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Enjoy That Cigarette While You Can: UC Campuses to Ban Tobacco Products in 2014
Photo by Nuno_Oliveira via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr
Nicotine lovers, take heed: the UC system is banning smoking and chewing tobacco on all ten of its campuses altogether starting in 2014.
The ban, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, is intended to reduce students' and faculty's exposure to second-hand smoke, but it's also to lower the number of kids who take up smoking in college.
"Virtually nobody starts smoking after age 24 or 25," Dr. Stanton Glantz, director of UCSF's Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education told the Chronicle. "If you can get people through the college ages and a little bit past, and they've either not started or they've stopped, then they're pretty well taken care of."
According to the San Jose Mercury News, the move isn't that unusual -- 600 other college campuses in California have also decided to disallow cigarettes.
The ban would apply to everyone who sets foot on campus -- not just students and teachers but visitors, people attending conferences and all university employees.
Not surprisingly, this new rule isn't sitting well with nicotine consumers -- UCLA's Daily Bruin reports that students who smoke are already feeling put out.
“I understand why (the university) would want to have a ban on smoking,” fourth-year student Trenton Szewczyk told the Bruin. “But I don’t like it. It’s a huge inconvenience.”
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