Photo by Emily Chow / North by Northwestern.

As long as cigarettes have been popular, they’ve been associated with an aura of coolness and subversion. Kate Moss smoked. Jack White smoked. Barack Obama smoked. But singers have to hit the high notes and presidents can’t be getting lung cancer, so Jack and Barack quit. As of March of this year, Kate still smoked, but she’s not exactly the poster child for good lifestyle choices — she did date Pete Doherty voluntarily.

To combat this “cool” image, we hear more about the harmful effects of smoking every year, and every few months we have a new “Truth” commercial to shove the facts into our brains. Despite all of this, the popularity of smoking actually increased among college students in the 90s, and has continued at the same level of popularity since then, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. The same study said that 30 percent of American college students smoke; that’s compared to 22.8 percent of the general adult population according to the American Lung Association. But does smoking’s popularity with college students translate into popularity at NU? Or do we judge our fellow students who smoke? And where does hookah fit in to all of this?

Anybody Got a Light?

If there’s any indication of how unpopular smoking is at Northwestern, it’s how hard it was for me to find a smoker to interview for this article. Maybe it was the cold weather, or maybe it was Parents’ Weekend driving smokers to ignore their cravings and stay indoors, but for whatever reason there were barely any to be seen on campus this past weekend. Compared to other college campuses, like Sarah Lawrence College where smoking is so prevalent that students receive a P.E. credit just for quitting, smokers are few and far between here at Northwestern.

To see just how many smokers we actually have here at Northwestern, I conducted a survey of 100 students. Of the students surveyed, 30 percent said they had smoked cigarettes before, and 16 percent said they smoked currently. When asked how frequently they smoked, the most common response averaged around one to three times a week, with several saying they smoked “only when drinking.” In fact, the most any student admitted to smoking was one cigarette each day. These results reveal that while there are some Northwestern students who smoke, most of these students do not consider themselves regular smokers, but rather, “social smokers.”

More than 70 percent of college smokers are “social smokers,” defined as “smoking most commonly while partying or socializing,” according to a study by the Journal of American College Health. One thing the majority of social smokers have in common is that they do not consider themselves to be smokers at all.

In fact, in order to find a single smoker, I had to resort to somewhat unorthodox methods — I decided to put my own lungs on the line in the hopes that social smokers would reveal themselves to me and agree to be interviewed.

It wasn’t my first time smoking. In fact, I know my way around cigarettes quite well. I started smoking one cold evening in high school, in a parking lot outside a coffee shop. Since then, I’ve been known to have a bum smoke or two when the mood strikes. So after hours of fruitlessly wandering the campus, I walked into 711 and asked for a pack of Camel No. 9s, needlessly nervous as I handed my ID to the guy behind the counter. With my pack of cigarettes in tow, I walked to the ashtray in front of what I had been told was a “smoking dorm” and proceeded to light up. Immediately, someone walked up to me and asked if I had a light. Within seconds of lighting my first cigarette, I had found my first interviewee, and learned my first lesson about smokers at Northwestern: they love company.

Unpopular but un-criticized

From then on, I found people to interview pretty easily, and they generally had similar things to say about the perception of smoking on campus. Weinberg freshman Joanne Kim said that she does not believe there is a stigma associated with smoking at Northwestern, while Music sophomore Sam Moon summed up the general consensus pretty well: “I usually don’t really think about it that much, but I guess that I know a lot of my friends don’t like it.”

Moon also affirmed the fact that Northwestern is an exception among colleges. “I’ve been to different [colleges] with my friends from other schools, and there’s a lot more smokers,” he said.

Non-smokers echoed these views. “I know some people who smoke occasionally, like around other smokers or in the right situation, but not many people who do it regularly,” Medill freshman S.K. Dachowitz said.

Medill junior Tony Jarboe agreed: “As you’re seeing an increase in the number of hoops people have to jump through to light up, you see a decrease in people who are willing and able to light up.”

While most students think smoking is pretty unpopular on campus, they also think that smokers aren’t really judged for their habit — if the students I talked to thought there was any kind of stigma attached to smoking cigarettes, they said it was a mild one and that it was due to the health effects. “The more we learn of the health effects, the more a stigma becomes attached,” Jarboe said.

Why so unpopular?

And the health effects are aplenty. While many students make intelligent health decisions to avoid smoking that could lead to addiction, others have gaps in their knowledge that could be very dangerous to their health, according to Dr. Peter Sporn, associate professor of medicine at Northwestern. One myth is that by just smoking “socially” they’ll avoid the ill health effects of cigarettes — but that’s not entirely true.

While social smokers avoid some of the long-term effects of smoking, they are still at risk for all the acute effects such as potentially exacerbating their asthma, causing eye problems, and other respiratory problems besides cancer and emphysema.

Another very dangerous practice is smoking while taking birth control pills. Dr. Sporn said that every case of pulmonary embolism that he sees in young women that’s not due to genetics is due to smoking while on birth control.

While many students identify the health risks associated with smoking, others cite the economy for the reason their lungs are clear: Smoking is just too expensive for many students. “In general you’re seeing a decrease in smoking as cigarettes become more expensive and other things become more expensive,” Jarboe said.

Those other things you might be inhaling

Until I started high school, I thought smoking hookah was just something caterpillars did while sitting on mushrooms. Now, however, according many sources such as The L.A. Times, hookah is gaining popularity among college students.

Students’ responses on the popularity of smoking hookah were much different than those on smoking cigarettes. “I think it has rather less of a stigma attached,” McCormick sophomore Greg McGlynn said.

Jarboe had a similar opinion, saying, “I think especially in a college atmosphere you’re likely to see the smoking of hookah,” describing it as “more socially acceptable.”

Our survey lends evidence to these opinions. Of those who responded, 36 percent admitted to smoking hookah, most of whom said they did so only on the weekends. Some students own their own hookah, and others go to hookah bars, but hookah is also a staple at parties. “I was at a party last weekend and someone pulled out a hookah and everyone passed it around,” Dachowitz said. “I would say in most kids’ minds it’s less dangerous and less bad for your health.”

This belief, however, is false. According to Dr. Peter Sporn, lung expert and associate professor of medicine at Northwestern, students’ perception of hookah as healthier than cigarettes is very wrong. “It’s a popular myth that smoking hookah is less dangerous than smoking cigarettes,” he said.“It contains all the bad things that are in cigarette smoke. Some of the very dangerous components are in higher concentrations. It involves holding higher quantities of smoke in your lungs for a longer period of time.”

Another smoked substance also seems to be more popular on campus than cigarettes, though it is less than legal. As one student surveyed said, “I know a lot of people who smoke pot, not cigarettes,” or as another guy succinctly put it, “Pass it!” Of those who responded to the survey, 27 percent admitted to smoking marijuana. Largely, those who smoked pot claimed to do so much more frequently than those who smoked hookah or cigarettes, with the most common response being that the respondent smoked a few times a week, while some overachieving potheads claimed to smoke “daily,” “three times a day,” and even “every hour on the hour.”

One possible reason for the prevalence of these types of smoking over cigarette smoking is that they are considered healthier — of course, this is not true. Another reason may be that hookah and pot are generally smoked in private. Perhaps some students fear the possible public judgment that can be associated with smoking cigarettes, which could explain social smoking: If you’ve got a light, then you’ve probably left your judgments at home.

Photos modeled by Weinberg freshman Peter Skopec and Weinberg junior Yale Sun.