By Ashley Hernandez
Smoking on campus should be banned for good.
At the main campus, here at East Los Angeles College, there are smoking areas for smokers, but the smoke still roams around and out of the designated area.
So what is the point of the designated smoking area?
There are pregnant women on campus along with people with asthma, and there will always be people with these conditions, so why not make a change now?
Second-hand smoke is extremely horrible and is more dangerous than actually smoking a cigarette.
The toxins exhaled from the cigarette causes more harm than the actual cigarette itself.
A designated smoking area is designed to allow people to smoke while being considerate of others, but it does not guarantee the smoke from staying in that area so what is the point of the designated area?
If the designated smoke area is not beneficial to everyone, then it should be changed somehow.
There are only two options. The first option is to ban smoking from campus permanently.
The second option is to somehow create an area where the smoke from the cigarettes can be contained and also ventilated through a process of air cleaning.
This process is both beneficial to people who do not smoke and the atmosphere.
But of course, if it was that easy it would have been built by then and the problem of being exposed to second-hand smoke would have been solved.
The reason why I am sensitive to this subject is due to my negative experience as a child.
My parents were teen parents who did not find any comfort other than through drugs and alcohol.
My grandmother would take care of my siblings and me from time to time and whenever I would go visit her, she says that I would ask her if we could go to a laundromat to wash my clothes because they stinking of cigarette.
I personally do not remember this, but she says that I was around the age of four and found it amazing that I disliked the cigarette smell at such a young age.
The day I found out about second-hand smoke in middle school I got really scared about messing up my lungs.
I had been inhaling all this bad stuff ever since I could remember and I realized that I did not want to do so any longer.
I decided to confront my mother about her decision to smoke in front of myself and my siblings.
I remember seeing her shocked face when I told her I did not like her smoking in front of me since children are not supposed to tell their parents what to do.
Since I do not appreciate inhaling second-hand smoke from my own mother then why should I inhale smoke from total strangers.
I might not know them, but I still do not appreciate or like the smell of cigarettes roaming around in the air or on my clothes.
This is because in the end of the day, I will be the person to suffer from someone else’s choice to personally harm their own body.
