Colleges asked to ban tobacco on campus

Current smoking policies

Clark State Community College: Tobacco prohibited in all buildings, school vehicles, immediate areas of buildings.

University of Cincinnati: Smoking prohibited indoors, school vehicles and within 25 feet of building entrances. Designated smoking areas provided.

University of Dayton: Smoking prohibited indoors and within 15 feet of doorways, windows and ventilation systems.

Miami University: Smoking prohibited on campus. Smokeless tobacco not included in policy.

Ohio State University: Smoking prohibited indoors and in several tobacco-free zones.

Wittenberg University: Smoking prohibited indoors and within 25 feet of doorways, windows and ventilation systems.

Sinclair Community College: Smoking permitted in designated outdoor areas. Prohibited outside the buildings at the Englewood, Huber Heights and Preble County Learning Centers.

The Ohio Board of Regents voted unanimously Monday to encourage all public campuses to prohibit tobacco products on their properties. Now it is up to the schools to decide to implement the proposed ban.

It is a “vital change” needed to curb the state’s smoking rate because virtually all smokers say they started the habit by age 26, said Mari-jean Siehl, of the Ohio Department of Health.

The regents,

which coordinates higher education in Ohio, cannot make the ban a requirement.

Ohio’s colleges would add to the list of at least 774 schools nationwide that have smoke-free policies, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation. Regionally, Miami University has banned smoking since 2008. In all, the public higher education system in Ohio has more than 539,000 students.

“This issue has been under discussion for years. It’s now time for action,” said James Tuschman, chair of the Board of Regents.

Chancellor Jim Petro said “compelling statistics” are behind the decision to encourage tobacco-free campuses. But, his own experience also motivates him to support the change.

Petro said he might not have started smoking if Denison University had a campuswide ban when he tried his first cigarette there in the 1960s. Petro smoked for 40 years, and was diagnosed in 2009 with laryngeal cancer that could have been caused by smoking. He is cancer-free now.

“I regret the fact that when I went off to college I started smoking. It obviously took its toll on me,” he said. “It’s an addiction. Once you start, it’s very hard to quit. Take it from me.”

Colleges across the country are enacting bans without adverse consequences and without people claiming a loss of freedom, Petro said. Ohio is recommending smokeless tobacco also be banned because the state is a popular test market for the products.

In Ohio, there have been 10,270 new cases of lung cancer this year – 7,530 of those resulting in death, according to the American Cancer Society. Nationwide, $96 billion is spent on smoking-related health care, with $4.98 billion the result of second-hand smoke.

Currently 27 percent of college-age Ohioans smoke. A campuswide smoking ban — even when lightly enforced — can cut that rate and reduce the number of cigarettes smokers consume on a daily basis, researchers at Indiana University found when they compared their smoke-free campus to nearby Purdue University, which does not have that policy.

“There’s a lot of evidence that shows that these kinds of policies are effective in decreasing smoking,” said researcher Jon Macy. “There’s reason to be optimistic that a tobacco-free campus policy will have some sort of effect on reducing smoking behavior among college students.”

It is not immediately clear if or when individual colleges will consider the state’s recommendation. Some officials, even at private university not overseen by the regents, expressed support for going tobacco-free.

“On a personal level, I believe strongly there is overwhelming scientific evidence that smoking causes enormous harm both to smokers and to those around them,” said Steven Johnson, president of Sinclair Community College, which has 25,000 students.

Urbana University, a private school with about 1,300 students, will consider voluntary adherence to the policy, said President Stephen Jones.

“We acknowledge that smoking negatively affects individual wellbeing, impacts the immediate environs near the areas where we do permit outdoor smoking, and imposes huge societal costs for health care and worker productivity,” Jones said.

Clark State Community College will have discussions in its safety committee and student, faculty and staff senates, said spokeswoman Jennifer Dietsch. The public college, with about 5,000 students, updated its policy this spring to prohibit smokeless tobacco in all buildings and designated non-smoking areas, Dietsch said.

Ohio State University, with nearly 57,000 students, will take the state recommendation “under careful consideration.”

At least seven campuses in Ohio already prohibit smoking. The private, Christian Cedarville University, with 3,300 students, does not allow students to even possess tobacco products on campus.

State law currently prohibits smoking within 25 feet of building entrances and inside all buildings. Wright State University and the University of Cincinnati recently reviewed their smoking policies, which follow state law, and students or faculty did not favor campuswide tobacco bans.

At the University of Cincinnati, where buildings are tightly spaced, state law effectively makes most of campus smoke-free, said Richard Harknett, former chair of the University of Cincinnati Faculty Senate. UC has more than 42,000 students and is the largest employer in Cincinnati with more than 9,800 on the payroll, not including students.

The university reviewed its policy last year, and faculty and students decided to spread awareness of the current policy, which is not always followed, Harknett said.

The University of Dayton spokeswoman Cilla Shindell said, “because much of the campus includes public right of way, a campus-wide ban would be difficult to enforce; we will continue to study the issue.” The university is a private institution with 11,000 students.

Wright State, with 18,300 students, has been discussing its smoking policy since March. In student government, the discussion has been to create designated smoking zones instead of a complete smoking ban so people living in the residence halls and on-campus apartments do not have to go off campus to smoke, said former WSU student president Paul Reed. “The students are interested in doing something different than what the Ohio Revised Code is now because of a lot of students have smoke allergies, or asthma or don’t want to be around smoke,” he said.