Dear health thugs: Keep your clean hands off my filthy fags

Two Science students called Sebastian Sonesten and Shirin El Ghomari plan to ban smoking on campus, save a few “smoking areas”. 

They think “cigarette smoke can be distressing for a lot of people” and this “unfair” truth clearly “violates the choices of non smokers”.

The proposed campus smoking ban is another attempt by self-proclaimed health heroes to nanny people into idiocy: a boring conglomerate of politically correct preachers and puritanical nut jobs.

Your correspondent is going to carry on smoking anyway

Draping themselves in superhero costumes, they paint their unlettered motion in the colours of liberty, as though they were French Revolutionaries striving to protect the rights of the peasantry. The motion will be presented to the ill-attended Student Council on the 2nd December, because they didn’t attend the first meeting. I like dedication.

I think it’s important to ask the question, whether or not they have anything productive to do, like work, sport, mountain climbing, writing or socialising. Taking pleasure out of taking away someone else’s pleasure is a form of masochism, so S&M seems more befitting for these fun-fighting, culture crushing sadists.

Regardless, they are under the illusion that there are great leviathans of toxic smoke by University buildings: unmoving and solid, unable to disappear in the outside.

The Tab conducted a poll to see whether you had been affected, and overwhelmingly most people seemed to say that they had never been affected by this issue in the slightest. Woodland Road, despite their ire, has not succumbed to a dense cloud of smoke which renders the human eye useless.

Passive smoking is a contentious issue as well. Researchers at the National Cancer Institute studied 76,000 women for more than a decade and found those affected significantly by second hand smoke were those with partners who smoked. Passive smoking affects you indoors, as smoke cannot dissipate anywhere.

Smoking bans inside pubs, clubs and train stations are of course legitimate but there is little reason to believe that briefly exposing yourself to a whiff of tobacco smoke will blacken your lungs and force you into a state of cancerous instability. I would say they are being hysterical in claiming that they have to navigate their way, as though an “old, old wooden ship used in the civil war era“, through a tobacco infused tempest.

How in the lack of hell are they going to police this? Will smokers be inspected, regulated and checked by hordes of self righteous health policemen? Are smokers going to be fined when found lighting up? Does the student body not even get an ounce of say?

Woodland Road is not constantly smothered in toxic smoke

In many respects, I can’t wait for a hysterical University administrator giving me a good telling off, armed to the teeth with a boring smile and NHS No Smoking leaflets.

Their attempts of clamping down on outdoor smoking are infantilising to students. We are adults now, and should be treated as such. This is not school, where sneaking a quick fag break was a hilarious and dangerous mission. They see themselves as the noblesse oblige, the benevolent leaders, who will show us how we should be living, and enlighten us with their omniscience.

Kids, let us be frank, the student body is a generally unhealthy specimen: its lungs are as black as tar, with a liver befitting an elderly alcoholic and a brain riddled with industrial strength drugs.

The Student Body is an unhealthy specimen, get over it

The student body also has an incredible aptitude and desire to ban anything it deems offensive, politically incorrect or unhealthy.

On our own Campus, our able-bodied and enlightened student union have tried to clamp down on binge drinking. Only last year they humiliated free expression by banning Blurred Lines.

The NUS’ “No Platform Policy” doesn’t allow anyone with “dangerous” or “offensive” views on Campus.

In years to come, textbooks will tell of a hysterically clownish society.

So keep your clinical hands off my fags and stop telling me what to do.