<p>I simply cannot see how anyone in the income groups where smoking is most prevalent can afford to indulge the habit today. Every morning, in the convenience store where I stop for my coffee, I see people I know stocking up. I know many of these people well enough to know that they don’t make much money.</p>
<p>And here in Illinois, the state legislature just slapped an additional buck a pack tax on cigarettes. At the rate I was smoking before I quit, that would have cost me a thousand dollars a year.</p>
<p>I think that with all the additives in cigarettes it is pretty much they can’t quit, it would be like giving up water.
It’s very pathetic.
Cigarettes also cut appetite, I think some smoke because it is cheaper than eating.
The FDA needs to crack down on the formula, 599 additives? For a nicotine delivery system?
I think it would be much easier for people to quit without them.</p>
<p>SUNY Buffalo has been smoke free for a couple years now. I didn’t really agree with the idea of having the whole campus go smoke free, as it seems pretty much impossible for people to get off campus, smoke a cigarette, and get back on in a reasonable amount of time. Haven’t been on campus lately :), but it did not seem to me as if the smoking ban were being well enforced at all. Not that people were smoking everywhere, but the hard core smokers seemed to get away with ignoring the ban in the usual popular outside areas.</p>
<p>As for not attending a SUNY as an option, where would you have those who can’t afford private schools or OOS schools attend?</p>
<p>No dog in the fight, but when you say “out-of-state students seem to shun the SUNY schools,” I hate to inform you - as an out-of-stater, the absolute only knowledge that I have of any SUNY school is that they are apparently the state universities of New York, there’s a bunch of them in locations that mean nothing to me, and there has never been any more visibility or information about them other than that. So it’s not that out-of-staters are “shunning” them - it’s just that they have zip, zero visibility or meaning outside of the state of New York, that’s all.</p>
<p>Maybe smokers can gee not smoke for a few hours. They manage to not smoke for hours on an airplane, they manage at a wedding, they manage waiting for a interview.</p>
<p>Smokers smell. And for heavens sake it’s not an illness. It’s a habit. It’s a crutch. It’s a coping mechanism, oh I’m so stressed I need to smoke.</p>
<p>Yes the body does get addicted, because the tobacco companies want you to be. However, one can quit if one wants to. The excuses are stupid to keep smoking. </p>
<p>I told my daughters if I ever caught them smoking, I would cut off all extras. Like hair cuts, mani pedis, etc. If they could afford to smoke, then they didn’t need my help for the fun stuff. They both had friends who smoked. My daughters saw how the smoking made them look and smell. That was enough to turn them off to smoking, so my threats weren’t necessary, but I meant it.</p>
<p>If you can’t make it thru the day without smoking that is just pathetic. I feel no compassion for smokers at all.</p>
<p>“Making it harder for them to engage in the addiction will not cure it.”</p>
<p>As an empirical matter, this just isn’t true. The inconvenience and expense prompt many people to take action to defeat their addiction. Public-smoking bans and higher tobacco prices affect both the decision to start smoking and the decision to quit. It is not a coincidence that smoking rates in the US have plummeted since these public health initiatives began. They work.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I always assumed you were a New Yorker! I guess it’s because I don’t know anybody as obsessed with or chauvinistic about pizza as New Yorkers.</p>
<p>Seahorsesrock, I think you’re swinging the pendulum too far the other direction. People who smoke really do suffer when they can’t smoke. And I think it’s heartless to feel no compassion for someone who feels the effects for decades of a bad decision that he made ages ago. I just think that if somebody has to be inconvenienced here, that’s regrettable, but it should be the people who made the bad decision, and not those of us who didn’t. </p>
<p>Pizzagirl, I’m a lot better informed than you might surmise. My tongue-in-cheek remarks about the SUNYs was merely an allusion to the fact that, like most California schools, SUNY schools attract few out-of-state students. Unlike the California colleges, price is not a huge deterrent to OOS students. </p>
<p>Will the smoking ban actually make a SUNY less desirable? To some, probably. To some the ban might make a SUNY more attractive. To 99%+ of high school students it probably makes no difference whatsoever.</p>
<p>I’d agree with pizza girl. I have no knowledge of the quality or number of SUNY schools.
I really hate smoking, nothing like a reformed smoker whose eyes & hearing is going, so smell is one of the few things I have left!
Unlike D, who can’t smell at all.
I do feel for smokers though.
It is an addiction, & many have tried over and over to quit.</p>
<p>They work primarily among educated people who understand the ramifications of smoking. Statistics show that the rates have not affected lower-income people, who theoretically should be more impacted by the economic sanctions, nearly as much.</p>
<p>I am not a smoker, but I have oodles of compassion for anyone who has an expensive, life-threatening addiction. Addiction is a brain disorder, and it is nauseating that corporations are knowingly and eagerly creating products that ensnare people this way in a lethal habit.</p>
<p>Food companies aren’t much better. We can get addicted to all sorts of substances.</p>
<p>I really can’t understand not having compassion, and with my asthma, smoke does affect me directly.</p>
<p>We are all in this leaky boat together. And “there but for the grace of God go I” fits a multitude of situations. (I am not religious, but the metaphor holds.)</p>
<p>Banning smoking on Barnard’s tiny campus is a lot different than at SUNY Buffalo. A Barnard student just has a few steps to get to Broadway, I can’t imagine what a poor person at SUNY Buffalo would do.</p>
<p>Agree about the closed car in the parking lot.</p>
<p>The solution is to put more time, money and resources into curing the mechanisms in the brain that cause addiction. Nicotine patches go only so far.</p>
<p>Ha - I really don’t even like pizza all that much - it is in reference to something in my work life, and a poorly chosen screen name on my part!</p>
<p>When the number of non-smokers who do not want to breathe second-hand smoke is greater than the number of smokers, greater smoking restrictions become a marketing advantage.</p>
<p>“Statistics show that the rates have not affected lower-income people”</p>
<p>That isn’t true. Smoking has declined faster among higher earners and the better educated. But it has declined in every group in the last 20+ years.</p>
<p>Mathmom, at our college, smokers need only be off campus, so they can be seen standing right at the side of the road. I am waiting to hear that someone has been hit by a car grabbing a smoke. I feel bad for the poor people who are addicted.</p>
<p>My mother was a smoker and an aunt, who smoked like a chimney, quit in her seventies. She just passed away…at 93. It is a tough habit to break.</p>
<p>I believe UofM went to a non-smoking campus last year but during our tour we saw smokers outside particularly on North Campus where there are many more international students and in the university hospital area. We asked about that from the tour guides and were told it’s “impossible and cost prohibitive” to enforce outside of the buildings.</p>
<p>Gee, did you not bother to read all the way to the end of the sentence you quoted - you know, where it said “nearly as much” - or did you intentionally quote me out of context?</p>
<p>I’m not picking on Hanna, who is a good contributor to this forum (at least from what I’ve seen), but intentionally quoting out of context seems to be pretty common on CC, particularly on the threads about more controversial topics. Now pardon me while I put on my flak helmet.</p>