Cigarette in hand, Cat Stinson sat in front of a no-smoking sign on a covered walkway on the University of Georgia campus discussing the university system’s new tobacco ban with friends.
“It’s a hindrance to us because we’re all over 18 and this is what we do in order to decrease stress,” she said this past week. “Do you have a lighter?”
This week, the state Board of Regents approved a new University System of Georgia policy banning tobacco use on the campuses of its 31 institutions. The ban includes all forms of tobacco products — cigarettes, cigars, chew, dip, hookahs, cigarillos, etc. — as well as e-cigarettes.
And, no, this particular ban does not address weed. (You might want to ask Gov. Nathan Deal about that one.)
The ban takes effect Oct. 1 and covers all areas owned, leased or in any way used by the university system. It applies to all students, employees, faculty, staff, contractors and visitors. Smoking is already banned inside all university system buildings.
UGA currently bans tobacco use from the entire Health Sciences Campus and everywhere near doors, windows, bus stops and covered walkways.
That would include the covered walkway where Stinson and her friends were sitting.
In an hour of stalking smokers along the covered area that some students call Smokers’ Alley this week, the tobacco police failed to appear.
Enforcement of the new ban focuses on “shared community responsibility.”
UGA junior Emily Moller helped the campus chapter of the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life group gather hundreds of signatures in support of a tobacco ban. But apart from one friend who engages in aggressive smoker-shaming, she and her friends take a low-key approach to confronting smokers on campus.
“I just hold my breath and keep walking,” she said.
“We don’t want people to feel like the American Cancer Society is out to get you,” explained fellow Relay for Life member Ryan Leonard.
Some 2,600 university system employees have self-identified as tobacco users. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that almost 19 percent of young adults ages 18-24 are likely to use tobacco. That would translate to about 60,000 university system students in Georgia.
But as a member of the DARE generation, smoking was never that sexy to Leonard, anyway.
“We’ve been raised not to do drugs, not to use alcohol or use cigarettes,” he said. “We’ve been raised to find cooler ways to die.”
Still, other powerful social pressures exist.
A half dozen students smoking on the Athens campus last week declined to speak with a reporter, saying they didn’t want their parents to know they smoke.
“No thanks,” one told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My dad gets that paper.”
(Note to the father of the UGA student who owns a blue fleece jacket: Your child smokes. And thank you for subscribing.)
In an informal poll of students, staff and faculty on the Athens campus this week, reactions to the coming ban were roughly split between shrugs and eye rolls.
In the first category was UGA staff member Jasmine Burch, a nonsmoker whose reaction to the ban was a pragmatic, “I knew it was coming.”
In the second group was student Maizy Stell, who called it “pretty absurd” during a smoke break outside the library.
And then there was professor Ed Panetta, a self-described “grumpy old guy” and former smoker (in college, of course), who called the new ban “an astute public health initiative.”
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