Smoking is a reliable indicator of trouble especially when you are dealing with a California Population of adolescents. In combination with other warning flags your confidence in prediction of trouble gets stronger.

When you are running a business – or running a school for that matter – you deal in profiling and odds of success so that you don’t run the place into the ground. This is why nursing programs reject ceratin applicants, even poor law schools won’t let anybody in with a LSAT below 30-50% and why well run banks and credit unions don’t indulge in sub prime lending.

Oh, and by the way, Tattoos are also great markers of the lifestyle and attitudes of the people who have them. Especially the facial & neck tattoos. A few days ago I ran into a high schooler who had his arms covered with various cigarette burns. He claimed they were done by his “friends”. They are certainly self inflicted. With a jacket on you would not have picked up how disturbed he is so quickly. Nice of him to mark himself so potential employers and friends are fairly warned.

Back to smoking, I’m not saying it’s evil, that’s not the point. It is a marker for the way the person involved is – in combination with other data, you can draw inferences.

Credit scores tell you volumes about a person also.

Do I think schools should tolerate smoking in primary, middle school, high schools? Generally no. There are places for smoking adolescents, just not in a good school with normal kids. Do I believe adolescents have freedom to do whatever they want? No, I don’t.

My mother has never smoked a cigarette in her life. But she’s been in and out of various mental institutions every couple of years since 1964.

I started smoking at age 20, and quit within a year. Joined the Air Force at 22, and started smoking again because the nicotine buzz was the only *legal* substance that could keep me awake from 4:30am when I started my day until 10:30pm when I finally collapsed. I quit again when I finished tech school – and got a sensible daily schedule at my permanent base. I started (again) when my first marriage broke up. I quit (again) when I finished my enlistment. I started for the forth time when I accepted a job in CA and my husband needed to stay in the Midwest for several months after I had to move across the county. And I quit for the last time when I became pregnant with my older son.

If you depend on smoking criteria, you’d have had to reject me – the stable, responsible employee who has been supporting her family on one income for 17 years – and you’d have accepted my bipolar schizophrenic parent as the better alternative. Status as a smoker would have been a terrible marker.

I have lots more anecdotes about smokers who are skilled and effective workers, but I won’t burden this blog with any more. And I doubt that tattoos or piercings are reliable markers for much either…

Yes, Katy, the buzz from cigarettes is quite real and enjoyable, at least until the smoker becomes habituated. I didn’t have much trouble with quitting each time I decided to do so. For me, the difficulty was finding some other means of feeling good when my life was overloaded with stresses, and not using tobacco for my coping mechanism.

I do have experience with smoking adolescents over the last 30 years. It is a very reliable indicator of behavior problems nowadays. It’s one of the real reasons some workplaces have gone to “smokers need not apply” – that policy screens out people you don’t want to have around (Unless smoking is the norm for the occupation in question).

Juvenile Hall inmates, Jail inmates, Mental patients, Rehab patients and Prison inmates smoke like chimneys. It’s an excellent marker…