Color me insensitive, out-of-touch, uncool, anti-libertarian, The Man, whatever, but it’s time for a total ban on tobacco smoking at Reed College. It’s long past time, in fact. Three reasons propel this argument:
1. Cigarette smoking is terrible for your health; it will turn you into an addict, and then it will kill you. Anything and everything the college can do to make it more difficult for you to smoke is in your best interest. The clear and present danger presented by tobacco demands a regulatory response that trumps individual choice and liberty. This is not new. Our society uses regulations to keep arsenic out of the water you drink, salmonella out of the chickens you eat, lame drivers off of the roads you drive, and we should use regulations to keep deadly and debilitating carcinogens out of your lungs.
2. Smoking tobacco is not just profoundly discourteous to nearby peers, it unfairly shortens their lives. It is flat out unethical for smokers to foist the ravages of lung cancer and heart disease on others, and in a civil society this inimical behavior must be regulated. The libertarian “right to smoke” should always be subordinate to the right to breathe clean air.
3. It hurts Reed College. Over the years I’ve met a half dozen prospies who chose not to apply to or attend Reed, citing the College’s smoking culture as a primary deterrent. Given the choice, these students look elsewhere and Reed, with fewer qualified applicants, is worse off. Smoking lowers the quality of students who attend Reed and, by extension, it lowers the quality of classroom discourse and scholarship.
The model I propose isn’t a police state or the failed U.S. war on drugs; instead, it’s every hospital in America that prohibits tobacco use on its campus because cigarette smoke is a pernicious carcinogen that, with prolonged exposure, kills users and the people near them.
Given the environmental dangers it presents, one could argue that tobacco should be treated the same way we treat radioactive material. The difference is that, while relatively few die from radiation poisoning, nearly one-half million American adults will die prematurely this year due to tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure, and those who don’t die will be prone to diabetes, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, tuberculosis, erectile dysfunction, cleft palate, ectopic pregnancy, rheumatoid arthritis, stroke, and impaired immune function.
Tobacco smoking on campus harms Reed College and it harms all of its current, past, and future students. It should be banned from campus.
Steven Falk ‘83
Board of Trustees, 2007 to 2011
President, Reed College Alumni Association 2004