I love the University of Michigan. I am proud
to be a graduate and a faculty member. I
respect the school’s leadership and admire the
integrity it brings to decision-making. But I
do not understand why Michigan has a smok-
ing policy that empowers smokers to assault
the people I love. The statistics are compel-
ling; each year, secondhand smoke kills nearly
three times the number killed by violent crime
in the United States. I need your help changing
the University’s policy.
Michigan’s
smoking
policy
is
well
intentioned.
It
was
developed
through
an inclusive and thoughtful process that
involved input from students, faculty and
staff, representing many of the schools across
campus. The concept of an almost smoke-free
campus was bold and pioneering when the
policy was developed. However, today, smoke-
free campuses are common, with 1,514 as of
Jan. 1, according to the American Nonsmokers’
Rights Foundation; many of them have more
comprehensive policies than Michigan.
Michigan’s policy has one fatal (literally)
flaw. It allows smoking on the miles of sidewalks
adjacent to the streets that snake through and
frame our campus, the sidewalks we all use to
enter and roam the campus, arguably the most
densely populated parts of campus.
On a typical walk from my office on East
Huron to any place on campus, I have to
walk through four groups of smokers. When
possible, I suspend breathing and accelerate
my pace, allowing me to dash through the
smoke and avoid being forced to draw the
toxins into my lungs. I resent being imposed
upon in this way, but I can live with it (I hope).
However, I worry about people who cannot
— people who cannot suspend breathing or
accelerate their pace. I worry about people in
wheelchairs, people with asthma, emphysema
or heart disease, conditions that can provoke
an immediate severe reaction to a tiny amount
of secondhand smoke. I worry about infants
in their mothers’ arms because their delicate
lungs can be harmed by this exposure.
Smokers are not bad people. Harming
others is the last thing they would ever want to
do. Most do realize their secondhand smoke is
disgusting, but they figure it just goes up in the
air. So what’s the big deal?
When smokers spew their secondhand
smoke into the air, it is the only circumstance
in which people are unwillingly exposed
to a known Group A carcinogen and the
perpetrators are not committing a federal
crime punishable by severe penalties. Breath
per breath, secondhand smoke may actually be
more dangerous than direct smoke because it’s
generated at lower temperatures, is produced
in an oxygen-deficient environment and
is rapidly diluted and cooled after leaving
the
burning
tobacco.
These
conditions
favor formation of smaller particulates in
secondhand smoke (ranging from 0.01 to 0.1
µm in diameter) than in mainstream smoke
(ranging from 0.1 to 1 µm), and small particles
have greater killing power because they can
penetrate directly into the blood through
the lungs. Secondhand smoke also typically
contains higher concentrations of ammonia
(40- to 170-fold), nitrogen oxides (4- to 10-fold)
and chemical carcinogens (e.g., benzene,
10-fold; N-nitrosamines, 6- to 100-fold; and
aniline, 30-fold) than mainstream smoke.
The impact is powerful and immediate.
For the period 1965–2009, secondhand smoke
killed an estimated 1.8 million people in the
United States, and it still kills an estimated
41,280 every year (down from more than
81,000 in 1965 when more people smoked
and fewer smoke-free policies were in place).
Opinion
JENNIFER CALFAS
EDITOR IN CHIEF
AARICA MARSH
and DEREK WOLFE
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS
LEV FACHER
MANAGING EDITOR
420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
tothedaily@michigandaily.com
Edited and managed by students at
the University of Michigan since 1890.
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s editorial board.
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Monday, March 9, 2015
Why does Michigan empower smokers
to harm the people we love the most?
Claire Bryan, Regan Detwiler, Payton Luokkala, Aarica Marsh, Victoria Noble,
Michael Paul, Allison Raeck, Melissa Scholke, Michael Schramm, Matthew
Seligman, Linh Vu, Mary Kate Winn, Jenny Wang, Derek Wolfe
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
MICHAEL O’DONNELL | VIEWPOINT
D
espite some progress made
during the student protests
of the 1960s, our society
frequently ignores
the opinions of
us students along
with anyone out-
side the narrow
class of people it
deems “experts.”
Who
are
the
“experts”?
They
are high-ranking
public
officials,
certain
Ph.D.s,
owners of jumbo
jets and people with the last name
Bush or Kennedy. But you don’t need
to be an expert in order to under-
stand the elementary phenomena
within a certain subject. Or, as the
singer/songwriter Bob Dylan once
wrote, “You don’t need a weath-
erman to know which way the
wind blows.”
Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology linguist and renowned dis-
sident Noam Chomsky takes up the
issue of our society’s “culture of the
expert,” along with other concerns
about the need for ordinary people
to critically analyze the actions
of states and governments, in his
essay, “The Responsibility of Intel-
lectuals.” Though of course he has
near-encyclopedic knowledge in a
wide variety of subjects, Chomsky
vehemently opposes the alienation
of ordinary people from political
discourse. He wrote, “There is no
body of theory or significant body
of relevant information beyond
the comprehension of the lay-
man, which makes policy immune
from criticism. To the extent that
‘expert knowledge’ is applied to
world affairs, it is surely appropri-
ate — for a person of any integrity,
quite necessary — to question its
quality and the goals it serves.”
What’s more, the extensive body of
information available to laypeople
today has enhanced their capacity
to criticize policy and to question
“expert knowledge.”
It is the responsibility of intellec-
tuals, then, to use this body of infor-
mation and theory to question and
sometimes to challenge the claims
made by political establishment.
Since last week he addressed
a joint session of Congress argu-
ing against the nuclear compro-
mise being negotiated by world
powers (including the U.S.) and
Iran, let’s take, for example, the
“expert knowledge” of Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The week before his address
to Congress, Al Jazeera released
leaked spy cables between the South
African government and the Moss-
ad, the Israeli equivalent of the CIA,
incidentally answering some of our
questions regarding Netanyahu’s
“expert
knowledge,”
specifically
questions about its “quality and the
goals it serves.”
In a speech before the United
Nations in 2012, Netanyahu sounded
similar alarms to those he sounded
last week, regarding the imminence
of Iran’s nuclear threat, saying that
Iran would obtain its first nuclear
bomb by that coming spring or,
at the latest, that summer. But, in
their report sent to South Africa
just weeks later, the Mossad con-
tradicted Netanyahu’s testimony.
The leaked report said: “Bottom
line: though Iran at this stage is not
performing the activity necessary
to produce weapons, it is working to
close gaps in areas that appear legit-
imate …” The leaked document not
only refutes Netanyahu’s claims, it
also suggests that Netanyahu know-
ingly lied to the UN. So much for his
“expert knowledge.”
This is but one illustration of the
dangers of having absolute faith in
our leaders. This instance is also
proof of the importance of every-
one, but especially those who call
themselves intellectuals, to question
“expert knowledge” and challenge
their respective authority.
Nonetheless, such blatant lies
often go unnoticed and unques-
tioned. (If it weren’t for the leaked
spy cables, we may have never
noticed the contradiction between
Netanyahu’s claims and the reality
according to his government’s own
intelligence agency — though the
evidence that refuted his claims was
within our grasp.) Chomsky empha-
sizes in his essay that what’s con-
demnable isn’t merely politicians
lying to us, but rather the entire
political establishment, especially
intellectuals allowing politicians
to lie and get away with it. “It is of
no particular interest,” Chomsky
wrote, “that one man is quite happy
to lie in behalf of a cause which he
knows to be unjust; but it is signifi-
cant that such events provoke so
little response in the intellectual
community.” It is the responsibility
of intellectuals, then, not to allow
themselves to merely acquiesce on
the claims made by the powerful,
but rather to analyze the claims and
actions of the powerful according
to their causes, motives and often
hidden intentions.
We should further consider the
burden of proof our intellectual
community sets before world lead-
ers. One reason Netanyahu can lie
with such ease in the realm of for-
eign policy is because no one seems
to care about the difference between
actually being threatened and mere-
ly feeling threatened. Hence the
supposed evidence of the threat isn’t
sufficiently scrutinized because it is
not the threat itself but the feeling of
being threatened that people seem
to care about.
In his essay, Chomsky speaks
to this point in the context of the
(then) current U.S. policy toward
Communist China; however, the
faulty intellectual principle he
identifies endures to this day. “To
prove that we are menaced is of
course unnecessary, and the matter
receives no attention; it is enough
that we feel menaced.”
In her essay, “Indigeneity, Settler
Colonialism, White Supremacy,”
Andrea Smith offers one explana-
tion for why and how this mere
“feeling menaced” works so effec-
tively in our political discourse.
“The logic of orientalism marks
certain peoples or nations as inferi-
or and deems them to be a constant
threat to the wellbeing of empire.
These peoples are still seen as
‘civilisations’ — they are not prop-
erty or the ‘disappeared.’ However,
they are imagined as permanent
foreign threats to empire … Conse-
quently, orientalism serves as the
anchor of war, because it allows
the United States to justify being
in a constant state of war to protect
itself from its enemies.”
(Here, Smith uses Edward Said’s
term “orientalism,” or “the process
of the West’s defining itself as a
superior civilization by construct-
ing itself in opposition to an ‘exotic’
but inferior ‘Orient’,” to signify more
than what has been historically
named the “Orient” or “Asia” (e.g.,
the Middle East)).
Under the influence of oriental-
ism, we feel threatened by the mere
fact of certain peoples or nations
existence. For example, under orien-
talism we’re supposed to believe that
a congregation of Muslims chanting
“Death to America! Death to Israel!”
(as seen regularly on Fox News) con-
stitutes a threat. The point is not
that these people definitively do not
constitute a threat — some funda-
mentalist groups, such as ISIS, sure-
ly constitute at least some threat.
Rather, the point is that it’s not even
a question whether they do or not
actually menace or threaten us.
What also isn’t a question, to
return to the issue of Iran’s nuclear
program, is what threat Iran would
pose if they actually acquired a
nuclear weapon. Anyone who thinks
about this question for a few seconds
realizes, “Oh, yeah: If Iran used a
nuclear weapon on Israel, the U.S.
or its allies would wipe Iran off the
map.” The real threat of Iran acquir-
ing a nuclear weapon would be a
threat to Israel’s absolute power in
the region; that is, an Iranian nucle-
ar weapon would likely act at most
as a deterrent to, say, the continued
settlement of the West Bank (inter-
nationally recognized as illegal) as
well as future episodes of what the
Israeli Defense Forces calls “mow-
ing the lawn” in Gaza (i.e., the rou-
tine slaughtering of Gazans).
Our society’s orientalist ideologi-
cal assumption deems these kinds
of questions and lines of inquiry
unnecessary. Thus, when world
leaders like Netanyahu make (false)
allegations regarding, say, our ene-
my’s nuclear development, we’re
supposed to immediately declare:
“Of course you should attack those
savages! If they exist, we should
kill them; if they (might) exist with
nuclear weapons, we should kill
them even more!” The efficacy of
this logic depends on us ordinary
citizens and intellectuals not dis-
tinguishing between feeling men-
aced and actually being menaced,
and not questioning whether or
not we actually are menaced. It is
the responsibility of intellectuals
then to criticize “expert knowl-
edge” in order to defend against
such faulty logic and its hidden
ideological assumptions and biases.
Unfortunately, we don’t all have
the time or energy to do the nec-
essary research. Thankfully, as
Chomsky points out, “For a privi-
leged minority (the intellectuals),
Western democracy provides the
leisure, the facilities and the train-
ing to seek the truth lying hidden
behind the veil of distortion and
misrepresentation, ideology and
class interest, through which the
events of current history are pre-
sented to us.” It is the responsibil-
ity of intellectuals then to speak
truth, expose lies and challenge
authority on behalf of those with-
out the leisure, the facilities and
the training prerequisite to do so.
It is the responsibility of intellec-
tuals to offer people an alternative
to the propaganda perpetuated by
our politicians and the pious por-
tion of the intellectual community.
In short, it is the responsibility of
intellectuals to dissent.
— Zak Witus can be reached
at zakwitus@umich.edu.
“The responsibility of intellectuals”
ZAK
WITUS
CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION
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On average, every 25 smokers kill one
innocent person over a lifetime. For
every person who dies, 10 more get
sick, some of them with debilitating
conditions. The Surgeon General
concluded there is no safe level of
secondhand smoke, so if you smell
smoke, you are being assaulted.
In fact, emerging research at the
University of Oklahoma is finding
that the extract from just one puff
of secondhand smoke can cause
DNA damage.
College students who smoke
are the unknowing victims of
nicotine. They start smoking with
their smoker friends, still think
of
themselves
as
non-smokers,
fully intending to quit when they
graduate, only to discover they are
indeed addicted and cannot quit. A
smoke-free campus helps them quit
because it is harder to find a place
to feed their addiction. National
studies show three out of four
smokers want to quit, and half try
every year, but only four to seven
percent are successful.
What can we do about this?
Change the policy. We can protect
the people we love, people who are
the most vulnerable, and we can
eliminate this assault on each of us
through a simple change in policy.
If you know someone who has heart
disease, respiratory problems, is
in a wheelchair, or is vulnerable to
secondhand smoke for any reason,
please let me know and I will work
with them to change this policy
even faster. Their support will
make the difference.
Michael P. O’Donnell is a clinical
professor at the School of Kinesiology
and the director of the Health
Management Research Center. He can
be reached at modonnell@umich.edu
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T
he air and ocean were warm as I lay on a
beach chair, headphones in. That beach
was private and rarely crowded, and I
wore a blue and purple two-
piece
swimsuit,
gathered
at the chest and hips with
beaded strings. I was uncon-
cerned that the relatively few
people lying near me would
see me in it.
When I got dressed that
morning, I didn’t consider
that my bikini and I might
become the focus of iPhone
cameras
belonging
to
whomever would be sitting
next to me. When I saw the phones pointed
at me, I was alarmed and thoroughly creeped
out. I didn’t really want these strangers owning
the copyrights — and distribution rights —
of pictures or videos of me on the beach in a
swimsuit.
In all fairness, those men could have been
doing any number of things with their camera
phones. But in my experience, there’s little
reason to follow the movements of another
person with your phone unless you’re watching
them on the screen, trying to keep them in the
frame.
If they were recording or photographing me
at that beach, it would have been illegal, but
only because the beach was privately owned.
On public property, consent isn’t usually needed
to photograph a stranger — bikini or no bikini.
***
One summer, I, along with the other students
in my sports photography class, went to a public
skate park to practice taking action shots. I
watched their tricks through my lens, and
tried to capture them on my memory card. I
don’t remember if I even thought twice about
whether the wheeled acrobats appreciated
their presence in my portfolio.
For a part of the session, I positioned myself
near one of the chain-link fences. As I attempted
to photograph the skaters, a little boy came up
to me and asked through the fence if he could
take a picture of me for his grandpa. I was taken
aback, but he held the phone’s camera up to the
iron as I agreed, probably in a questioning tone.
He took the picture, walked over to a car, got in
the passenger seat, and drove off.
I wasn’t thrilled with that particular
progression of events. But no matter how weird
I thought the whole thing was, it was still
perfectly legal. Just as I could photograph the
athletes, that little boy had a right to take my
picture and give it to whomever he wanted —
with or without my approval.
***
In 1890, attorney Samuel Warren and
Supreme
Court
Justice
Louis
Brandeis
published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard
Law Review. In it, they argued that individuals
have a right to keep information about
themselves to themselves. For several reasons,
including resurgent newspaper readership and
innovations in photographic equipment, laws of
the day were failing to protect personal privacy.
They argued for more arduous personal privacy
protection in what became the most cited law
review article of all time — at least according to
my Philosophy GSI.
And it’s easy to see why this idea took so
quickly. For one thing, Americans have a
long list of personal “rights” that they are
accustomed to the government protecting on
their behalf, and the right to privacy seems at
least as important as our generous exemption
from quartering troops. Just as it had when the
article was written, the technology available to
violate others’ personal privacy rights has again
changed.
Today, our flimsy laws attempt to provide
some level of personal privacy. You can’t record
a private conversation — or interview — without
the acknowledged consent of each participant.
It’s illegal to take photos of another person
without permission — unless they’re taken on
public property. Yet, a massive percentage of
people regularly carry phones and cameras
that can easily — and covertly — do both of
these things. And when content can be quickly
uploaded from any computer, photos and videos
can go viral before their subjects even know
they were illicitly taken.
Meanwhile, web companies, and allegedly,
the government, collect vast quantities of data
about individuals’ computer use. Consumers,
especially millennials, have grown accustomed
to the waning privacy of the digital age. We sign
away privacy rights in exchange for Facebook
accounts, Google services and a plethora of
other websites and apps each time we blindly
agree to one of those online contracts.
The way I see it, we’re at a crossroads. As
we grow more reliant on digital technology,
we open more avenues to share information
— about ourselves and others — that might’ve
otherwise been private. Consequently, our laws
grow increasingly difficult to enforce, obsolete
in their methods and antiquated in terms of
the content they protect. Certainly, there are
upsides to diminished privacy — transparency
being one of them. But, if personal privacy
is something we continue to value, it needs
further protection.
— Victoria Noble can be reached
at vjnoble@umich.edu.
Protecting personal privacy
VICTORIA
NOBLE