BSU’s health director seeks smoking-free campus

BOISE – It’s already hard to find a place to smoke these days, but not hard enough for Ferdinand Schlapper.

The head of health services at Boise State University wants to steer Idahoans toward a zero-tolerance policy. First, he’s working to make smoking taboo all over the Boise State campus – all the grounds, all the buildings, and all the vehicles.

“High-achieving students would be drawn to a healthier learning environment,” Schlapper said. “It would be a great selling point for us.”

Then, he’s aiming at everywhere else in the state.

“I want to eradicate this from the planet,” Schlapper said recently as he breathed in the clean air of the BSU student union. “And I truly think we can.”

Under current Idaho law, smokers can still huddle in doorways – as long as those doorways are at least 20 feet from the entrance of a public building. They can still smoke in bars; in the smoking areas of some workplaces; in cars; and outside.

BSU already bans smoking in all buildings, including dorms. It provides one entrance to each building where smokers can’t congregate, and has some outdoor limits.

Schlapper’s long-term plan, which will be discussed at a BSU Cabinet meeting Monday, calls for making the entire 175-acre campus smoke-free. He polled faculty, students and staff at the 18,600-student school and only about 34 percent support that idea.

But 92 percent “agree that the desire to breathe clean air should take precedence over a smoker’s desire to smoke,” Schlapper noted.

However, many smokers at BSU think there’s enough air right outside the buildings for smokers and nonsmokers.

“You’re outside; you’re not really bothering anybody,” added a BSU staff member on a smoke break who declined to give her name.

Political science professor Jim Weatherby doesn’t smoke, but he thinks other people should be able to – outside.

“We continue to pick on smokers in a policy like this; it goes a little too far,” Weatherby said.

Schlapper knows incremental change might be more palatable, but he doesn’t want to just define more smoking and nonsmoking areas.

“If we’re moving toward this anyway, we should just do it,” he said.

If Schlapper succeeds, Boise State would be the first public four-year college or university in the country to do so, said Melissa Murphy of the College Tobacco Prevention Resource in Newton, Mass.

“A lot of schools consider themselves to be 100 percent smoke-free, but it usually doesn’t include the entire campus grounds; it’s usually just campus buildings,” Murphy said.

Idaho comes relatively late to the discussion on smoking.

“Idaho is very independent; we don’t like government telling us what we can and can’t do,” said Brad Hoaglun, director of government relations for the American Cancer Society in Boise and another smoking opponent.

But only about 17 percent of Idahoans smoke – compared to about 20 percent nationwide, Hoaglun said.

Hoaglun attributes the low rate to Idaho’s large Mormon population. The religion discourages tobacco. Only 10 percent smoke in neighboring Utah, which has the highest proportion of Mormons in the country.

Schlapper said about 9 percent of Boise State students and 15 percent of non-faculty staff smoke. Only 3 percent of the faculty smokes.

Elsewhere in the state, the Tobacco Free Idaho Alliance is gearing up for a ballot initiative in 2008 that would ask voters to increase the tax on a pack of cigarettes both to discourage smoking and to raise money for smoking-related health costs. The initiative would raise the tax from 57 cents per pack to $1.57, Hoaglun said. Similar initiatives in Washington and Montana have raised cigarette taxes in those states.

“If they can do it, why not us?” Hoaglun said. The group isn’t aiming for the 2006 election because it needs time to gather the 47,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot.

Rep. Bob Ring, R-Caldwell and a retired physician, plans to introduce a bill in January that would make smoking illegal in bowling alleys to bring those areas into line with the rest of Idaho law. That would leave smokers with special smoking rooms in Veteran’s Administration hospitals; smoking rooms at some workplaces; bars; and the outdoors.