A day late (and a dollar short) – but here is an entirely predictable response to yesterday’s ODE editorial:

At first glance, the anti-smoking effort may seem like a suppression of freedoms, and one could argue that banning cigarettes from the campus marketplace would restrict the legitimate right of smokers to purchase tobacco products at the University.

I may have missed this in remedial citizenship classes, but I don’t think we have a right to buy tobacco products on campus. Sadly, we also didn’t have the right to drink beer on campus, and so Clancy Thurber’s bit the dust three years ago for no very good reason. The EMU gets to decide if they don’t want to stock something.

But should they stop selling smokes just because the Campus Advisory Board says so? Of course not. Insofar as the university can be expected to have an opinion on health issues, the sale of cigarettes certainly doesn’t mean that the institution is blind to the consequences of smoking them. For God’s sake, how many warnings have to be put on the pack before the “not an endorsement” angle becomes sufficiently clear?

And after several inches of blather about health risks, the editorial concludes with:

…the University’s mission statement makes no specific mention of a responsibility to physical health of students….

Well, exactly. Keep selling cigarettes, and – come to think – reopen Clancy Thurber’s, too. I command it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2004 at 14:08 by olly and is filed under Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.