Smoke free dorms credited with cutting smoking

Smoke-free residence halls at the University of Iowa are getting some of the credit for making more U-of-I students smoke-free too. Surveys over several years find smoking rates among students have dropped dramatically in recent years after smoking was banned in all dorms. Professor Chris Squire, an oral pathologist at the U-of-I, says smoking rates were “alarming” in the 80s and 90s. Professor Squire says smoke-free dorm floors were introduced at the U-of-I in 1998 and all dorms were made smoke-free two years later. He says the surveys are showing the impact, as smoking rates dropped from nearly 50-percent to almost 30-percent.At first, he says some students protested the smoke-free rules, but now they’re okay with it as the policy’s been in place for a few years. Squire says the smoking rates among students didn’t really start to drop until the full dorm-wide ban was put in place.He says the University of Minnesota has -no- smoke-free dorms and the student smoking rate there was 48-point-five percent in 2000, when it was 28-point-three-percent at Iowa.