Marion will join main campus for tobacco ban beginning Jan. 1

MARION — Students, faculty and staff at The Ohio State University at Marion will have to find someplace else to smoke, chew and spit come January.
Marion campus will follow the lead of main campus and become completely tobacco-free on Jan. 1. Marion Technical College also may enforce a ban.
Dave Claborn, OSUM director of development and community relations, and Dr. Greg Rose, OSUM dean and director, said some details of the ban are still being ironed out.
“We’re not going to have the cigarette police going around campus,” said Claborn, adding that the school administrators are still figuring out how to enforce the ban.
Rose said the smoking ban is partially proactive, and is part of a larger effort to help people kick the habit.
He said OSUM and Marion Technical College are working to figure out if the ban will be enforced for the MTC community, since it is a shared campus.
Nikki Workman, director of public relations at MTC, said administrators are trying to see what their students and faculty want to do.
For OSUM freshman Savannah Incho-Lewis, who is majoring in middle childhood education, the ban will be welcome. She said her parents smoked while she was growing up, and she doesn’t like having smoke around her.
“I can go to school and not have to worry about it,” she said.
There is no official penalty for smoking or other tobacco use listed on OSU’s main website, which states that “all students, faculty, staff, vendors, volunteers, and visitors are expected to comply with this policy. Individuals are encouraged and empowered to respectfully inform others about the policy in an ongoing effort to support individuals to be tobacco free, improve individual health, and encourage a culture of compliance.”
In 2012, the Ohio Board of Regents recommended that all college campuses become tobacco-free.
OSU’s Newark campus and the Central Ohio Technical College began a smoking ban Aug. 1.

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