Anti-Tobacco Group Celebrates Victories On and Off Campus

It would seem to be a difficult time to fight against tobacco use in Missouri. Voters defeated a proposed statewide tobacco tax increase in 2006. Every year, 9,475 Missourians die from tobacco use. Each year, more than 12,000 Missouri youths become new daily smokers. Tobacco use costs Missouri $4.3 billion in lost productivity and direct medical costs.

Yet the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC) students and faculty that comprise Peers Against Secondhand Smoke (PASS) are seeing encouraging signs that their work to increase awareness about the dangers of tobacco is having an impact both on campus and in the surrounding community.

In existence since 2005, PASS has flourished since the university received a $2.6 million grant through Missouri Foundation for Health’s Tobacco Prevention and Cessation Initiative (TPCI). The grant funds a wide variety of efforts, enabling PASS to help institute tobacco-free policies at the UM Health Care System and Boone Hospital Center. It is also one of the few MFH grants that focuses on the college-age audience.

However, the group considers its greatest accomplishment to be its work to convince Columbia’s city government to pass an ordinance in 2006 that bans smoking in local bars, restaurants and other public buildings. For PASS, spreading its message within the campus was easy to develop. Taking that message outside the university walls provided a challenge to the students, who suddenly found themselves dealing with local politics, governmental structures, business owners and individuals who all needed to be engage in the Columbia-wide effort.

“It was a lot of work,” Kim Dude, director of the university’s Wellness Resource Center, said of the group’s efforts in support of the ban. It took three years to become a reality, and PASS wasn’t sure the decision was going to be favorable.

“There were many frustrating city government meetings where it was very easy to get discouraged,” Dude said. “The students kept me going, though, and in the end we got it done.”

PASS also earned national recognition in 2006 for its work, receiving the “Outstanding Tobacco Control Programming” award from BACCHUS, a university- and community-based network focusing on comprehensive health and safety initiatives.

“Completely unexpected,” said third-year student and PASS vice president Domingo Pacheco. “We just went to the conference to get exposure to other groups doing similar work across the country. To receive the award based on just one year of work was shocking.”

Now the organization, which is part of the university’s task force to review the campus smoking policy, has set its sights on convincing students not to begin smoking and helping current smokers find effective cessation services. Commitment to this issue is one many PASS members plan to continue as they move into the workforce, helping people understand the dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke.

PASS and other groups will continue to have opportunities to educate Missourians about the dangers of tobacco use through MFH’s TPCI funding program, now already in its fourth year of funding. MFH has made a nine-year, $40 million commitment to TPCI, and by the end of 2006, has already made grants totaling $11.4 million to 26 organizations around Missouri for school-based prevention and workplace cessation programming.

University of Missouri – Health Care
Columbia, MO 65211
573.882.4141
www.muhealth.org