I waited with great anticipation to hear whether students would vote to make Saint Louis University a smoke-free zone. With almost 20 percent of students participating in last month’s referendum, the verdict is clear: Smoking should only take place at the very fringes of campus. This decision awaits only administrative approval.

Riding this progressive wave, it seems that now would be a great time to introduce even greater measures to protect students from their peers and from themselves; although second-hand smoke might never have killed anyone, there are plenty of activities that have.

First, of course, is the problem of alcohol consumption. Wander down West Pine Mall on a Sunday morning, and you’ll recognize the tell-tale signs of the effect booze has on property-whether it’s broken lights, cracked windows, uncrushed cans or shattered bottles strewn about the walkways. All of this damage must be paid for out of students’ pockets. Wouldn’t an outright ban on alcohol avert these unnecessary costs? Clearly, it would.

Yet those property concerns must take a backseat to alcohol’s human cost. According to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention, there are approximately 75,766 alcohol-attributable deaths from disease every year in America; in fact, during the time it takes you to read this commentary, one person will have died from an alcohol-related illness. This doesn’t include the almost 20,000 annual alcohol-related fatalities due to drunk driving, or the 254,000 injuries where alcohol was involved in an car accident.

And, speaking of cars, the University could make SLU safer by banning them from campus altogether. In 2005, 43,443 Americans died as a result of automobile accidents. The removal of cars and the parking lots that held them would not only prevent drivers-inebriated or not-from killing SLU students (and vice versa), but it would also leave considerably more green space on campus.

Why should we create more green space? Because, according to the World Health Organization, car pollution causes, by a two-to-one margin, more deaths than car accidents do. And let’s not forget about the environment itself. In 2003, WHO calculated that 160,000 people die every year from global warming, and no doubt, the use of cars in the United States plays no small role in this calamity. SLU could unpave its lots and plant some trees to offset the ills exacted against us by the unenlightened.

Next, students could turn their attention to the food they eat, chock full of known and unknown poisons. Heart disease accounts for 40 percent of all U.S. deaths, with 869,724 lives lost in 2004, alone. Obesity adds $93 billion to this country’s medical bills annually. SLU could lead by example and ban pizza, burritos, soda pop, vending machines and other agents of death from its cafeterias and hallways.

Students could also return the money that helped build the Busch Student Center, since that money was derived from sales of alcohol, which students are probably in the process of banning (for obvious reasons).

The University could intervene in many other areas. It could end its sports programs, activities that could make students victims of a sports-related death, dozens if not hundreds of which occur annually. SLU could distribute Breathe Right nasal strips and require their nightly use, to prevent snoring, which was just recently found to be yet another cause of heart disease; surely, the victims of secondhand snoring would rejoice, and snorers themselves would benefit from this momentous change in lifestyle.

The University could require only computers in classrooms, as pencils could turn into instruments of death with but a slip or toss. In the meantime, it could round off any remaining corners on its desks, chairs, benches, buildings and books, since pointy things pose a danger to non-pointy things, or even other pointy things. After all, death by second-hand pointy thing is death, all the same.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of bannable substances, vehicles, foods and behaviors. But it’s a start.

I look with interest to the day that students enact these modest proposals to discourage the free exercise of dangerous activities and eliminate their free exercise altogether.

Only then will SLU be a healthy place for classes-though an increasingly unhealthy place for an education.

Patrick Ishmael is a student in the Saint Louis University School of Law.