Imagine you’re sitting outside next to Café Camino, your mouth watering over a delicious cheeseburger and you’re ready to dig in.

Then suddenly the stench of burnt tobacco seeps through your nostrils, souring the experience of your tasty burger.

You look to your left and you notice two students sharing a cigarette. Your eyes venture off to your right and you witness hipsters clouding their lungs with e-cigs.

Ducking your head to avoid the incoming haze of smoke, you notice the sea of cigarette butts littering the ground around your feet.

This is reality for us here on campus and smoking certainly has gotten out of hand at EC.

A responsible person should know better than to carelessly discard their cigarette. It can’t be stressed enough how bad it is for the environment and considering the proximity of EC to the coast.

More importantly you shouldn’t have to get through smoke barriers when entering in and out of facilities. It’s disrespectful to say the least to force someone to breath something harmful.

It’s evident that there’s a shortage of pride amongst students. Many take this school for granted and The Union wished that wasn’t the case.

Yet this total disregard for this institution, environmental impact, and non-smokers will continue to fuel the issue on whether or not smoking should be banned.

Back in 2011, campus faculty was surveyed about possible changing the smoking policy on campus; 30 percent wanted to leave things as is, while 70 percent of faculty supported a stricter smoking policy.

One of the primary arguments made against the ban was that it would violate the rights of individuals.

You have to take into consideration students and faculty with existing health issues like asthma, the physically disabled, or women who are pregnant. The ill effects of secondhand smoke are real and can’t be taken lightly.

Yes banning someone from smoking in a public area is infringing on a person’s individual rights, but others have a right to live a healthy and proactive life style and shouldn’t have to accommodate the habits of others.

In addition, t’s obvious the signs asking students to smoke 20 feet from entryways don’t work, and as of the moment there’s no real enforcement of that policy.

We could set up designated smoking areas around campus, but the $50,000 – $100,000 price tag for the construction and maintenance of each possible smoking zone is completely ridiculous when the money could be better spent elsewhere.

And who would enforce such smoking zones? Certainly not faculty, that’s not in their job description. We don’t have enough cadets or campus police officers to monitor each designated smoking zone. So why waste time, money, and energy on something that’s doomed to fail?

We could forget about the ban and go about business as usual, leaving our school in the hands of those who don’t smoke responsibly and consider our campus a giant ashtray.

On the other hand, banning would bring about a cleaner and healthier school environment and would be in the best interest of everybody including those who smoke.

We’re not fans of infringing on personal freedoms. If you smoke that’s your business, but when you hurt the campus and the well being of others, that’s when people have to deploy policies to teach social etiquette in public spaces.

Like any privilege that gets abused, it should be taken away and a policy banning smoking on campus is long overdue.