MANKATO — From the smoking lounge to the Rugby pitch, college students agree: an all-out smoking ban at Minnesota State University would be a bad idea.
The survey being conducted at MSU isn't done yet. But informally, from the few interviewed last week, students are saying they don't favor a ban. They also aren't sure many of the alternatives hinted at in the survey — such as building more $10,000 smoking shelters — are worth much.
"That's stupid," Janelle Johnson, a freshman and smoker from Sioux Falls, S.D., said of the smoking shelters. "You could do so much more with that money. Like pave the parking lots because the parking lots suck."
Johnson was hanging out in the little room in MSU's Centennial Student Union called the smoking lounge. She and friends Johanna Bergland and Christina Doherty, all smokers, had just a few minutes earlier discovered the smoking lounge.
While the smoking lounge itself likely will soon become extinct — either by way of Mankato's recently passed smoking ban, or by way of the next phase of CSU remodeling — smokers will not. That's why the time has come to figure out what people really want the smoking situation on campus to be.
Research, meanwhile, indicates that the number of people smoking is not going down.
Center for Disease Control statistics show that about 22.5 percent of all adults smoke cigarettes. In the 18-24 age range, that number jumps to 28.5 percent.
MSU also keeps statistics. Wendy Schuh, an MSU alcohol and drug educator, said that when regular and occasional smokers are lumped together, roughly 33 percent of MSU students smoke. Also, Schuh said that of all young people who try smoking, nearly half go on to become regular smokers, and many of them start when they're drinking.
"Get 'em drunk and they're like, 'Give me a cigarette,'" Johnson said.
Added Doherty, "And these are all our friends who yell at us for smoking."
Schuh also sits on the committee responsible for the survey. The committee is examining the campus tobacco policy and may make changes. She said there's a trend across the country of colleges going tobacco free.
There's also a cost issue. MSU building service manager Don Duehring told The Free Press recently that, between worker time and the cost of a cigarette butt-sucking machine, MSU spends the equivalent of a full-time position dealing just with cigarette butts.
So the cons of smoking are plenty. But a total ban?
"I think that's stupid," said Bergland, a freshman and smoker from Moorhead. "I understand at restaurants because there's kids there and stuff."
A lot of elements on campus, the smokers said, contribute to the smoking problem, or perception of a problem.
Bergland, a resident of the Gage residence complex, said she routinely flouts the rule that all smokers must remain at least 15 feet from the entrance. And while she smokes there an average of four times each day, only once since she arrived in August has someone told her to back away. Even then the person who told her left before making sure Bergland complied.
Even non-smokers say an all-out ban would be bad.
Freshman Monica VinZant of St. Paul, playing softball with friends on the campus rugby pitch, said the results would be very bad.
"I don't think it's a very good idea," she said. "You can't ask somebody to quit right away. You'd have a lot of cranky students. And you'd have a lot less people coming to this school."
Fellow softballer Charlie Boyshek agreed.
"(Smoking) really doesn't bother me," he said. "It'll probably do more bad than good to ban it altogether."
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