Hey Mom, can I finally buy a smoke?

Does anybody remember those annoying anti-smoking posters plastered in every single classroom of our K-12 education?

You know, the ones where a grotesque inside-out woman (who looks worse than anyone your parents tried to set you up with) eyeballs you with a woe-is-me repentance, leaving you to fathom whether you still have a soul after having taken a drag of a menthol at a New Year’s Eve party?

Fast forward to now: As UCLA students, we are no longer barraged by these laminated insults to our intelligence.

However, according to former ASUCLA dictates, we are still those same naive teens, whose decisions about cigarettes need to be made for them.

The Marlboro Man is nowhere to be found on our sterile campus ““ not in the vending machines, at the North Campus shop or the Market in Ackerman.

However, according to a study done by the Harvard School of Public Health, 25 percent of UCLA students smoked within a 30 day time period. That’s one-fourth of our population that is forced to go elsewhere to buy a product that is completely legal.

If the government says it’s legal, if students want it, then why shouldn’t our student union stock it?

The answer to this question dates back to the early 1990s, when ASUCLA’s board of directors decided to ban the sale of tobacco products on campus.

This decision was based on “social responsibility,” according to current ASUCLA Executive Director Bob Williams. Jan Griwach, supply director for the UCLA Store, also commented that the ban was issued to “support UCLA’s smoke-free environment.”

As noble as these causes seemed, the relationship between ASUCLA and the students should no longer be one of parent and child.

Smokers should reject these judgment calls on products that so many of us demand. Just look at the copious amounts of unhealthy junk food that the ASUCLA store peddles. These undoubtedly have negative repercussions on the physiques of young coeds, but nobody seems to gripe.

Well, in the words of tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor from the cult film “Thank You for Smoking”: “It is my job to defend the defenseless.”

“If students would ask for cigarettes, we would usually send them to Rite Aid or Ralph’s,” said Adam Yassaman, a UCLA alumnus and former manager of the Ackerman Market.

Oh great, let me take my smoker’s lungs on a magical journey all the way across Le Conte.

The lack of nicotine gets even more taxing during finals week. Picture this: You’re standing outside Powell, stressed, desperately yearning for a drag of a Parliament, and you realize you have no cigarettes. Understanding how incredibly maternal the school is for not selling them, you are forced to bum one from your neighbor. To add credence to the argument and a dose of hyper-intellectualism, let’s call this the “bumming culture” ““ a culture of blue-and-gold children reduced to mere beggars on the streets of UCLA because their parents won’t let them smoke.

The kids on the hill face similar problems. David Yu, a fourth-year English major, said of the ban, “I knew students who made their own cigarettes in the dorms and sold them because there was such a demand.”

You know there has to be something wrong when students have to cater to a hillside black market which is normally reserved for illegal drugs.

I think the reason that more smokers haven’t spoken out about this issue is because they are afraid of the non-smoking intelligentsia that breeds on our campus, those who naively fuse smoking with moral indignation. It is up to ASUCLA to take a more proactive role in fixing this problem.

Those who oppose selling cigarettes need to understand that no one ever denies the negative consequences of smoking. It is a brutish and addictive habit that leads to a myriad of health problems. There are various reasons for student smoking ““ the charm of self defacement, a rebel allure, something to do after a drinking binge. Whatever the motives, as responsible adults, we reserve the right to incase our lungs with murky, cancer-ridden tar. And we shouldn’t have to walk all the way to “Shady-Mart” to do it. It’s about time UCLA smokers start battling this aged and unjust statute.

Join the fight. Fight to die. E-mail Gonzalez at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].