By From The Chronicle

Everyone on this campus should have the right to a smoke-free environment, but they don’t.

In the past three years there has been sweeping progress in limiting the public’s exposure to secondhand smoke and now it’s time for the University to catch up with the rest of the country.

The wide-scale banning of smoking in restaurants, bars and other public places is a signal that people are finally realizing the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Smokers seem to feel that it’s their personal right, as if it were a civil liberty, to puff wherever they like, but smoking in public harms more than just the person at the end of the filter.

Secondhand smoke kills 53,000 people each year. That means for every eight smokers that die each year from cigarette smoke, so does one nonsmoker.

The University is now considering drastic changes to improve its smoking policy. An old policy of “non-smoking floors” seems to have morphed into “you can smoke in you’re room if it’s okay with your roommate.” Anyone who lives on a floor with a smoke is simply at risk; smoke cannot be contained to a single dorm. It’s time to simply ban smoking in all dorms.

Far more importantly because more people are exposed, smoking needs to be prohibited near the entrances of buildings. Smokers who linger near buildings force anyone entering or exiting to walk through clouds of cigarette smoke. This problem is particularly an issue at the south campus entrance to the unispan and the north campus entrance to the student center.

Limiting, if not eliminating, smoking on campus is a matter of public safety and it’s an embarrassment that the school has allowed it for so long. It should be a public safety initiative to prohibit smoking within 20 feet of the entrance to any building and enforce the rules.

Smokers do not have the right to endanger the lives of others. It’s that simple.