The proposed tobacco ban for Ball State may receive more support using a new study on smoking rates put out by Ball State’s Global Health Institute.
The study found that Indiana has the seventh highest smoking rate in the nation, with about a quarter of the population smoking.
Kerry Anne McGeary, director of the Global Health Institute, said the institute at Ball State has been monitoring risky health behaviors in Indiana that cause preventable disease. During the Fall Semester, they published reports on alcohol use and obesity in Indiana.
With the smoking study, McGeary said she wants to get the information to the public and government.
“We want people to be aware of the fact that Indiana has one of the highest smoking rates in the entire nation,” McGeary said. “We are much higher than the national rate of smoking and our [quitting] smoking attempts are not working well.”
McGeary said smoking is declining faster on a national level than in Indiana, despite appearing to have similar trends, because nationally less people start smoking.
The data for the study was collected in 2011 by the state of Indiana and funded by the Center for Disease Control, McGeary said. She thinks the number of smokers for 2013 would be close, within 1 to 2 percent, but not declining.
The study showed there are higher smoking rates in characteristics including being male, black, non-hispanic or having no higher education.
“Those groups 10 years ago were watching their parents smoke,” McGeary said. “I think it is an environmental issue as well as an education issue. They grew up in smoking households and continued to smoke and did not respond to the information about smoking. People who are more highly educated are better at processing detailed information.”
McGeary said another factor is that health and education are a similar investment because for both the payoff is in the future. She said people who don’t invest in their education generally also take greater risks with their health.
“I just want to present this information and say, ‘These are the facts, you do what you think you should,’” McGeary said. “The science is that smoking is really bad for you, and we have more people smoking and not enough people quitting.”
Senior nursing majors Matt Graham and Doug Robertson said they smoke even though they know the risks.
“I think with smokers, people are going to quit smoking when they want to quit smoking, regardless of what people say about it,” Graham said. “Obviously with us being nursing majors we have heard about the terrible things that smoking does. I’m aware of all of them. I know that it is probably going to kill me.”
“Everybody does something bad,” Robertson said. “Everybody has their vices.”
Robertson and Graham said completely banning smoking on campus would be going too far. If the policy is passed, it will be effective Aug. 1, Vice President of Student Affairs Kay Bales said in a Daily News report.
“I agree that everybody has the right to clean air, but on the other side you can take away the right for somebody to smoke cigarettes, which are completely legal if you are of legal age,” Graham said. “Giving one person freedom is always going to mean taking away someone else’s.”
Currently Indiana has relatively low taxes for cigarettes and allocates very little money towards health compared to other states, McGeary said.
According to americashealthrankings.org, Indiana was ranked 36 out of 50 states for health funding in 2011, and has since dropped to 41.
The American Cancer Society estimated that each pack of cigarettes costs $35 in future health related costs.
“For a smoker... that doesn’t mean much to them,” McGeary said. “For the state of Indiana those $35 of health related costs are probably born by Medicare and Medicaid services. This is an issue that the state should be concerned about.”
