Anti-Smoking Policy

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If a new policy to develop a smoke free environment for the university is to be created, the policy must consider the following four important factors: bans on smoking, anti-smoking ads, public lectures, and the age of the spokespeople. Firstly, creating bans on smoking in the university premises may seem as a harsh strategy, especially to students who are highly addicted to smoking. This strategy can be implemented with the help of strict security personnel, who should ensure that any student caught smoking in the university is stopped. However, this is likely to cause student unrest since they may see the strategy as an infringement of their rights (Foleno, 1992). On the other hand, proper consultation and discussion with all the university’s students on the need to ban smoking totally in the institution may help in adhering to the new policy.
The second factor, anti-smoking ads, may also be of significant value to the new policy. Anti-smoking advertising can succeed in the long run only if there is clarity and consistency in the messages. Since most of the university students normally fail to pay attention to boring ads, anti-smoking ads should have captivating themes, which will attract the students to read the messages on the ads (Pechmann & Reibling, 2000). The messages should discuss the adverse negative effects of smoking such as lung cancer, smelly breath, and mouth cancer (Boyle, 2004). In addition, public lectures that focus on both the short and long-term effects of smoking can be incorporated into the policy. Such lectures are likely to enlighten students at the university on the health issues associated with smoking tobacco (Boyle, 2004). For the lectures to be taken seriously by the students, the people chosen to...

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