On Friday, smoking will be a thing of the past at Chattanooga State Community College.
That’s to everybody’s benefit.
Millennials entering higher education today never knew a time when nearly half of all United States adults smoked (42.4 percent when the Centers for Disease Control first began to keep records in 1965). They can’t recall entering offices where a blue haze of cigarette smoke hung over the room. They won’t remember sharing a meal in a restaurant where smoking was allowed throughout. They can’t fathom sitting in a closed classroom where the instructor smoked.
Today, fewer than 17 percent of U.S. adults smoke. Since it’s legal, it’s still their right to do so, and it ought to remain their right in their homes, in their cars and in the open wherever it’s not otherwise permitted.
Smokers decry the loss of their “rights” with bans of tobacco products in various places, but they rarely consider the “rights” of others to breathe clean air in the workplace, to stay in hotel rooms or rent cars where the odor of previous smokers doesn’t trigger their allergies, to wear clothes not permeated with the smell of cigarettes, or to see highways and byways littered by cigarettes butts casually tossed away.
Compare smoking to overeating. Neither is healthy, but a body must have food to survive. Not so with tobacco. And overeating may harm the one doing it, but it doesn’t prevent others from eating, touch off illnesses by the nearness to it, or stain the clothing of those in the vicinity.
While we support private businesses and individual governments in banning smoking and screening smokers during the hiring process, we also believe the 1990 state law that protects already hired smokers from being fired is correct.
Chattanooga State, meanwhile, deserves additional credit because its ban came at the initiation of a student and not from a Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) edict. No such edict has been made, though other TBR schools such as Cleveland State Community College already have such a ban. Similarly, the University of Tennessee system has not banned smoking but has limited it on its campuses. We’d love to see student-led drives engineer similar bans at other TBR and University of Tennessee system schools.
Since Tennessee is a tobacco-rich state – fourth in production in the country – tobacco use is higher than most states. And while we don’t want to discourage that production, we know the benefits for non-users certainly outweigh those for users.