Smokers violated pedestrians’ civil rights

Column by Natalie Voss

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I thought as I walked out of Patterson Office Tower on Thursday afternoon. The crowd was full of smoking students protesting the ban that went into effect.

It’s been much discussed across campus and in the Kernel — I even saw a note scribbled on a flyer in the women’s bathroom in White Hall debating the ban. Personally, I wonder how any student over the age of 13 has enough time to stand in the bathroom and write their stream of consciousness on whatever surface is available, but that is not the point.

If I see one more argument against trouncing smokers’ civil liberties and how a state institution has no right to regulate their behavior, I think I’m going to scream.

Nevermind that university-educated people should be well-informed enough to know they are throwing away money and taking years off their lives by continuing to smoke — if you, know the detriments and choose to do it anyway, it is your choice. But what no one seems to consider here is that it’s my choice not to smoke.

Like many other students, I have asthma. I’m lucky in that it is mild enough so I can walk across camps without being guaranteed a strangling asthma attack, however Thursday I could feel my throat constricting as I walked through the cloud of smoke outside of POT.

I can’t imagine what it is like for students whose respiratory problems are more serious … I would say your civil right to smoke should not interfere with my civil right to breathe.

And as I paused to look at the group of protestors, one girl on the outer edge of the crowd met my eye, scanned my hands for a cigarette and not finding one blew her smoke directly into my face.

She has the right to smoke in protest, but she did not give me the choice to avoid it.

And where were campus police during all this?

I’d say based upon students’ initial reactions to news of the ban they should have been ready for this, but I didn’t see anyone wandering around taking names or writing citations.

I read a quote from Ellen Hahn, co-chair of the Tobacco Free Task Force, in the Nov. 16 Kernel article which said, “It’s not about enforcement.”

So why create a ban you don’t plan to enforce? Unfortunately, the answer to that question wasn’t in the article.

By the time I graduate from this university I will have paid about $64,000 in tuition and fees. I think the university owes me the common courtesy of bothering to ask protesting students to either disperse or show a passersby some respect.

If we can’t rely on UK Police to enforce the rules, and insist on protesting them anyway, that is your decision, your God-given right as an American and I will not tell you, you are wrong for exercising it. All I ask is that you let me exercise mine in peace and fresh air

Natalie Voss is an equine science senior. E-mail opinions@kykernel.com.