Smoking forum lights up discussion
Carina Woudenberg
Date created: 3/27/06 Section: NEWS
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 Media Credit: Shannon Elliott From left: Tommie Phillips Sr., Sherri Hancock, Laravic Flores at smoking forum. |
Smoking and designated smoking areas were the main focus of a campus wide forum, "Don't be afraid to 'butt in,'" held on March 15 in Skyline's Gallery Theatre.
As an issue that's been hovering over this campus for years, the school's Health and Safety Committee took on the job of coming up with some situation that would benefit both smokers and non-smokers.
Last fall, the committee proposed to College Council the idea of creating designated smoking areas on campus.
The forum was designed as a way of assessing the effectiveness of the designated areas existing on this campus since the beginning of this semester.
"We've decided to bring the issues [on smoking] to a focus and to resolve them in some way." Victoria Morrow, president of Skyline College, said at the start of the forum.
Morrow added that the college council plans to place durable shelters at the designated areas but that the council first wanted to learn from the forum whether there would be support for the shelters.
The panel at the forum consisted of the interim Chief of Security, Tommie Phillips Sr., Chair of Skyline's Health and Safety committee, Sherri Hancock and two representatives from Breathe California, Laravic Flores and Karen Licavole.
Phillips and Flores both talked about how harmful second hand smoke is, both mentioning that 47 hundred Californians die from second hand smoke a year.
"Second hand smoke is the third leading cause of preventable death in this country behind alcohol and drug abuse and smoking," Flores said.
Flores commended Skyline for creating designated smoking areas, a trend she says is now happening at colleges and universities across the state. Flores added that the areas should be away from heavily populated areas because second hand smoke can affect bystanders from up to twenty feet away.
"Smoking in groups actually saturates the local area with tobacco smoke," Flores said. "So those that come in contact with it are exposed to very high levels of cancer causing carcinogens."
The forum was well attended with representatives of students, staff and faculty both smokers and non-smokers expressing their concerns around designated smoking areas and smoking in general.
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