Just Illumination

By DAVE MACCAR

Smoking stigma

On this campus, a cigarette smoker carries a worse stigma than a heroin addict. At least in some circles that statement is true. It is not only this campus, it is everywhere—restaurants, malls, and even (if you can believe it) bars. Everyone is anti-smoking. Sure, there are good reasons, like imminent death, noxious odor, cancer clouds and LA-like smog. But we are talking about a legal substance that may be purchased and used by anyone 18 or over.

It should be up to the discretion of restaurant proprietors or any business owners whether they allow smoking in their establishments. In California, this right is being stripped away. Beer-guzzling beasts can go down to their favorite watering hole and throw back a healthy pitcher of brain cell-killing brew, but they absolutely cannot light up a Marlboro in the Sunshine State, not inside the bar at least. There is now talk of bringing this kind of legislation to the East Coast.

Walk into any restaurant and note the size of the smoking section. You will be hard-pressed to even find one, especially in a new restaurant that is not a diner or attached to a bar. The smokers are being ostracized—banished to the chill of winter for a few precious drags, with one hand plunged firmly into a coat pocket, and the other formed into a frozen claw, carefully balancing a cigarette between numb fingers.

The most interesting thing is, no one really cares. Non-smokers are overjoyed that they do not have to make the awful choice of sitting with the smokers or waiting for a table; now they have all the tables. Smokers accept their fate and leave the smokes in the car. They know they have been annoying the hell out of people for years. They see those annoyed hand waves and the unnecessary, fake coughs that non-smokers display when reluctantly in the company of smokers.

I can handle all the ostracizing, the banning of smoking in restaurants and bars; these things I could eventually accept. What I cannot accept is hypocrisy, and there is an ambiguous little batch baking up right here at ol’ Rider University.

Ok, this is not a dry campus. In New Jersey a person must be 21 years old to legally purchase alcohol. Roughly half of Rider’s student population falls into that age group, yet we have a place, and entire entity called the Rider Pub that serves alcohol three nights a week. Strangely enough, cigarettes, which can be legally purchased by nearly all of the students at Rider, cannot be found in one single place on this campus on any day of the week.

However, we are permitted to smoke in our dorms and in the Pub at any time. Why is there no place to purchase cigarettes on this campus? Is it because the administration knows that smokers would burn through their Bronc Bucks in a week if they sold cartons at the C-Store, or that they do not want to propagate student smoking? But student drunkenness is just fine. It is a petty and ridiculously trivial matter, I admit, but that is me.

Just something to think about, friends.