For some students coming to MSU from China, the new tobacco-free campus is a welcome change but for others it is quite frustrating.
“I think it’s quite inconvenient for us to go off the campus to smoke because sometimes I just need a little cigarette after class,” international student, and media and information freshman Bernard Cheng said.
He finds the ban especially annoying for students who have to live on campus.
“For freshmen, we don’t have cars,” he said. “We need to ride a bike to come out for 30 minutes for only one cigarette and then go back. I hope it can change.”
For international students who smoke, coming to a tobacco-free campus can be a big adjustment.
“I’m sure there are some students who smoke, and we’ll have to figure out what they’re going to do about it,” James Dorsett, director of the Office for International Students and Scholars, said. “But I think (students were) adequately given information in advance so that they were able to prepare for it, if it was an issue.”
Dorsett says he doesn’t anticipate there will be any issues with international students adjusting to the new regulations.
“Basically, they will probably look around and see if it’s being really enforced or how people they know or the older students, how they would be dealing with it,” he said. “I’m sure for all the students, it will be somewhat of an adjustment, but I think they’ll figure it out.”
For some international students, like Chinese international student and food industry management freshman Chenxi He, the tobacco ban has been a pleasant surprise.
“I didn’t know (about the ban),” he said. “I came here and I saw the signs ‘tobacco-free,’ and I was very happy.”
Although the tobacco ban may not be a deterrent to international students considering MSU, it won’t be much of an attraction either, Dorsett said.
“For some, it’s certainly something that we can point to as far as a healthy campus and an initiative that is trying to look out for people’s well-being and trying to avoid secondhand smoke and all those sorts of things,” Dorsett said. “I think it could have some attraction. I doubt it’s their number one thing, but I imagine it helps.”
Two-thirds of all males in China smoked and more are picking up the habit as teenagers, according to a 2015 study published in a UK medical journal.
Among women in China, smoking rates were found to be much smaller, with only about 10 percent of older women and and one percent of middle-aged women smoking, according to the study.
Tobacco laws in China aren’t much different compared to those in the U.S., according to the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids’ website.
Smoking is prohibited in medical facilities, restaurants, bars and on most forms of public transportation. Tobacco advertising is prohibited in mass media, public places, means of public transport and outdoors.
Required warnings on tobacco projects are text-only, use small type and cover at most 30 percent of the front and back surfaces of cigarette packaging, according to the campaign’s site.
But warnings will increase in size to 35 percent on Oct.1.
