AUBG MUST BECOME A SMOKE-FREE CAMPUS
Hi, my name is Ethan and I’m being poisoned.
I’m a student at the American University in Bulgaria. A country with the highest smoking rate in the EU for people above 15 years old.
Some days, it feels like everyone on campus smokes. I can’t enter or exit a school building without being fumigated by a gaggle of students and staff ripping their favorite brand of cancer sticks.
Few people in the world today don’t know that smoking is hazardous for one’s health. Cigarettes have been scientifically proven time and again to cause cancer, amongst other health problems.
Smokers know this too. It’s legally mandated in the EU that cigarette manufacturers print the negative effects of smoking, alongside horribly graphic images of cancerous lungs, milky eyes, dead limbs, and more of its victims.
This doesn’t deter them, however. Smokers who know better all over the world cite that it’s “a personal choice” to subject themselves to cigarettes. Pushback against legal bans on cigarettes — mostly from big tobacco lobbyists — says that it’s up to the individual to decide what habits to keep, healthy or otherwise. To them, it’s about individual freedoms.
But for me, it’s not a choice.
Just by living here and going to school on campus, I’ve become what the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) calls a passive smoker. Passive smokers like myself and every other non-smoker on campus, are predisposed to the same lethal diseases as cigarette smokers because we inhale secondhand smoke left lingering in our atmosphere by them. We cannot escape it.
Even the residential buildings are swarming with smokers. The communal chain smoke is omnipresent at every door leading outside. Every bench that would otherwise be a safe distance from the fumes has two pairs of lungs parked on it, slowly killing themselves. Every balcony where one might salvage some fresh air is occupied by another resident puffing away the air quality.
When it rains, and the smokers pull even closer to the doors to stay under the eaves of the building, the miasma of tobacco, formaldehyde, benzene, tar, and carbon monoxide flood the lobbies.
But according to the NHS, “most secondhand smoke is invisible and odorless.” Even after the smell subsides, the toxins remain in the air.
According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “There is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke; even brief exposure can cause serious health problems.”
I have that brief exposure. Every. Single. Day.
There is no option for people like me. There are no smokers entrances and nonsmokers entrances. Technically speaking, they’re all non-smoking entrances but the rule that prohibits smoke within 10 meters of every door is not enforced at our school.
Where are my individual rights? If smokers get to ruin their health as a personal choice, why don’t I get a choice not to?
One of the biggest things drawing students to AUBG is the American university model, and more American universities than ever before are enacting smoke-free policies on campus to protect nonsmokers’ rights.
The greatest strength of AUBG is our opportunity to choose which aspects of the American model best suit the mission. If we die prematurely, we don’t get to fulfill the mission of the university. It is vital that we hold our university accountable for our safety.
Smoking doesn’t just kill smokers. Protect your friends and loved ones. Quit now.
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Ethan has enjoyed breathing his whole life. He was born and raised on a mountain in the world’s largest ponderosa pine forest full of thin, clean mountain air. In October 2020, he moved to a country that smokes more cigarettes per capita than any other country in the EU to go to university where he advocates for a non-smoking lifestyle. This piece was produced for his Advanced Writing for Media class.
