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The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has announced plans for a completely smoke-free, tobacco-free, and electronic cigarette-free campus in 2015. While this is is certainly not the first campus to go smoke-free, the inclusion on electronic cigarettes in the policy seems likely to cause trouble.

The policy is set to start June 1st of 2015 and campus administrators claim a robust and accessible smoking cessation program will be implemented to help smoking students kick the habit. Apparently they are among yet another group of people unwilling to see electronic cigarettes as an alternative to smoking.

You can check out the announcement right here, but it doesn’t provide even the slightest reasoning as to why the policy includes electronic cigarettes.

What seems most likely is that a group of non-smokers with little experience with smoking and no understanding of electronic cigarettes designed the policy based on emotion and best guess rather than reason and research. It is admirable that the campus is going smoke- and tobacco-free, but if the goal is to protect student health, then there should be some more justification for banning electronic cigarettes.

However, this policy may do little more than force-criminalize (or whatever the academic equivalent would be) smokers. Students addicted to smoking and stuck on campus for 4, 6, or even 12 hours can’t necessarily be expected to travel off campus to get their fix. And they probably won’t. Without even the option of electronic cigarettes or dedicated smoking areas, the policy only forces smoking students to find ways to cheat for their fix.

Perhaps UMass Dartmouth expects all incoming and current smokers to quit immediately because of the policy. Given that quit attempts only work about 9 to 12 percent of the time, they could simply be putting their smoking students in a lose-lose situation.

The policy itself might not be very well enforced once implemented. Are campus cops really going to spend time writing up hard working students that step outside the library for a nip of an electronic cigarette? I would hope they have better things to do.