CORRECTION APPENDED

Starting next spring, there will be no more stray cigarette butts lying around Harvard Medical School.

Dean Jeffrey S. Flier announced Monday that the Medical school, in conjunction with the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, will be extending its current no-smoking policy to include outdoors near entrances and other air intakes. [CORRECTION BELOW]

“We continually review our policies to make sure that we’re advancing human health,” said Judith F. Montminy, a spokesman for the Medical School. “We have determined that allowing smoking on any of our grounds was not advisable.”

Flier announced that the campus-wide ban will not go into effect until the spring of 2009 in order to give smokers time to quit their habit, according to a statement released by the Medical School.

The smoking-ban announcement coincided with the opening of a new exhibit examining the reprehensible marketing tactics tobacco companies used in the 1920s to 1950s. Advertisements featured everything from smiling doctors enjoying a “healthy” smoke to pseudo-scientific medical facts meant to allay rising health concerns and avoid losing customers.

The Dental School and the Medical School along with the Harvard School of Public Health—which instituted a campus-wide no-smoking policy in 2003—are all encouraging faculty and students who smoke to take advantage of Harvard’s free smoking-cessation programs.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Allan M. Brandt, whose recent book, “The Cigarette Century,” addresses the history of cigarette consumption in the U.S., said he is in full support of the plan.

“This new policy is really a reflection on our scientific information of how harmful smoking is as well as on public polices that are trying to assure that environments are really safe,” said Brandt, who also spoke at the exhibit.

Taking the history of the public’s reaction to no-smoking policies into account, Brandt said that he does not foresee much difficulty in enforcing the new regulations.

“I think this reflects social norms about smoking as well as the fact that people’s understanding of its harms have really shifted,” Brandt said. “There’s sort of a self-enforcement­. Generally, the public has been very respectful and compliant.”

Stanford Medical School Professor Robert K. Jackler, who recently lectured at the event, said he hopes to increase public awareness about how the tobacco industry deceived the public during the first half of the twentieth century.

“We in healthcare have a moral responsibility to set healthful behavior,” said Jackler, whose school declared a tobacco-free zone on its entire campus last September. “Hospitals and medical schools have a unique and special role in promoting healthful behavior.”

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.


CORRECTION APPENDED

The March 13 story, "Medical School Expands Smoking Ban," said that Harvard Medical School's new no-smoking policy will extend to include outdoors near entrances and other air intakes. In fact, the current policy already extends to these areas, and the new one will ban all smoking on the Medical School's grounds.