Starting Dec. 1, 2015, North Central College will be a smoke-free campus. Smoke free means that the use of any smoke-producing products will be prohibited on campus-owned places, inside and outside. Vapers and e-cigarettes will be prohibited, too.
As America as a nation has been moving toward smoke free, this change was supported by college authorities and there were little to no obstacles on its way to being approved.
Two years ago when Jeremy Gudauskas, associate dean of students, asked the Student Government Association if it was interested in taking a survey of the students about the smoking policy at NCC. The SGA took the survey of 300-400 students and the majority of them answered positively about NCC becoming a smoke-free campus.
“There hasn’t been much opposition to the proposal,” says Gudauskas.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a press release in 2012, saying “60 percent of America’s biggest cities are now smoke free.”
What made NCC finally decide to go smoke-free campus was the “Illinois Smoke Free Campus Act” that was enacted on July 1. All state universities are now smoke free as of July 1, 2015, and “we couldn’t be behind the game,” said Gudauskas.
Smoke free doesn’t mean that people will have to quit smoking. After Dec. 1, smokers will have to go to city-owned streets and parks to smoke.
NCC is going to put urns on college-owned grounds by the sidewalks to prevent cigarette butts from being thrown all around the streets. However, it is inevitable that the smoke will be closer to the houses of campus neighbors.
Some smokers on campus are not against this change. They are already informed of the potential danger that tobacco has to health, as well as the danger of secondhand smoke. For some smokers, smoking is a good stress relief and they keep smoking in spite of the danger to their health.
“It’s a good change, but it’s not like we’re going to stop smoking. Even with the new regulation, it’ll be the same. We are just going to smoke a few feet away from where we are smoking right now,” says Ana Luiza Rebeiro, a student at NCC.
“It’s just a status that NCC wants, in order not to be behind the game, and more importantly, to sound more attractive to the potential students and their parents,” she continued.
More and more campuses nationwide are becoming smoke free and it’s a must-have label to be considered as an up-to-date and health-conscious institution. The odd juxtaposition is that it is not promised that the population of the smokers on campus will decrease.
