She stepped out bravely from the double doors that guard the 1902 Room just as I shuffled out of Sanborn's back exit, my chin tucked as far into my scarf as humanly possible. In a sweeping and practiced motion, she extracted an open pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her back pocket, tapped the cardboard carton to her palm, and brought a small, white roll to her lips. She muttered an expletive as she turned her back to the wind and used her hand to cup the flame that curled atop the lighter. I walked past just slowly enough to notice she had trimmed her knitted gloves to not lose dexterity in her fingers while keeping them warm. She was no stranger to the winter cigarette break.
If you were to sit on the steps that lead up to the very same overhang and count the students who stepped out of the library for a quick smoke throughout the course of a day, you would likely watch the sun set before hitting double digits. The girl I passed on my way into the library is just one member of a minority of students on Dartmouth's campus who are likely to identify themselves as "smokers."
Even fewer would go so far as to identify themselves as "chain-smokers." Yet, puffing through a pack a day, Eli Rachovitsky '13 openly acknowledges his place within this category. He also recognizes that the average Dartmouth student smokes "far less" than he does."There used to be a saying that if you wanted your kid not to smoke, you should send him to college," said psychology professor Todd Heatherton, who has collaborated on research regarding tobacco use in adolescent youths. "As smoking went down dramatically in the '80s and '90s, it became really uncommon to see college students smoking."Like many campuses across the country, Dartmouth was quick to respond to the urgent warnings about the health risks of cigarette smoke. A signed notice by College President Ernest Martin Hopkins, who served from 1916 to 1945, requested that "smoking be avoided in recitation rooms and recitation halls." In 1975, students favored the prohibition of smoking in the classroom two-to-one, with approximately one-third of the undergraduates represented in the vote."Very few Dartmouth students back then smoked cigarettes," John Donaghy '75, a writing professor, recalled of his undergraduate years.Until recently, most campuses have been satisfied with a regulation to ban smoking in shared work areas. Yet over 1,000 colleges have come to adopt policies that forbid smoking anywhere within their campus borders, even in public areas, Fox Business recently reported.When asked whether smoking should be banned at Dartmouth, Noah Smith '15, a nonsmoker, responded that instating such a policy could enable the College to set more invasive decrees in the future.
"It sets a precedent of the school deciding what is bad for your health," Smith said.
Alex Velaise '15, agreed that students should have the freedom to decide their own behavior.
"America is in a trend where it's not socially acceptable to smoke anymore, but it's a matter of principle," Velaise said. "We're all adults, so we should be able to make our own choices." Heatherton mentioned that the justification for smoking bans on college campuses often has less to do with preventing students from smoking of their own will then creating an environment that respects non smokers' rights to not be harmed by toxic tobacco fumes.
Maggie Tierney '14 rolled up her sleeve to expose two pink cigarette burns she received on her right hand during a night out at Bones Gate fraternity last Wednesday.
"I'm not gong to be offended if you're smoking outside the library because I can avoid you," Tierney said. "But when you choose to smoke in a basement or any type of enclosed space, and you then elect to flail your arms around and accidentally burn the people around you, it's just not okay."
Like Tierney, many students interviewed indicated that they had certainly encountered inconsiderate cigarette smokers while at Dartmouth. However, these episodes pale in comparison to the insensitivity of European smokers.
Velaise, who spent his winter term working at a bank in Europe, noted that most adolescents there smoke incessantly. He described how half of the men and women he worked with took regular, hour-long smoking breaks sanctioned by the bank, as each floor was evenly divided into designated smoking and non-smoking areas.
"Coming back to Dartmouth, I noticed that smoking isn't ingrained as a part of American culture," Velaise said.
Smith, who spent winter in Paris on the French Foreign Study Program, agreed with Velaise's assessment. He noticed that smoking is less stigmatized in Europe than in the United States.
"It was completely different. In France, even people who looked like they were 14 smoked," Smith said. "If you see of-age people smoking on campus, you just look at them funny."
In fact, at least some of the stigma that he refers to was born right here at Dartmouth. Since the mid-'90s, Heatherton has collaborated with Geisel School professor James Sargent to document the portrayal of smoking in popular Hollywood films and its influence on adolescents. The study revealed that 95 percent of 600 popular films from 1988 to 1997 featured tobacco use, and adolescents who routinely watch these movies are more likely to smoke themselves.
Heatherton theorizes that the national attention directed at similar findings indirectly led to the decline of smoking in movies in the last decade. A more recent study published by the researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated a drop in adolescent smoking in accordance with the drop of tobacco use in film.
For reasons that aren't entirely understood, through there may be fewer frequent smokers than in past decades, there appear to be far more "occasional" smokers than ever before. Some students, like Tierney, are strongly opposed to "social smoking," but many more don't see the harm in lighting up every once in awhile.
"We have smart people here who know that it's not the case that having one cigarette is going to kill you," Heatherton said. "But that one cigarette makes it so much more likely that you'll have another one, and another one... and we do know that will probably get you."
