The impending merger of Augusta State and Georgia Health Sciences universities will have unexpected effects on student smokers.

Gina Thurman, the acting assistant vice president for student services and assistant dean of students, addressed Augusta State’s Student Government Association Friday and informed them that the administration of the new university has decided to extend GHSU’s tobacco ban to the Walton Way campus after the universities merge. GHSU went tobacco-free in 2007, Thurman said, and many other Georgia universities, including Emory University and Armstrong Atlantic University, have adopted similar policies.

GHSU even offered assistance to help those addicted to tobacco, she said.

“When they went tobacco-free, they provided classes, kits to help you quit, different resources, counseling, treatment options to help those that wanted to quit do so,” Thurman said. “They’ve had some good results with that; they’ve seen some positive changes since then. The idea is that (the administration) would kind of introduce the policy for one year to give those people that do smoke that want an opportunity to try to quit or to come up with some other alternatives a year to do so because, obviously, if you smoke, quitting smoking is not going to be something you do overnight. It’s going to be a process.”

The current plan is to introduce the ban in November 2013, coinciding with the American Cancer Society’s Great American Smokeout campaign, Thurman said. Then the policy will be gradually implemented over the course of the academic year. The tobacco-free policy is set to take full effect in the fall of 2014.

Carol Rychly, the vice president for academic affairs at Augusta State, said a survey of Augusta State faculty, staff and students showed some level of support of a potential ban, but Thurman mentioned that she had received complaints that the survey itself seemed biased in a way that would skew results in favor of the ban.

SGA President Andrew Phillips said he anticipates an unfavorable reaction to the ban because of lingering resentment over the merger and the new university’s name.

“Anything that we’re changing and (GHSU is) staying the same is viewed (negatively), even though they clearly didn’t always have a tobacco-free campus,” Phillips said. “I think it’s moving forward that they took it on before we did. I mean, this could have happened had we not consolidated.”

But he said he understands the policy is controversial.

“Obviously, if you’re a smoker and this is one place you can’t smoke, it’s going to suck,” Phillips said. “I think that a lot of students have been walking through smoke on the way to class – really it’s just a haze – and I think that they would benefit from not necessarily being around that. The policy isn’t saying you can’t smoke; it’s just saying you can’t smoke here.”

Although Phillips said the ban might have occurred regardless, Rychly said the ban is definitely connected to the merger of the universities.

“One of the things that happening with the consolidation is it gives every policy that we have there tends to be a similar policy or something on both campuses that addresses the same issue,” she said. “So whenever we run into policies that don’t exactly match, it does force us to look at those things and say what would be a recommendation.”

That recommendation extends the ban from GHSU throughout the rest of the campus of the new university. The policy bans all forms of tobacco, including chewing tobacco and electronic cigarettes, Rychly said.

“I’ve never been a smoker, so it’s very easy for me to say we should do this,” she said. “But on the other hand, I think we should be sensitive to people who do smoke. We know that smoking is not a good thing for the person who smokes, and we also know it’s not a good thing for the people around them.”

As GHSU did in 2007, the new university will offer classes and provide resources to those who wish to quit using tobacco products, Thurman said. She said the administration wants the SGA to champion the policy, but several senators voiced their discontentment with the ban during the afternoon meeting.

Phillips said the policy will go into effect regardless of student support, echoing Thurman’s previous statement.

“At this point the only thing that is set in stone is that we’re going tobacco-free,” Thurman said. “The timeline has just been a suggestion. Nothing else has been approved at (this) point, just that it has been recommended that the new campus be tobacco-free at some point.”