April 19, 2008 6:51 AM

Because it's the right thing to do...and for the right reasons

MY NEW HERO #108: Victoria Galanopoulos

Gone, thankfully, are the days when a popular, exquisitely cool University of Oregon professor was known for chain-smoking Gauloises throughout his lectures on Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, the professor was fond of pointing out, smoked the French-made Gauloises, too. Years later, of course, Sartre died of a lung tumor, people got smarter about the hazards of tobacco and professors and students are mercifully prohibited from lighting up in classrooms at most U.S. colleges. The smokers have been moved outdoors. At Portland Community College, Student Body President Victoria Galanopoulos wants to change that. She and a PCC task force, backed by the American Lung Association of Oregon, want to snuff smoking anywhere on the college's campuses, including the outdoor entryways where smokers now gather.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention for any length of time that I'm virulently anti-smoking. As I do virtually every time I broach the subject, I will toss in the obligatory disclaimer: I virulently and inflexibly oppose that act of smoking, not those addicted to the cancer sticks.

What angers me most about smoking is secondhand smoke. If you want to slowly commit suicide, that's one thing, but you possess no right to force your smoke into the same air that I must take into my lungs. I've pissed off a number of people with this assertion, but my right to breathe clean, untobaccofied air trumps your right to smoke. If you're somewhere where I will not be impacted by your secondhand smoke...well, knock yourself out.

This is exactly why I'm so excited about Portland Community College seriously looking at making all of their campuses smoke-free. Despite what anyone might think, smoking is not a "right". Cigarette smoke doesn't respect boundaries; it can't tell a "smoking" section from a "non-smoking" one. If you're smoking in a public place, everyone in the vicinity is "enjoying" that cigarette right along with you. That, to me, is the height of disrespect. There is a "right" to smoke only insofar as the secondhand smoke produced isn't inhaled by those in the vicinity of a smoker. If you have to walk through a designated smoking area in order to get to where you need to be, your health is being jeopardized against your will and without your consent.

There aren't many things I'm truly militant about. Smoking is most definitely at the top of that list. Having grown up with a father that smoked, and having been forced to inhale his secondhand smoke for years, I've developed an intense resentment of those smokers who care more about feeding their addiction than the well-being of those around them. Having lived and worked in parts of the former Yugoslavia, where smoking is the national sport, well, that certainly did nothing to improve my attitude toward smoking.

Students at PCC- and, really, anyone in any public area- have the right to be able to expect to breathe clean, untobaccofied air. Nonsmokers should be, and in the case of Victoria Galanopoulos, are demanding that this right not only be respected, but codified into the rules governing public areas.

You go, girl....

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on April 19, 2008 6:51 AM.

This is how we support our troops?? was the previous entry in this blog.

Yes, kids...you, too, can have a rewarding career as a drug-addled, brain-dead headline writer is the next entry in this blog.

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