Stop Smoking Way

The issue: A campuswide smoking ban at state system universities has smokers irate.
Our opinion: Smoking is a deadly addiction, but the ban is high-handed, unreasonable and perhaps unworkable.

Smokers on State System of Higher Education campuses have had one of their guilty pleasures snuffed out: An edict from the chancellor’s offices has left them no place to light up on campus, not even in a remote corner, hundreds of feet away from the nearest building or other human beings. It seems a bit much.

Restaurants and businesses in Lower Bucks don’t seem to be feeling the heat as a result of Pennsylvania’s smoking ban.

Smoking was banned inside public places earlier this week by the state government. Many Lower Bucks shops appear to be in compliance and, in fact, some are loving it.

Eileen Acker, manager of the Dallas Diner on Route 13 in Bristol Township, is a longtime smoker who supports the indoor ban.

“I love it,” Acker said happily. “I only smoked seven [cigarettes] on the first day because I had to go outside.”

Scotland’s 2006 ban on smoking in public places cut the heart attack rate by 17 percent within one year, with non-smokers benefiting most, researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study is the first real-time, large-scale look at how a ban on second-hand smoke might benefit smokers and nonsmokers. Earlier research looked at the effect of smoking bans in individual cities, or had other limitations.

“A total of 67 percent of the decrease involved non-smokers,” Dr. Jill Pell of the University of Glasgow and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.