Us here at Honi Soit yearn for the USyd campus culture of yesteryear. We miss turning up to shit boring lectures with a jug of beer sloshing in our stomachs, smoking under the ‘No smoking’ signs out the front of Fisher with our fellow comrades and heckling campus security from the Manning balcony (RIP). There is one magic ingredient that will unite our student population and revolutionise campus social life, and this one is legal. It’s called tobacco, or baccy, or spin, depending on the context. Yes, Mum, I fucking love durries.
True spirituality isn’t attending yoga classes, hanging a few stones you found at Bondi Beach around your neck and frolicking naked in the mud at Pitch Music & Arts Festival. It’s watching the rising sun in your PJs after an all-nighter with a black coffee in one hand and a dart in the other. That’s boss level spirituality.
There’s nothing worse than an Economics professor (wanna-be cop) jumping off their bike to scold you and banish you to some far flung corner of campus.
Contrary to the common parlance ‘don’t shit where you eat’, students should be allowed to smoke anywhere on campus: in the Fisher stacks, in your lecture, heck, in the middle of your biology dissection exam. But I’d go further: we shouldn’t be forced to trek off campus to get a deck. The USU should subsidise cigarettes sold on campus and invest in a few cig machines: the uni student’s pokie. It’s an absolute travesty that the SRC mutual aid program doesn’t include decks of Winnie Blue (Optimum Crush). The masses don’t want fruit and veg. They just want a cig or two to ease the pain of being screwed by the capitalist system. It will also cull the rabid population of scabs who beg you for a dart on Eastern Avenue.
Yes, we know smoking is bad for you. We don’t live under a rock. But a bit of emphysema and a few lung diseases here and there is nothing compared to the soothing calm of sucking on a cancer stick when you have 2000 words to write in four hours. The nicotine flows through your bloodstream. Warm orange glows before your eyes. The filter is sweet between your lips. Oh what a rush!
End smoker oppression and support the fight to allow us to die how we choose (the young person’s euthanasia) – with a body full of ash, a mouth full of rotting teeth and a mind comforted by the knowledge that we’re not a narc. Utter bliss, in other words.