It’s official. Smoking will be banned within 100 feet of campus buildings beginning Jan. 1, 2008. Due to the proximity of most campus buildings, smokers will be left with few places to light up, namely around the flagpole in the quad and the middle of Kenan Stadium.

UNC is claiming the measure is both a response to the health risks of second-hand smoke and a way to encourage smokers to quit. (And the DTH thinks it is awesome!)

The former reason is, of course, bullshit. People who are waiters and bartenders for 30 years get cancer from second-hand smoke. (By the way, you are still allowed to smoke in bars and restaurants in this town; there are still no no-smoking sections of restaurants in Winston.) People who walk past someone smoking a cigarette outdoors on campus do not.

So, the only real reason UNC has implemented this ban is the latter one: to encourage smokers to quit. Okay. Admirable goal. Everyone agrees that the inclination to smoke cigarettes is inextricably linked to some personal moral failing, and that people who smoke should be cleansed of their habit so they may be good, upstanding citizens fit to interact with the rest of us.

But seriously? Effectively banning smoking on campus? Outdoors? In the freely circulating air in which particulate matter vanishes in a matter of seconds? The air in public space on a public university? Is that street legal?

Smoking outdoors is a personal choice that affects no one other than smokers. It is legal to smoke. UNC (a part of the state government system, no less) has no business trying to regulate whether, how often, or under what circumstances people who partake do so - assuming, of course, the impact on the lives of others is as negligible as it is in the case of outdoor second-hand smoke - any more than it does how much time they spend exercising or what time they go to sleep.

State government, if you think the true cost of cigarettes is more than the cost of the tobacco, what with all the health risks, and that people ought to be discouraged from smoking, then raise the ****ing vice tax. (You could even use the revenue to research or treat lung cancer.) Oh, wait, that would hurt our economy.

Let’s keep in mind: this is not the first cringe-inducingly paternalistic thing this here university of the people has done this year. They also dragged those crazy Bible-thumpers exercising their right to free speech off campus, lest they offend someone.

Zack Waterman put it better than I ever could: "If there ever was one place you should be able to smoke cigarettes while listening to crazy religious rhetoric, it should be at a university on tobacco road, in the Bible belt."