SOME KIDS LOBBY FOR SMOKING BANS (6-2003)

Kids are not only beginning to get the message that smoking 
cigarettes is bad, on many levels, some of them are even 
taking up the anti-smoking banner and running with it. And 
that’s a good thing.

Kyle Damitz, 14, of Chicago has been an anti-smoking 
activist for eight years, since he and his brother 
convinced their local bowling alley to ban smoking on youth 
league nights. Now he is active in helping to promote 
banning of smoking in other public places in his city.

Damitz is an asthmatic. He says just a whiff of cigarette 
smoke makes him start wheezing and coughing.

And, you see, that is the whole crux of the problem with 
smoking. Everybody knows by now that smoking is bad for 
you. We’ve heard it from the Surgeon General, from TV ads, 
from health classes in school, and even on every pack of 
cigarettes. And despite the enormous health risks and the 
great expense involved in keeping up the habit, adults 
still have the right to smoke if they want to.

But nobody has the right to cause harm or even discomfort 
to others, especially children, while enjoying their own 
bad habits. And, unfortunately, smoking really does affect 
the innocent bystanders.

Erik Horne, a 21-year-old smoker attending Western 
Washington University is on the other side of the debate. 
While young Damitz wants to ban smoking in all public 
places, Horne is lobbying his school to erect enclosed 
smoking areas for students who smoke. The college bans 
smoking inside and close by all buildings on campus. Horne 
believes it’s discrimination.

“It's harassment,” said Horne. He is circulating a petition 
to force the college to accommodate smokers. 

But other young people nationwide are climbing on the anti-
smoking bandwagon – and for good reason. Fires caused by 
errant cigarette butts discarded by smokers on a New Jersey 
city’s boardwalk were proving to be costly and dangerous. 
So 16 year old Ashley Sobrinski led a campaign to get 
smoking banned on the boardwalk. She is now lobbying the 
state to ban smoking in all N.J. restaurants.

Allison Bordsen, a senior at the University of California, 
Davis, is working to get ashtrays moved farther away from 
entrances to campus buildings. The college has already 
banned smoking inside the buildings and has even banned the 
sale of tobacco on campus. 

She said that some students complain that she’s trying to 
take their rights away. But she insists that smoking is not 
a right, but a privilege. “We have a right to breathe,” she 
said.

Kids and teen-agers around the nation are slowly starting 
to fight back against the pressure from their peers and the 
tobacco companies to take up smoking. Still, more than 
310,000 kids have started smoking already this year, 
according to the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Of those, 
more than 99,000 will die prematurely because of their new-
found habit.

Smoking should be banned inside any building that allows 
kids to enter. Most bars do not allow children inside, so 
whether or not cigarettes are banned in bars should be up 
to the owner of the establishment. But restaurants and 
other businesses that permit children to enter should not 
allow smoking.

Smoking around young children is nothing shy of child 
abuse. And if adults continue to puff away while sitting at 
the same table as kids in a restaurant, then it should be 
up to the state to pass appropriate legislation banning 
such abuse.  Thankfully, some kids are beginning to stand 
up for their right to breathe.