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Smoking ban on campus counterproductive |
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By Tettyana Jasli
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Sep. 14 2010 |
The second-floor corridor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences building 1 (AS1) used to see students congregating along the drains to grab a cigarette break in between lessons, or at the benches to meet up while enjoying a smoke.
It was affectionately known as the “dungeon” amongst its frequenters.
Now, the benches have been removed and the drains cleared.
Smokers no longer congregate, although the occasional rebel hovers around the corner at the end of the corridor, stealing a puff.
Instead, a sign has been put up by the university administration next to the lockers. It reads in bold: “Please be considerate to non-smokers. Classrooms in this area are affected by your smoking. This is a non-smoking campus, and we thank you for not smoking.”
At the bottom right hand corner of the sign is the faint but still visible signs of where someone scrawled with a black marker “Eat Shit Bureaucracy.”
It has since been whitewashed over.
When the sign was first put up, there was similar scribbling next to the sign like “Good try but try harder” and “The Right to Smoke.”
These have also since been cleaned off.
It is apparent that student smokers are not pleased with the attempts by the university administration to clamp down on smoking on campus.
This is apparent even on online mediums like Facebook where in jest, some have set up a Facebook group called NUSSA, which stands for National University of Singapore Smokers’ Association.
It is a play on NUSSU, which stands for the National University of Singapore Students’ Union.
According to the write-up on the group’s Facebook page, smokers in NUS are students too, and thus they should be accorded rights as students to have their own space.
NUS has been declared as a smoke-free campus since 1998, but it is only recently that the administration has been taking stronger action against errant offenders.
The University’s no-smoking policy is outlined under the Code of Student Conduct circulated by the Office of Student Affairs.
First offenders are issued warning or reprimand letters and repeated offences may be followed up with a possible fine.
But it is unclear whether the administration’s efforts will be effective.
“Physically it is a big campus, so there are always going to be places to smoke,” agreed fourth-year Economics major Raghurathman Uthaman.
The resulting effect has been to push student smokers deeper into the school in search of other spots to light up, which has been counterproductive.
Smoking is an addictive habit, and the demand for smoking spots is thus “inelastic.”
“Inelastic” denotes a term in Economics whereby when the market price of a good rises, the corresponding fall in the demand of the good is less than proportionate to the rise in the price.
The stronger ban is likely to have put off a less than proportionate number of smokers.
The majority of NUS students whom The Campus Observer spoke to said they were fine with smoking on campus, as long as it was limited to certain spots.
According to fourth-year History major Yasmeen Hussain, “I guess it’s okay if they all do it in one place so they do not affect non-smokers with second hand smoke.”
In an interview with The Campus Observer last year, Professor Tan Ern Ser, who is currently Vice-Dean of Student Affairs at NUS, said the problem is a lack of space.
The university cannot justify finding a room especially for smokers as it is unsure whether providing a space for smokers will be violating any rule, he said.
In August 1997, the National Environment Agency (NEA) included all universities to the list of places where smoking is prohibited in Singapore.
“If we can find a space somewhere that will not cause non-smokers to have secondary smoke, then I don’t see why not,” Tan said.
Tan however conceded that he was “personally against it” as it was “smelly” and “affects people in the vicinity.”
Still, he acknowledged that there is room for dialogue.
In response to why there are no designated smoking areas on campus, NUSSU states on its website that “the University wishes to send a clear message that smoking is strongly discouraged anywhere on campus.”
However, it concedes that the no-smoking policy on campus is “enforced primarily by social conscience."
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