Temple University set to become a tobacco-free campus

Temple University announced Tuesday that it plans to ban the use of all tobacco products on campus in the coming months.

Temple President Richard M. Englert wrote in a message to the University community that the new policy aims to "eliminate the use of all tobacco products in all indoor and outdoor spaces at each Temple campus in the United States," including both combustible and noncombustible products. 

Currently, Temple's policy bans smoking within 25 feet of a building. Englert wrote that the decision to change this policy follows a May 2018 report from Temple's Presidential Smokefree Campus Task Force. 

Englert wrote that Temple plans to have the new policy instituted by July 1, with full implementation at the start of the school year in September 2019. He added that the policy will include anti-smoking programs "to help students, faculty and staff break their nicotine addiction."

Temple's new policy follows trends among other Philadelphia universities. Drexel University has banned tobacco on campus since 2013, and Penn became a tobacco-free campus in 2017. 

Penn's decision to ban tobacco products followed recommendations from the Tobacco Committee, which was created by the University in 2014 to explore how Penn could change its policies. The Committee is chaired by Penn Medicine's Comprehensive Smoking Treatment Programs Director Frank Leone, who focuses on changing social perceptions of smoking rather than penalizing smokers. 

“Rules by themselves don’t really effectively change behavior as much as you would like," Leone told PennToday in 2016. "Even if they do change behavior on campus, they don’t have the same downstream impact that we would like to see.” 

In an effort to make Penn tobacco-free, the University removed over 25 smoking poles — where smokers dispose of cigarette butts — on campus in 2017.