Even in the 1973 Brownsville Station hit song "Smokin' in the Boys' Room," a lyric noted that "everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school."
Now that smoking really isn't allowed in the enclosed portion of Tennessee public secondary schools, lawmakers should take the next step and prohibit tobacco on school grounds.
Currently, the 2000 law allows adult staff members to smoke outdoors but not within 50 feet of any entrance to the building. It also allows adults to light up on school grounds after school hours but not where they would block any entrance to any building and not in any public seating area, bleachers for sporting events or public restrooms.
It's not a big jump to the tobacco ban, which is the desire for organizations such as TNSTRONG (Tennessee Stop Tobacco and Revolutionize Our New Generation).
Student members of that organization want to make a presentation at a meeting of the Hamilton County Board of Education and explain their goal of making the next generation of Tennesseans tobacco-free. The school board can't supersede state laws on tobacco policies, but members could give the suggestion their stamp of approval.
Currently, 11.5 percent of high school students smoke (though it's unlawful for persons under the age of 18 to possess a tobacco or vapor product), and 21.7 percent use e-cigarettes, which nevertheless contain addictive nicotine. Of adults, 22.1 percent, between one in four and one in five, smoke.
So, members of TNSTRONG have their work cut out for them, but in the meantime they also want to impress a few facts on students' minds.
Such as:
» Although the tobacco industry no longer can pay for product placement in movies, characters thought to be strong or cool are often depicted as smoking. And, according to a U.S. surgeon general's report, research has shown that such images influence young people.
» About 42 percent of video games, according to a 2015 study, featured characters smoking cigarettes, cigars, e-cigarettes or other products, or who made references to those products or smoking devices. The representation of tobacco use in games is depicted as largely positive and is likely more influential than that in movies, an executive of Truth Initiative, a tobacco-control advocacy organization, told CNN in 2016.
» E-cigarettes are marketed as less harmful to the body than tobacco products, and while their relatively recent proliferation hasn't allowed for long-term studies, they almost all have nicotine, which has been shown to have a negative impact on adolescent brain development and even some lasting cognitive and behavioral impairments.
There's also this: The portion of cancer deaths in Tennessee attributable to smoking is 32.9 percent, almost a third.
For the last statistic alone, we hope the powers that be can see their way toward making a school grounds tobacco ban a reality.