to mandate they quit.
ASU has several large campuses. Students, staff and faculty don’t have time to walk 15 minutes off campus, have a cigarette, and walk the 15 minutes back to work or class. Despite an adult citizen’s willful decision to smoke — in public, in the open air, well within his or her current legal rights — the ban would effectively take that right away. If the overall goal is to help smokers quit, Markus should start his own private organization rather than use his office at a public university as a mouthpiece.
Health is more than just physical. For my own sanity, and for the sanity of this country, we must stop sliding toward an oppressive system that restricts our freedom. We must stop these affronts to our rights.
Reach Ryan at ryan.m.sweeney@asu.edu