UM looks at other tobacco-free campuses

The University of Montana is gearing up to become a tobacco-free campus by fall 2011 and it is not alone in its effort to ban tobacco products on school grounds — 172 other college campuses across the nation have done the same thing.
And not just colleges are taking such initiatives.
Designating tobacco-free grounds is becoming a “mega-trend,” said Clare Lemke, coordinator of the Montana Tobacco Free Medical Campus Project that helped four local hospitals go tobacco-free on Oct. 1.
“When I started this position in fall of 2007, there were three hospitals with tobacco-free campuses and by the end of November (there will be) 30,” Lemke said. “That’s just about half of the hospitals in the state.”
Along with the 172 tobacco-free university campuses nationwide, there are at least another 322 smoke-free campuses, said Julee Stearns, UM health promotion specialist and chair of the UM Tobacco Task Force that drafted the University’s tobacco-free plan. These tobacco-free university and hospital campuses serve as models for UM’s plan.
The plan is framed similarly to one used by Oklahoma State University, a school with more than 21,000 students that went tobacco-free last year, Stearns said. In her research, Stearns focused particularly on Oklahoma State as an example of how UM can successfully implement a tobacco-free campus using a “phase-in” plan. That phase-in will include gathering more feedback this semester and going to the faculty and staff senates in the spring.
President George Dennison sent an e-mail to the campus community Monday to inform students and faculty of the plan, and the ASUM Senate voted in support of it on Oct. 7. Education and development will continue until full implementation in 2011.
Yvon Fils-Aimé, a tobacco health educator with Oklahoma State’s University Health Services, said enforcing the tobacco ban at his university hasn’t been difficult and officials haven’t seen many students smoking on campus since it took effect last year.
Oklahoma State is an agricultural and mechanical university with a rodeo culture that is tolerant of chewing tobacco, Fils-Aimé said. In a 2006 survey, about 33 percent of students there said they used a tobacco product within the past 30 days.
Fils-Aimé said that if Oklahoma State can implement a smoking ban, any school can.
A few months after the policy was implemented in July 2008, tobacco use at Oklahoma State dropped from 33 percent to about 23 percent, he said.
“We cannot be a healthy campus with tobacco,” Fils-Aimé said, adding that every day 1,200 people die from tobacco use. While some argue it’s their personal right to smoke or chew tobacco, he said, this personal choice doesn’t trump the university’s responsibility to provide a healthy campus for all.
Aside from the harms of secondhand smoke, chewing tobacco use has the potential to be unhealthy for others as well, Fils-Aimé said. Spit bottles are sometimes left around campus full of saliva that can transmit disease to other students and university employees that have to clean up the mess, he said.
Fils-Aimé disagreed with Oklahoma students who argued that banning tobacco on campus oppressed the minority – smokers – saying that the university has a right to protect the health of non-smokers from secondhand smoke regardless of the number of smokers.
Though the university encountered some resistance, enrollment wasn’t negatively affected and only increased following the ban, Fils-Aimé said. The school didn’t experience a drop in the number of applicants for student housing, he said.
His only regret is not fining students for smoking on campus. Some students have complained to him that it’s unfair that people breaking the rules don’t get penalized.
Maintenance and insurance costs also played a role in turning Oklahoma State tobacco-free.
While designated “smoking zones” were considered as an alternative to the tobacco-free plan, research showed that those areas are rarely used, Fils-Aimé said. It’s difficult to get insurance for structures in smoking areas and cleaning these areas costs money and poses a health threat to maintenance workers, he said. A structure-less “smoking zone” was designated on the Oklahoma State campus for the year following the plan’s implementation at the request of a faculty committee, but it has since been taken out.
Mary Windecker, director of strategic planning and spokesperson for Community Medical Center, said the hospital campus went tobacco-free on Oct. 1, partly because people weren’t going to designated “smoking zones” to light up, sometimes still smoking in front of doorways. Making their entire campus tobacco-free made enforcement easier because it erased the ambiguity surrounding smoking zone boundaries. She said the center hasn’t encountered problems with people not complying with the ban.
Community Medical Center went tobacco-free at the beginning of the month, along with St. Patrick Hospital, St. Joseph’s western Montana clinic, and Tamarack Medical Clinics throughout western Montana.
Montana Tech will be completely tobacco free in July 2010.
Tobacco policy changes are backed by anti-tobacco legislation across the state. The Montana Indoor Clean Air Act, passed in 2005, prohibits smoking in all work places. Another 13 states across the country have similar smoke-free laws. The Montana Collegiate Tobacco Prevention Initiative, led by the BACCHUS Network, is also working with UM and six other universities across Montana to reduce tobacco use.
Lemke said that while she doesn’t have a magic wand to change opponents of tobacco legislation into supporters, working to help hospitals transition into tobacco-free campuses has shown her that educating people about the harms of tobacco and getting the word out early regarding upcoming policy changes has made transitions to “tobacco-free” much easier. Oklahoma State spent two years preparing their campus for the transition and Community Medical Center spent six months.
“Don’t rush through this and think you can do this in two months, it really takes time,” she said.
The university needs to make it clear that they aren’t “anti-smokers,” Lemke said. Anti-tobacco policies are put in place to promote safer and healthier environments, they aren’t about segregating people from each other, she said.