To Many People Smoking?

By: William Hodges

Smoking among college students has not decreased over the past thirty years like the national smoking average has. It remains extremely high and is a concern to medical professionals all over the world. A study done by no-smoking.org reported that nearly fifty percent of all college kids had smoked some sort of tobacco product within the past year. Now this does mean that some people might not be frequent smokers but they statistics still stands out especially when compared to the national smoking average which has decreased by over half in thirty years. According to ygoy.com the percentage of smokers in the United States is about twenty-three percent which is less than half of the number that smoke in college. According to the University of Rhode Island about half of college students have “unsuccessfully quit in the past year.” This is a startling statistic because it truly shows the addictiveness of cigarettes.
It is not a new fact that cigarettes are one of the leading causes of death in the United States and this is the reason why so many people are looking into the problem with smoking in colleges. A study done by the “Statistics and Research Service” shows that there is a large correlation between the people that smoke cigarettes and their affiliation with a fraternity or sorority. This shows that smoking is largely a way for people to demonstrate that they are “cool” to other people. Many schools such as Gainesville state college have created a smoke free campus where students are not allowed at any time to smoke. This has greatly diminished students exposure to second hand smoke which has been shown to kill about fifty thousand people a year in the us alone. This problem is one that I killing many and is not one that can easily be solved. School such as Gainesville have started to make good progress in the decrease in smoking on college campuses but it is nowhere near gone.