LETTER: Smoking or Sex?

By Economics Major Tyler Watts

I have no shame in admitting that I enjoy tobacco. An after-dinner cigarette or a contemplative puff on my pipe always hits the spot. A few weeks ago at Mason, I was short of cigarettes and sans pipe, yet desirous of a smoke. I trundled into the convenience store in the JC, but alas, they don't sell tobacco in any form.

The folks at the information desk confirmed my suspicion that tobacco is not sold on campus. Not too surprising, given the rampant anti-smoking mentality in the popular culture. Isn’t it strange, though, how something nearly everyone did 50 years ago is now taboo?

Curious indeed; while you can’t get cigarettes on campus, you can purchase condoms (and I hear the RAs even give them out). In this case, something that used to be taboo (i.e. fornication) is now accepted as a normal part of college life. Call me old-fashioned (I take it as a compliment), but I find this a somewhat disturbing inversion of cultural values.

If you ask me, fornication is a much bigger social problem than tobacco abuse—one could debate whether venereal disease at age 20 is worse than lung cancer at 70, but it's for sure that smoking never made anyone pregnant.

Yet official policies seem to exhibit much more tolerance for casual sex than they do for a casual smoke. As the classic cigarette ad said, “you’ve come a long way, baby.” Maybe the administration would allow tobacco sales on campus if we smokers promised to only practice “safe smoking”?