After all of the fiery debates and twisted rhetoric, the smoke has finally cleared: Saint Louis University students have spoken, and they say that smoking must go. Nevertheless, I’m a bit confused as to what they want. (After all, the referendum was a bit ambiguous.) Do they really want a campus-wide ban, or just a change in the enforcement of rules?

One thing is for sure: 63 percent of voting SLU students (but only 13 percent of all students, if you divide the student population by the referendum results) claim that they want to see a change in the smoking rules. These people are a force that must be appeased. Before the administration makes an official statement about the results, or changes policy, however, they should consider this point: smoke.free.slu’s proposal was based on preventing harm to humans caused by environmental tobacco smoke.

The Environmental Protection Agency says that ETS kills roughly 3,000 people per year, and the U.S. Surgeon General reports that there is no known, risk-free level of secondhand smoke. Carly Caminiti, vice president of smoke.free.slu, has implied that the passing of Referendum B shows the administration that we, the students of SLU, “recognize the severity of breathing in secondhand smoke” due to these facts, and others. We saw the light, and the referendum passed.

This sounds good, right? Well, I have some facts of my own to present.

There’s another substance on campus that is often abused, which the administration allows: alcohol. This same substance causes 75,000 deaths each year and accounts for 39 percent of all traffic-related fatalities-that’s 16,000 deaths, annually. Alcohol has “inspired” more statements, also authored by the Surgeon General, than Big Tobacco could ever dream about. Could this be the same substance that the University endorses, and sells, within its walls?

Caminiti has said that 105 colleges have become entirely, or almost entirely, smoke-free. But where are the dry and semi-dry campuses? If the 63 percent of SLU students-again, that’s just 63 percent of students who voted-understand the severity of 3,000 deaths per year, surely they understand the severity of 75,000 deaths. So, they must agree that we need a campus-wide alcohol ban.

Perhaps that conclusion seems unfair. I’m sure many students think, “Drinking only affects me, not others, and I can handle myself.” Tell that to parents who have lost a child due to the irresponsible actions of drunk drivers, or to the girl whose friend got in a car with a drunk driver and died. How many times have you seen or heard of the danger in drinking and driving? How many times, by comparison, have we sent students to the hospital for smoking too much?

The point is, if we are really concerned with saving human lives, then we should vote to make the campus dry. How many votes, out of 2,250, would be in favor of that proposal?

This decision-keeping the alcohol but shunning the smokers-would also be a difficult one for the administration to make. If saving lives is Referendum B’s main objection, then the answer is easy for administrators. However, morals aren’t always stable when money and contracts are involved. I’m sure the administration doesn’t want to look hypocritical. Maybe if the University opened a hookah bar, they would have smote Referendum B on the spot.

To quote a great St. Louis Jesuit, “Cui Bono?” To whose benefit? I may sound like a sore loser, but what are we representing, except for an inconsistent morality, if we don’t ban both?

Nick Calcaterra is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.