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    Pity the nicotine addict

    10341757_785651334802934_8978077757976073462_nI don't mind people smoking outside, but as one of the 15-20% of the population psychologists are now calling "highly sensitive"* I do find gum chewing incredibly distracting.**

     So this doesn't look good. All the nicotine addicts at LSU are going to walk around furiously chomping little pieces of rubber with their mouths open. Some percentage of them will do that thing where you make the gum snap, irritating even the lowly sensitive people.*** I'll be hiding out in my office blaring FIDLAR.

    On this gum business, it's really weird that the ban will apply to e cigarettes, but not to nicotine gum, even though nicotine gum doesn't really help people quit. The second weird thing there's no enforcement mechanism:

    The policy doesn’t exactly have teeth. Campus police won’t be able to write tickets for smoking, and leaders acknowledge that it will be more of a recommendation to campus visitors and tailgating football fans.

    But Sylvester said she hopes the campus community will take on the role of self-policing to stamp out tobacco.

    “We’re definitely going to use the social-norming approach,” she said. “Seventy percent of us do not use any kind of tobacco products. We are the norm, not the tobacco user.”

    So at best you are going to get all these busy bodies telling people "you can't smoke here," and smokers patiently explaining that actuality implies possibility as they continue to puff away. I don't see this ending well.


    Feh. Where's Roger Scruton when you need him?***

    [Notes:

    *Coming soon to a DSM near you! Nice salon dot com article here.

    **Oprah Winfrey never allowed it on set. Singapore doesn't allow it on island, God bless them.

    ***I'm not neurotic, you're desensitized.

    ***Actually, according to the Guardian, that didn't work out to well either.]

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    6 responses to “Pity the nicotine addict”

    1. Anonymous Grad Avatar
      Anonymous Grad

      They already did this on my campus. As best as I can tell the biggest effect is that there are now more cigarette butts on the ground (since they removed all ash trays and smoker’s poles).

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    2. Another Anon Grad Avatar
      Another Anon Grad

      I have attended two large public state universities, one of which I am currently attending. Smoking on campus is banned at both of them. At the one I used to attend, the policy had some teeth. Apparently, if caught smoking, a hold could be put on your record and you would have to write some sort of essay. Now, at the one I attend, it seems the anti-smoking policy has less teeth – I see more people smoking on campus here then there. It’s possible the same rule is in place here as it is there and I just don’t know about. I think, however, there is one crucial difference. At the one I used to attend, most of the major areas for student traffic on campus are adjacent to roads, and campus police constantly patrolled those roads. At the one I currently attend, that is not the case – many major areas of student traffic either don’t contain roads, or there are just not that many campus police on patrol on the roads that are adjacent to student traffic.

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    3. Anon. Avatar
      Anon.

      Why would the ban apply to nicotine gum? Nicotine gum is no more hazardous or irritating to others than regular chewing gum, and I assume that you don’t propose to ban that as well. (The fact that nicotine gum may be ineffective for smoke cessation is neither here nor there.)

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Actually I’d be very happy if gum were banned, but that wasn’t the point I was trying to make.
      I can’t for the life of me see why it would make sense to ban e-cigs (which are not a tobacco product and which don’t cause second hand smoke) and not ban nicotine gum.

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    5. Joe Avatar
      Joe

      I too want to ban a number of things that annoy me.

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    6. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Yeah, when I’m being maximally reflective (and minimally rattled) I thank God I’ll never have enough power for it to be an issue. Reformation theology teaches that there’s a Caligula* lurking inside all of us. . . I don’t know if that’s really true, but I’d never want to find out in my own case.
      With the smoking thing, I just don’t think that student and colleagues’ physical health is in our remit. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I think that Ed, Jeff, Lisa, Leigh, and Gordon (or Shelley Tremain, for that matter) could all do a much better job explaining why one might take it to be problematic to think that it should be.
      [*Almost wrote “little Caligula” but am thankfully pretentious enough to see the problem. Flashbacks to Muffy Siegel’s work on adjectives and compound nominals, a short basketball player is not short, etc.]

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