Ban up in smoke

More than a month into IU’s first tobacco-free semester, I’ve yet to notice any change. Walking to class most days I still have to find creative routes around people who walk with cigarettes, and every so often I cut through whole packs of smokers. In the beginning I wondered if they were uninformed. But now that seems unlikely. It’s all the IDS talked about for a long while, and everyone got an official e-mail detailing the policy. People are well-aware. \nHowever, considering everyone’s official notice of the policy came in an e-mail that made no reference to punishment, IU’s tobacco rule seems to be a tobacco suggestion. Opponents of this ban have often pointed out that it is unenforceable, but everyone who came to its defense seemed to cite personal responsibility as the reason it would work. If you politely mentioned to a smoker that there is indeed a ban, he would smile and stamp out his cigarette. People don’t seem to realize IUPD issues fines of several hundred dollars to students caught drinking alcohol underage, alcohol they can’t even legally buy. Yet it still isn’t enough incentive to get them to stop. And yet tobacco, which is addictive and readily available, is supposed to be a vice people can purge from their systems, with only a polite suggestion. Users are pariahs already, shooed to the balconies and patio tables of the world, made irritable without what they crave and outcast when they get it. A polite suggestion doesn’t even register.\nSo now, instead of less smoke on campus, there’s just more conflict. People who are vehemently anti-tobacco feel even more animosity towards users because they know legally they are in the right but have no way of enforcing the rules. I’m reminded of many rules we have at IU, which are so far off of the pulse of the community that they don’t even register as legitimate. It’s fitting that in a town that people frequently refer to as “The People’s Republic of Bloomington,” IU administrators create regulations whose sole method of enforcement is the graciousness of offenders. That’s roughly the same reason Communism failed. Most users and many non-users believe that the law infringes upon individual rights, and whether that’s correct is largely irrelevant; the point is, IU has no friends in the nicotine community. They don’t want to cooperate. Fortunately, no one is making them. \nI don’t envy the administration. Considering people wear T-shirts that openly mock its “dry-campus” policy, when it finally gets around to drafting a regulation it cares to enforce, it’s going to have to crack some skulls to be taken seriously. IU would do well to decide which laws it cares to enforce and which ones it has given up on, because if one were to juxtapose unpunished behavior with the supposed rules governing the campus, they might be given reason to fear that the dean fell ill or fled the campus sometime in the past few years and hasn’t come back.