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The Abbotsford News
A story elsewhere in this edition of your Saturday morning paper tells of yet another battle over the appropriateness of having "smoke holes" at Abbotsford high schools. A better question: Why were they removed in the first place? If the omniscient ones who sit on the Abbotsford School Board are really concerned with teenagers smoking, how does banning smoke holes help their cause? Teens who have been smoking for a few years already know the damage the habit can do to a body. But telling them again and again isn't going to wean the weed from their hand. Nor is the ban on smoke holes. Why not cut some fat from the administrative payroll and use the savings to bankroll intensive educational programs, aimed at the pre-teen set? School board chairman John Smith said teens who smoke look like "walking corpses." Sorry to burst your descriptive bubble, John, but you're wrong. The majority of teens who smoke look exactly like their contemporaries who do not smoke. Ah, there's nothing like a little verbosity with an election a month away. The last time I checked, smoking was a legal act in Canada -- for now. It's tiresome to wake up each morning to find government dictating yet another thing that is good or bad for us. You will not smoke in restaurants. You will wear a helmet when bicycling. You will wear a seat belt while in a vehicle. You will nota pub within a half-mile of a major road. So the smoke hole issue is burning at school board meetings. Why? Haven't we already learned that the more one makes an issue out of something, the more attractive it becomes to teens? Rebellion is as instinctive to teens as spitting is to Roberto Alomar. I remember the aforementioned smoke hole at Abbotsford Senior Secondary as a student there in the mid-1980s. From my recollection, the smoke hole was generally ignored by the majority of students. Actually there were two holes -- initially, smokers were to puff next to the shop area on the school's east side. The smoking area was then moved to a central courtyard outside the cafeteria. If memory serves me correctly, the mere existence of the smoke hole did not spur non- smoking students to rise en masse and run to the 7-11 to buy packages of Player's Light. No, the ones who used the designated smoking area were the same ones who stepped off school property to do likewise when there was no smoke hole available. Too often regular citizens get elected to a token board and assume the personalities of autocratic rulers. Rigid stances by some members of our school board -- the belief that no tobacco shall sully school district property -- are laughable, ridiculous, and powerless. If one honestly believes that banning tobacco from school grounds will in any way curtail youths from smoking, I have prime Saskatchewan oceanfront property for sale. Whether it's on school property or outside the 7-11, if a teen is going to smoke, he's going to smoke. And frankly, it's nobody's business -- not the school board's and certainly not this newspaper's -- but the teen's and his family.
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