Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

PCC to become first tobacco-free community college in Oregon

Photos and story by James Hill

Portland Community College will go tobacco-free in the fall of 2009, according to Preston Pulliams, college president.

PCC will be the first community college in Oregon to prohibit the use of tobacco products on its campuses. It will join two currently tobacco-free schools, Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon College of Oriental Medicine.

“This will be a big change,” Pulliams said. “We must ensure that it is planned, paced and fundamentally respectful of people’s rights, regardless of their view of the change.”

Portland Community College is the largest post-secondary education institution in Oregon, serving 86,000 students – more than the seven Oregon University System schools combined. It also is one of the 20 largest employers in the Portland metro area.

Currently, the college only allows smoking outdoors in designated smoking areas, away from school buildings.

“We applaud PCC’s plans to become Oregon’s first 100 percent tobacco-free community college,” said Andrew Epstein, school policy coordinator at the American Lung Association of Oregon, which has served as a resource to PCC through the Oregon Tobacco-Free College Initiative. “All students and staff deserve a campus environment free of secondhand smoke exposure, regardless of where they happen to be enrolled or employed.”

The student body has begun to react to the news. “While, as the daughter of two smokers, I appreciate the right of people to smoke, I do not think there is a realistic way to allow it on campus without putting others at risk of dangerous smoke-related complications,” said Marissa Johnson, incoming president of the student government for the Cascade Campus in North Portland. “I believe students will agree this is the sensible choice for the overall health and quality of our time here at PCC. After a while, it will just be habit, to wait until off campus to smoke, just as we have adjusted to smoking outside rather than indoors.”

At the Sylvania Campus in Southwest Portland, out-going president Victoria Galanopoulos led the fight for a tobacco-free college. “In addition to representing students, I’m also a parent. Like many other parents, if given the choice, I would like to send my child to a college that provides a tobacco-free campus, and now we have that option,” she said. ‘Tobacco-related deaths and diseases are preventable, and this policy is one more step in the right direction to help change social norms surrounding tobacco use.”

More than 50 U.S. colleges and universities are 100 percent tobacco-free, according to the American Lung Association of Oregon, including Clark College in Vancouver, Wash. Santa Rosa Junior College and Woodland Community College in California also are tobacco-free. The largest collection of smoke-free schools is in North Carolina – in the heart of tobacco country.