San Diego State joins the UC campuses in prohibiting the sale and use of tobacco products beginning Jan. 1

Each of the ten UC campuses has gone “smoke-free” as of Jan. 1, following UCSD’s implementation of the tobacco ban on Sept. 1., 2013. Additionally, San Diego State University enforced a similar smoking ban starting Jan. 1.

The regulations of the SDSU ban are similar to those of the UC system, prohibiting all tobacco use, sale and sponsorship. Unlike the other nine UC campuses, UC Irvine’s ban on smoking will allow the use of e-cigarettes and chewing tobacco.

SDSU’s ban comes after a policy designating 12 smoking areas, which was largely unsuccessful. Thus far there have been no formal measurements of the effectiveness of the tobacco ban at UCSD.

However, UCSD Executive Director of Student Health and Well-being Karen Calfas thinks that a decrease in smoking is noticeable on campus.

“That isn’t to say there aren’t places where people aren’t occasionally smoking, but this is our transition period and so I think it’s been very effective,” Calfas said. “We are working with other campuses to do a system-wide measurement, but the other campuses just went smoke-free so we’re still working out what that will be.”

UCLA became the first smoke-free campus in April, the only UC campus other than UCSD to ban tobacco before Jan. 1.

“Our experience has been very similar to that of UCLA,” Calfas said. “I anticipate that the other UCs will have the same success. We’re all looking forward to how that’s going to play out.”

California has many restrictions on smoking in public places compared to other states; other public school campuses other than University of California campuses have begun adopting similar policies, although not on a system-wide level.

“I suspect that other CSUs are or will soon be smoke-free as well,” Calfas said. “In San Diego, many of the community colleges have been smoke-free for a while now.”
Calfas also noted the recent increase in smoke-free campuses nationwide.

“When we first wrote a proposal to consider this as a system, there were 500 or 700 schools that were smoke free,” Calfas said. “Now there are 1,000 to 1,200. I think we’re going to see many universities throughout the nation take this step.”