After separating smokers from the rest of the De Anza College population, the non-smokers have won, so let’s not try to make this any more alienating for the smokers by putting anti-smoking ads and pamphlets in smoking areas. 

Most De Anza cigarette smokers have been very tolerant of the restrictions that make them smoke in designated smoking areas. 

Smoking a cigarette is as much a choice of free will as drinking a cup of coffee, and just as beginning a vice is a choice of free will, so is ending it. As long as their vice is legal, and they follow the restrictions of age and location, you don’t have a right to stop them from enjoying it. 

Smokers no longer smoke indoors, on buses, in many public areas or around children, all for what have become valid reasons. 

Smoking is a choice of lifestyle obviously not a healthy one but it’s not the place of other people to be a health brigade. You can’t force people to stop drinking coffee, stop eating fast food, stop playing with guns or stop participating in extreme sports just because it shortens their life. 

Not only will putting anti-smoking ads on the smoking tables not force a change in a smoker’s life in any way it’s insulting and promotes the notion that smoking is akin to a disease. 

People can develop addiction problems and health issues from a variety of things, but the true responsibility of every human who indulges in anything is to know his or her limit. Moderation is the true factor that’s needed, and past that, you cannot blame much else. 

Big Tobacco has cut back intensely on advertising, so it’s hard to say that the media still sell the image that smoking is cool. If the reason people are so eager to get smokers to quit smoking is the concern of second-hand smoke, I’d say you should worry more about vehicle exhaust in the air, since all the smokers are now pushed into corners. 

You’re able to avoid them, so go on about your merry way.

It’s obvious some people need help in their lives, but help should be on one’s own volition. You wouldn’t put up posters on a billboard saying “lose weight now for a skinny California.”  Would you?

I’ve heard many people say cigarette companies are making money by taking away years from our lives, but the entire entertainment industry has been doing the same  thing for just as long. 

Before you ask a smoker if they are ready to quit smoking, ask yourself if you are ready to quit your own vices; if you don’t, you may find that you don’t like the same treatment.