When Laura Buchta started to smoke cigarettes this past March, she didn’t think she would get addicted. She said she was only dabbling.

‘Then I was really frustrated with life, after an argument with my ex,’ Buchta said.

Buchta, a graduate student in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, said before then, she was smoking with friends socially. ‘And now I enjoy it. One of these days I know I’ll quit.’

According to a USA Today article in 2007, 31 percent of college students smoke, compared to 25 percent of people in the country who smoke.

‘It’s their (smokers) prerogative, but it’s not good,’ said Rebecca Kirschner, a junior child and family studies major and non-smoker at Syracuse University. ‘It isn’t good for them, and it isn’t good for the people who are around them.’

Despite the known hazards of smoking cigarettes, students are continuing to light up. Many colleges and federal acts are putting bans or restrictions on smoking areas and limiting the sales of cigarettes to young people.

Over 300 colleges already have smoke-free campuses, according to the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, and many more permit it in very limited areas on campus.

SU has tried to curb the impact that smoking has on non-smokers. The school has an official policy on alcohol, tobacco and other drugs, which prohibits smoking in campus buildings, and has a $2,000 fine for any person who does not abide by these rules.

In contrast, the State University of New York at Buffalo has implemented a smoking ban on the whole campus. Currently, smoking is only permitted in parking lots more than 100 feet from campus buildings, but starting August 2010 the campus will be 100 percent smoke free.

These campuses report on their Web sites that they have set up services to help students quit smoking so that the bans will be easier to endure. The bans are meant to stop people under the age of 24 from smoking,

This has also become a goal for the whole country. President Barack Obama recently passed an act to increase cigarette taxes. He has also gotten Congress, and even Philip Morris USA, the producers of Marlboro cigarettes, onboard to adopt his new Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. This bans the sale of flavored tobacco and relinquishes many responsibilities to the FDA to increase federal control on packaging and regulating cigarette additives. According to FoxNews.com, Philip Morris USA has increased the price of Marlboro cigarettes by 71 cents, and their smaller brands by 81 cents, to offset the deficits expected by the April 2009 federal tax increases of 62 cents per pack. Philip Morris USA and the Obama Administration’s acts not only attempt to lower the smoking impact on young people, they hope to lower smoking rates in all citizens, especially families and students. Local CVS salesperson Brian Roach said, ‘(Increases in prices) defeat the purpose. They (Philip Morris) lose smokers.’ He notes that sales have recently gone down, after the price boosts were recognized. He thinks this is a direct result of increases in the price of packages of cigarettes, and the government upping the tax on the packs.

Roach also notes Onondaga County’s raise in the legal age to buy cigarettes as another direct cause of decrease in sales.

‘The smoking age is now 19, and most people from other parts of the country don’t realize that,’ Roach said. ‘We ID everyone.’

Haley Behre, a sophomore magazine journalism major, has been smoking since she was 16, and does not agree with the changes.

‘I think it (the raise in age to buy cigarettes in Onondaga County) was dumb,’ Behre said.

Behre thought she could buy cigarettes once she turned 18 but said, ‘Then I had to wait a whole other year to buy them.’ Despite the age-constraining laws, Behre is able to get her hands on cigarettes from friends who are older.

Many like Behre want to quit but cant. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that only about 12 percent of adolescent smokers that wish to quit are actually successful – a small percentage considering that more than 440,000 people die annually in the United States from smoking.

‘Yeah, I have wanted to quit,’ Behre said. ‘I don’t know, sometimes I get stressed out, and it helps with the stress. I can quit for a day or two.’

scschoen@syr.edu

Published on October 4, 2009 at 12:00 pm