Hello! Today I would like to bring up a vaguely health-related topic that we discussed in Rubicon recently- the tradition of smoking cigars at graduation. This post is more so a call to the SPA community to think about how we treat our traditions and think about them, as I have never been to a graduation (nor smoked a cigar, for that matter) and a lot of this post is gathered from the thoughts of fellow Rubicon staffers.

Back in the days of the Saint Paul Academy boys’ school, students would partake in a certain tradition of smoking cigars at their graduation. Smoking wasn’t allowed on campus, even in those days, so after the graduation ceremony students would walk across the street and light up cigars, blowing the smoke at the campus.

Of course, this isn’t what happens today. (It should be noted that I tried to search for sources for the modern cigars-at-graduation tradition, but most of the links that popped up were from tobacco companies, school newspapers, and Reddit. Not things that I am going to cite.) Last year, at the class of 2021’s graduation, the cigar smoking made its way on to campus after the Head of School made a remark about not smoking cigars at school. This led to some unsavory occurrences where elderly family members would be walking through puffs of cigar smoke.

So. Let’s reexamine this tradition. Cigars are generally not a big problem for high school students- according to the CDC, only 2.1% of high school students smoked cigars regularly in 2021. Youth have much more of a problem with e-cigarettes or vapes, which were smoked by 11.3% of high school students in 2021. Even so, cigars are still tobacco and have similar health effects to cigarettes- prolonged use can be detrimental to dental, heart, or lung health, or even carcinogenic. However, this is just from prolonged use, so no one’s going to get negative health impacts from smoking a cigar once at graduation, unless they’re already a regular tobacco user via vaping… or whatever the kids are doing these days.

So, perhaps cigars at graduation are not an issue of personal organ health, but an issue of smoke everywhere being irritating and gross. If you’re graduating this year, be aware that there are other people there and that most of them do not want to waltz through cigar smoke on a warm summer’s day.

I know the tone of this post is a bit unpolished and pretty casual, but it is finals week! This is the second to last Good for You post of this year- I’ll be posting one last playlist for your finals studying pleasure. Have a wonderful week and good luck on your exams!

Creative Commons image from Pixabay.