Normally, a story like this wouldn’t really get on my radar, but then I remembered this is Georgia, buried well into the Deep South.

I haven’t written much about smoking bans in the last couple of years, mostly because not a lot has been happening on that front. Places that are going to ban indoor smoking have done it and places that haven’t done it — mostly Southern states — have if anything the last few years become more stubborn about passing regulations on private businesses.

Georgia has some city bans, but statewide, the only ban is on smoking in restaurants. This week, the state of Georgia banned all tobacco products on its state college campuses — Univ. of Georgia, Georgia Tech and 29 other campuses.  This even includes outdoor football stadiums. I have no idea if this also includes e-cigs, which aren’t mentioned in the article (debatable if e-cigs are a “tobacco product.”)

I think this is a fairly big deal because Georgia’s university system is huge, with more than 300,000 students, and like I said, it’s in the Deep South, where the laws are pretty lax about cigarette smoking. Few states in the Deep South even bother to ban smoking in restaurants, much less bars (though a number of major cities in the South do have smoking bans). And not coincidentally, partly because of low state cigarette taxes in many of these states, the Deep South has some of the highest smoking rates in the country.