Portland State University has already taken steps to reduce tobacco use on its downtown campus. Now the school is challenging itself to become entirely smoke-free by 2016.
Josef Lotz / Portland State University
(file photo, October 2006)
College student Hannah Muller was a light smoker for years. She was enrolled at Portland Community College in 2009 when that school implemented a smoking ban.
Muller says that policy is what drove her to break her habit.
"That change at that time really sparked me to getting onto the road towards quitting, and I did within a year. And I started to realize, I started to view my behaviors as out of social norm. And that environmental change really changed my life," she said.
Now Muller is making an active effort to make the same policy change a reality at PSU. The university has accepted a Regional Fresh Air Challenge by local, state, and federal health authorities.
The smoking ban would extend beyond the campus Clean Air Corridor, which the school implemented earlier this year. That corridor is a designated pollution-free zone.
This story originally appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting.
