RILEY STRAW
Lampoon Editor
Once, long ago, the campus C-Store sold cigarettes; not candy cigarettes — it sold actual, smokable cigarettes. During that time, there were never cigarettes thrown on the ground. Instead, there were regularly maintained ashtrays, butt receptacles (also known as butt stops), and people didn’t passive aggressively cough at anyone who lit up.
In the late 2000s, the C-Store no longer had any tobacco products available for purchase. Though it was a burden on already troubled lungs to make it down to Fred Mart — or, heaven forbid, Sunoco — students made the trek.
They happily puffed outside Starbucks and were able to smoke on their way to classes. Friendships were formed from the question on every broke smoker’s mind: “Do you have a cigarette I could bum?”
But in January 2012, everything changed. Suddenly, the butt stops were gone. The air was heavy with suspicion instead of carcinogens. Several signs were erected claiming that Fredonia was, in fact, tobacco free.
“We thought it would boost enrollment,” said Anne Tito-Backo, SUNY Director of Smoker’s Affairs. “We were wrong — so wrong.”
Once Fredonia joined the SUNY Tobacco Free Initiative, the cigarette butts once stored safely within butt stops were littered all over the sidewalks; although the SUNY administration took away their receptacles, the smokers continued to smoke.
Over time, the piles of cigarette butts on the sidewalk grew. Everyone’s clothes began to reek of cigarette smoke. The entire campus was covered.
“What happened was that no one thought of a way to mandate the new ban,” Tito-Backo said. “We just thought telling them to stop would work. We thought they would respect our dogmatic authority.”
Over the summer, when prospective students came on tours, one of the first things they noticed was the stench. There was not a single location in Fredonia immune to the potency of the butts.
“SUNY Fredonia is now a tobacco free campus,” the tour guide would yell, plugging her nose and stepping on butts all the way.
“I was going to come here,” said Collie Flower, an Erie County Community College freshman, “but the whole place was covered in cigarettes. I don’t smoke, and I don’t mind when other people smoke — I just don’t want to have to be around a smell like that all the time.”
Due to the SUNY Tobacco Free policy, and its resulting increase of butts on the ground, enrollment to Fredonia has never been lower — only seven people enrolled this semester.
“It turns out that there aren’t really enough smokers on campus that smoking was ever really a problem,” Backo said. “But now that there’s no butt stops, it seems more students than ever are picking up the habit.”
The seven students who enrolled are each avid chainsmokers. They said the smell attracted them like tobacco to a flame.