May, 11, 2014

Siqi Xu
Broadway Building, Room 569
625 SW Jackson Street
Portland, OR, 97201


President Wim Wiewel
Portland State University
PO Box 751--POF
Portland, OR, 97207-0751


Dear Mr. Wiewel:
Thank you for sacrificing your valuable time to read my letter. An interesting article in Lancet drew my
attention and I want to share with you. It said that The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not
the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.
1
While a huge proportion of
PSU students are addicted into the glamour and sophistication that tobacco provides to them. Smoking is fatal
poison for not only human beings but also the environment. Throwing away cigarette butts anywhere can cause
pollution for PSU. So I do believe that holding a program for helping students get rid of smoking addiction,
enforcing students to obey PSU no-smoking rule and giving a right place to put cigarette butts dustbin with
ashtray are very important.
Smoking is absolutely harmful to smokers. It causes a lot of diseases such as asthma, heart disease, lung cancer
and so on. According to statistics, cigarette smoking kills more than 440,000 Americans each year
2
which
equals to 73% of the population in Portland. While many PSU students are still smoking although they know
the result of not keeping away from it. Most of them cannot stop since the first time they smoked. They
commonly get addicted to smoking, and finally, cigarettes are a part of their life. With time moving on, this
kind of bad habit will be even worse. The more cigarettes they are going to smoke, the worse their health will
be. In 2011, an estimated 77.8% (34.1 million) of population smoked every day, and 22.2% (9.7 million)
smoked some days
3
. It is a great pity.
What I suggest is to start a program especially for those students who cannot get away from addiction of
smoking. Members of that program can help heavy smokers get rid of cigarettes by performing some interesting
and useful ways such as playing different games, use other things like food to distract attention of thirsting for
smoking and so forth.
Besides, smoking does harm not only to smokers but also people around them. In the survey, among the
440,000 dead American smokers, 49,000 of these deaths from exposure to secondhand smoke. Secondhand
smoking is a potential murder that hide in crowds. Not only the smoked students but also other innocent
students may get hurt from harmful smog. Actually, our school has the smoking policy but most smoking
students just pretend to lose sight of it. The smoking policy in PSU website only gives that smoking is
prohibited within 25 feet from entrances and exits, air intake vents, operable windows of buildings, or where
otherwise prohibited by signage
4
instead of pointing out certain place for smoking outside closing space.

1
Oeberg, Mattias; Jaakkola, Maritta S; Woodward, AlistairView Profile; Peruga, Armando; Pruess-Ustuen, Annette. (2011).
Worldwide burden of disease from exposure to second-hand smoke: a retrospective analysis of data from 192 countries. The Lancet,
139-146
2
Cigarette Smoking in the United States. (n.d.).
3
Ibid
4
Portland State University. (n.d.).
Another fact is that many students throw away cigarette butts wherever they finish smoking. One day I walked
by the green belt besides Ondin Building, I found a lot of cigarette butts on the grass. It was disgusting. If every
smoker does like this, cigarette butts will be a huge pollution in PSU.
As far as I am concerned, our school need to enforce smoking students to obey the policy by pointing out
certain area for smoking and fining them if they smoke outside the given place. Besides, set some dustbins with
ashtray inside this area so that smokers will never have the excuse to throw cigarette butts wherever they want.
By doing this, a potential effect of causing fire can also be reduced efficiently.
To improve both the living quality in our homePSU and the health for ourselves, it is time for our school to
take some actions to reduce the harm that smoking brings to us. Again, thank your for reading.
Sincerely,


Siqi Xu