Smoking Thrills

Columbia Health’s collaboration with the Truth Initiative campaigning against nicotine use. 

By Rocky Rūb

Illustration by Jacqueline Subkhanberdina

We open at dusk. Fog rolls over two rectangular fields of green marsh like a scene right out of a film noir. A young man with a mahogany messenger bag walks through the haze, his matching walnut dress shoes clicking on the granite walkway beneath him. He’s mysterious. He’s contemplative. The hairs on the nape of his neck raise. He turns his head. Is anyone there? No. Now is his chance. A soft glow contours the tired, tortured look on his face. He steps into the light and he … hits his vape?

Such is a common occurrence outside Butler Library. The building bookends the southern half of the University’s superblock with Low Library in its direct view; outside its glittering facade sits the most popular of thirteen designated smoking areas on the campus. The studious silhouettes of academics young and old propagate along this transient station, lips pursed delicately—or anxiously, depending on the season—to the slender dopamine inducer, the cigarette (or, sometimes, the vape). 

But Columbia Health has been hit with an intense case of self-righteousness! Big Anti-Tobacco, the Truth Initiative, allocated grant money to Columbia in spring 2024 to make the campus 100% tobacco and nicotine free. Universities across the nation can apply to the program with a tobacco/vape cessation plan and be awarded up to $20,000 to support their initiative. Since receiving the grant, Columbia Health has gathered and evaluated testimonials from students who resent the smoky and smelly wrath of our nicotine inclined peers, including those we’ve come to know and love that decorate the northern perimeter of Butler Library. In summer or fall of 2025, the University Senate will vote on a new policy that would abolish the designated smoking areas on campus. If the bill passes, we will be forced to say goodbye to that secondhand hit of tobacco or Cherry Bomb Blitz greeting students before their study sessions. 

What would a smoke-free campus look like? Where will the smokers go? 

In a Town Hall on March 4, 2025, a Columbia Health representative said that “We are fortunate to have two parks on either side of the campus, so folks can either go there or to the [crosswalk] medians.” The horror! Imagine the indignity of smoking on the Broadway median! What is this, some sort of sick revamp of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign?  Though, the smoke break trips could restore intra-campus foot traffic—a needed stimulus after plummeting Barnard/Columbia walks-of-shame caused by the Nov. 5 presidential election. Still, campus will never feel the same. 

It is hard to picture Butler’s entrance without smoking academics ornamenting the walkway. It is a focal point between four freshmen dormitories, three dining halls (plus a food truck), the South Lawns which hosts Undergraduate Student Life events, and the occasional Larty (lawn party). The walkway is where your Italian campus crush lives, puffing longingly to Alma Mater across the field; it is the place where you wonder whether your infatuation is a fated soul tie or just secondhand addiction. It is where one gets all their passing, inconsequential gossip about how your influencer classmate cheated on her fiancé and is now voyaging through Europe while having a sapphic love affair. The display of chic outfits from smokers past will be greatly missed. Many a TikTok edit will mourn their loss. How on earth could we condemn smoking when it means banishing the strongest of our leather-clad, yapping soldiers? 

But, “Goodbye to all that,” I say, over my tears for the dark academia aesthetic that ultimately carried my decision to attend Columbia over Penn’s already established no-nicotine campus. Alas, since Columbia has yet again failed to breach an overall top ten National Universities ranking by the U.S. News and World Report, the University has decided that we should at least be in the top ten healthiest National Universities. While we at The Blue and White can appreciate the benefit to our shriveled lungs—even though we DID NOT ASK FOR IT—we cannot and will not be in support of such wellness reform! I can say with my full chest, scar tissue and all: “I dissent!”