Smoking has become one of the champion causes of the public health sphere. And for good reason: It’s the number one preventable cause of death and accounts for nearly $100 billion in health care expenditures. Smokers have an average lifespan of 13 to 14 years lower than nonsmokers. The facts pile on.

The University’s campus-wide smoking ban, a complement to the recent statewide smoking initiative that banned cigarette and cigar use in workplaces and restaurants, took effect on July 1 of this year. The ban allows smoking only on sidewalks adjacent to public roads on campus and in the privacy of one’s own vehicle.

Nevertheless, disparities exist within the ranks of cancer-causing agents. According to a recent report released by the World Health Organization, tobacco, along with 106 other chemicals and activities, has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, meaning that it has been strongly implicated as a causation of cancer. Though some of these agents are highly regulated under national standards, like radon and mustard gas — some of them are not, such as Chinese salted fish, the occupational hazard as a painter and postmenopausal estrogen therapy.

So what is it about smoking that makes it so insulting to society? What makes tobacco so different, to the extent that it caused the University to spend more than $240,000 on banning the activity from campus? University professors, officials and students share their perspectives on the new culture of health the University aims to promote through the Smoke-Free Initiative.

What is a ban?

Nationwide efforts to curtail tobacco use have been steadily gaining momentum over the past decade. The University’s smoking ban is certainly not a unique one, as the University of Kentucky, University of Iowa and University of Maine, in addition to the University’s own Medical School, have enacted smoke-free initiatives on their campuses prior to this summer.

Part of the smoking ban’s goals have been “to help change the view of tobacco and cigarettes, which has been painted as just a normal part of life by the cigarette industry for more than a century,” said Cliff Douglas, adjunct lecturer in the School of Public Health and director of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network.

In other words: it's a norm shift. The ban seeks to transform smoking from a publicly accepted activity into something a little more taboo.

“People who smoke feel badly about it,” said Prof. Ken Warner, the former dean of the School of Public Health and co-chair of the Smoke Free University Steering Committee. “They want to hide it.”

Warner noted that to some extent, the ban could be enacted because the majority of University members did not smoke and looked upon the habit in a negative light. Even those who did engage in the activity had expressed a desire to quit.

In fact, without support from the community, Warner said a ban might have not been the best method to reduce tobacco use at the University.

“It’s certainly more difficult where it’s more common,” he said. “In a place where 50 percent of the people smoke, and nobody sees it as a serious problem, and you adopt a policy like that arbitrarily, it probably would not succeed.”

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this policy is that it is not formally enforced. Besides a report to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution and a subsequent mediation process, students can light up within the vicinity of classroom buildings and still escape relatively unscathed.

According to Chief Health Officer Robert Winfield, there have been no incidents brought to the Office of Student Conflict Resolution since the ban was implemented. Nevertheless, it's evident that the ban has not been 100 percent effective. Many students still smoke on the Diag and Michigan Union steps.