To the editor:

I am an unapologetic smoker who retired from Harvard five years ago after serving 22 years as a library assistant at the law school. The Harvard Yard smoking ban, and the efforts of anti-tobacco reformers to prohibit smoking on all American university campuses, are designed not for the usual secondhand smoke protection rationale, but to alienate and ostracize smokers. Reformers call this policy "de-normalization."

If, when I was a library assistant, I had been required to leave campus for a cigarette, it would have taken so much time, my employment would have been put in danger. Likewise, for students, professors, or workers who wish to smoke, to be required to leave campus would handicap them to the point of jeopardizing their place at the university. This is exactly what anti-smoking reformers want.

Two years ago, Dr. Howard Koh, assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a federal initiative to pressure universities to prohibit tobacco. Koh said the purpose is “to protect people from tobacco dependence.” In other words, to protect students from making unapproved of decisions--hardly a vote of confidence in their judgment. Implicit in Koh’s announcement was the threat to withhold federal funds from universities who don't cooperate.

When Koh was director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, he boasted at a meeting I attended, that he had considered demanding the phrase “You are the scum of the earth” be printed on all cigarette packs sold in Massachusetts. As a federal official and a physician, Koh’s scorn—quite representative of anti smoking reformers in general—for those almost 20% of American adults who smoke, is unconscionable.

Stephen A. Helfer

Retired library assistant at HLS Library and co-founder of Cambridge Citizens for Smokers' Rights