Where do you draw the line between allowing people the choice to do what they want and preventing them from infringing on your own rights? Where do you draw the line between caring for yourself and caring for others? I'm not talking about anything explicitly political; this is not a civil rights or civil liberties type of thing. I'm talking about smoking and smokers. Whether warranted or not, the smoking of tobacco has not been deemed an illegal act by our legislatures. Despite all the statistics and reports that are out there about the dangers of smoking, nothing has been done to ban its use. And, as I'm sure everyone remembers from health class, alcohol and tobacco are the most abused drugs in our country. Obviously, this fact is strictly due to the fact that they are legal. Sure, there are some states that limit where one can smoke, but smoking itself is still legal. This is a prime example of the hypocrisy that infects our government, but that is an article for another day.

Cigarette companies (or 'Big Tobacco,' as they like to be called) spend billions of dollars per year to get commercially inept people (i.e., kids) addicted to their legal drug. It would be like Advil making commercials geared towards nine-year-olds or Benadryl advertisements portraying taking the pills as something attractive people do. It is like McDonald's spending hundreds of millions on making people believe that the food they serve is actually healthy after adding addictive chemicals to Big Macs and the French fries...hmm...well, that's also an article for another day. So what it comes down to is that huge corporations are allowed to advertise slow acting, self-inflicted poisons to the general public. Hooray for corporate America.

But until-through our legislature-we do something about this dilemma, we are stuck with legal tobacco smoking. So the problem remains of compromising between the right to smoke and the right of people to breathe clean air.

Brandeis has a policy that, in effect, is rather useless: no smoking within 15 feet of a building. In practice, the rule is enforced as: no smoking inside. But despite this policy, I am still surrounded by smokers. As I walk down any one of the paths across campus, all I need to do is look to the side for a mere ten seconds to find the remains of a smoker. Not a corpse-although that will certainly come in 50 years time-but cigarette butts and packs littered all over the place. Trash of a smoking nature is often strewn about the walkways themselves. It really is quite atrocious. Where is your sense of pride and respect, smokers of Brandeis?

In the two months I've been at Brandeis, I've built up immunity to second-hand smoke. There's just so much of it. And, as someone who gets extremely queasy at the smell of smoke, what am I supposed to do when I am surrounded by smoke? Am I supposed to ask every smoker I pass to extinguish his cigarette? Should I buy a gas mask? Should I start a petition to get the University to implement a 'smoking section' policy? Should I just deal with it? Or should I concentrate on the smokers' litter, and start a campaign to get more ash trays and trash cans? Or maybe work in conjunction with Students for Environmental Action to get people to realize that littering is disgusting. And smoking isn't so attractive either. (Just look at the French.)

But here's the main thing I don't get about smoking: you pay lots of money (depending on how strongly you're addicted) for people to kill you. Now, I'm pretty sure euthanasia was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, so how does this stand? Secondly, to paraphrase a hardcore smoker: you can't do exercise when you smoke. I'm sure everyone has seen the anti-smoking commercials-the black lungs, the hole in the throat and the body bags. So, why are people so susceptible to Big Tobacco's commercials and not anti-smoking commercials? Where's the difference?

Fine, if you don't care about your own health, I suppose I can't do anything to change your mind. But why are you so selfish not to care about other people? Ignoring the fact that second-hand smoke can be detrimental to one's health, smoking is just plain rude.

I dare you to find someone who relishes in a bunch of toxins and carcinogens being blown into her face; I dare you to find someone who loves the smell of smoky death clinging to his clothing. Even though this will probably earn me the enmity of half the residents of North Quads, I think this has to be said. The other day I counted seven trashed cigarette boxes and over 40 butts. If you're going to kill yourself and make other people around you sick, at least clean up your mess. It just isn't sanitary, and it smells terrible.