As students, on a campus that prides itself on diversity and tolerance, the segment who choose to be smokers are the one group that has found limited quarter from this community.  After being forcibly exiled from buildings, buses, and trains, we smokers are forced to indulge their oral fixations outside in full exposure to all the elements that beset New England. Desperate to escape the biting wind and cigarette soaking precipitation smokers will often congregate beneath the overhangs of Wheatley, McCormack and the Science building. Despite conceding the indoors to the non-smokers, smokers still find ourselves at odds with the tobacco-free community.

The very overhangs that the smokers find respite under also have vents built into them that pump “fresh” air into the buildings. In many cases the smokers at UMB are huddled directly beneath those vents, causing the vents to pump carcinogenic fumes into the public air supply, which aggravates the sensitive non-smokers inside and causing a general level of discomfort.

Currently the UMB Administration is taking action against this issue, in tandem with our very own USG, to forcibly relocate the smokers to keep the air in the buildings “fresh.” President of the USG Neil MacInnes-Barker has assured the student body that this is not a move to ban smoking on campus. He has stated that smokers will still be able to find plenty of habitable places to light up, but not in places where vents are located.

Since this is not a total ban on smoking and that the reasons for the enforcement of the relocation are logical and sound I cannot help but support this referendum. It is like forcing an idling car to move away from a storefront. However I still feel as though smokers have an unwarranted bad rap on campus, and I would hate to see this health concern used as a precedent for a campus wide smoking ban.

It has been tried before by certain groups on campus but has always ultimately failed. It is my accretion that this forced relocation of smokers is just what those groups have been waiting for. If we have to move them for one health hazard why not simply remove them completely and eliminate the hazard?

There are a couple of reasons why not. Cigarette smoking is not a crime, a school wide ban would essentially make it “illegal” to do so on campus. It would disadvantage a group who by their own account depend on a substance for mental stability and stress relief.

It seems that many people are personally offended by smokers as if the person smoking is trying to give them cancer or something. The fact is that person is probably just trying to unwind and get a handle on things and you don’t see smokers screaming at Yoga practitioners that their mats are an unpleasant color and so should be removed from their line of sight.

Clean air is a myth; the air we breathe is filthy with pollution whether a smoker is outside or not.  Walking bye a smoker is no more unpleasant than stepping behind an idling car, walking past a gas station, or catching a whiff of a garbage truck. It is just one of life’s little annoyances, and can be seen as chance for our bodies to test themselves against the harshest of elements.

There are those in the medical profession that are looking at this whole smoking thing the completely wrong way I might ad. People go to the hospital when they are sick; doctors and nurses then get paid to make them better. Smoking makes people sick, makes them go to the hospital, and provides doctors with repeat business. You can’t do cancer research without cancer patients.

So now as I draw my little rant to a close I feel compelled to remind the reader that there is no ban on smoking yet, and that this move is a good one. I would like to express a brooding concern for the welfare and freedom of smokers at UMB and our position between a rock and a hard place in our pro-“clean air” community.