Thank you to Akash Sharma for your thought-provoking comments to my article on college smoking. I am in no way offended and always enjoy conversation and debate! In response, I am not a smoker myself, but I am not in favor of a smoke-free campus either. Smokers deserve a fair opportunity for education just like anyone else, and a smoke-free campus makes that difficult. In my article, I tried to just write from what I heard in the interviews, and there simply seemed to be a large consensus against smoking. However, there were comments that I included fighting for smokers’ rights, such as Steve Heaslip and his “monsters and villains� comment. I certainly could appreciate these arguments, and was encouraged by accommodations made for smokers, such as “smoke shacks�. We at Ohio State have a 25-feet rule, which in mainly kept in place so that smoke doesn’t enter into windows and affect people negatively, such as asthmatics, and as long as residents who are smokers comply by this, everything seems to work out fine. But as a resident advisor I do notice the stigma on smokers, and notice the difficulty of complying by the rule in bad weather. These issues seem to cause tensions between smokers and nonsmokers that could be prevented with smoker accommodations and fair regulations.

I do want to add that as a resident advisor, I am also very much so an advocate of student health, so it is more important for me personally to educate a resident about the effects of smoking and second-hand smoke than to just tell them to move because the law says so. We’re in college now and old enough to make our own health decisions…but we also all have to live and learn together, and that’s going to involve some compromise on all ends.