Have you ever been sitting at a restaurant attempting to enjoy your meal when a truly pungent odor drifts toward you? Or walking to the store when someone standing on the opposite side of the street spits directly in front of you? There are various forms of tobacco floating around, but two in particular seem to be rather popular here at Freedom. People smoke. And people chew. It’s common knowledge; but has anyone noticed the surprisingly high amount of people who do so? Nicotine addictions seem to be the new “thing” lately. Nowadays, instead of hearing, “Hey, where do you think I could score a concert ticket?” when you walk through the halls, all you hear is, “Hey, do you have a cigarette I could bum?” 16,100 students under the age of 18 in this state alone become new smokers each year. You can only imagine how many kids have been doing it for ages. The truth is, you cannot argue with the facts. 17.5 percent of high school students in Pennsylvania alone smoke cigarettes. On top of that, 10.3 percent of high school students in our state use smokeless or spit tobacco. These numbers may not seem all that high, but when you think about it, they could—and should—be a lot lower. However, the pressure to be popular has gotten to be too much for kids to handle. The thing that no one seems to realize, though, is that nicotine addictions don’t make you look cool; they make you look, for lack of a better word, stupid. The most distressing part of it all? One must be seen to be cool. Smoking and chewing in public is never an attractive activity; there are too many people in this world who are repulsed by the act for it to ever be considered widely acceptable. Additionally, the risk that secondhand smoke raises for those in the vicinity is only getting higher and higher. 2,100 adults die each year in Pennsylvania from secondhand smoke (not to mention to 20,000 that die from their own smoking habits), which is far too high a number from a cause so foolish. Look at Freedom as a prime example of this public misdemeanor. It can be assumed that students who chew don’t mind it at all, but what they don’t realize is the effect their choices have on other students around them. Have you ever seen a spit bottle? The residue from that tobacco is positively abhorrent. What’s worse is when students decide to take it upon themselves to use the school as their own personal spit bottle; for example, the water fountains, the bathrooms, the cafeteria, etc. During the school day is neither the time nor the place for such behavior; said actions are distracting, inappropriate, and quite frankly, rather nauseating. Of course, there’s a simple solution: keep your personal decisions to yourself. Pushing them onto others by smoking or chewing around them will only make you look even more unappealing. If you decide to make that poor life choice, then you’re the one that should have to deal with the consequences, not the rest of the world.