Share and Voice: St. Louis County Health and Human Service Conference

This past Tuesday, October 5th, I traveled down to the DECC to host one of the seminars scheduled for the Annual St. Louis County Health and Human Service Conference.  The topic of my seminar was 'God Does Not Take Sides,' however, that's actually not what I want to discuss.  What I found to be most interesting, or ironic even, about the event was what I witnessed on my way there.  I was walking down the street crossing over from the Famous Dave's parking lot over to where the little lift bridge is.  The bridge was up so I had to take a minor detour route to the right where I passed by numerous sail boats, past the Irwin Tour Ship, and into the parking lot of the DECC and the Duluth 10 Movie theater.  

As I was walking along there were several people headed in the same direction as myself and judging by the 'Recycle' tote bags they were carrying on their shoulders I could tell these people had been this way before.  Though regardless of the tote bags I noticed something else that was rather disappointing.  You see most of them were smoking as they were walking along!  As we traveled down the sidewalk I noticed that out of the eight people I was walking with 1/2 of them had a cigarette in hand.  I found this to be ironic in the fact that these people were attending an event about health, however, outside of the event most of them were smoking and puffing away their health.  Once I reached the entrance of the building I was kindly greeted by the second-hand smoke of several others who were sitting and waiting outside, again, smoking.  I briefly glanced into the cigarette trays placed outside the front doors and noticed that several new butts had been placed into it.  

Now, I neither want to give an unpleasant impression of the event, since the seminar I hosted was very informative; nor do I want to get into a big debate about smoking since I know it may be a sensitive subject, however, I just can't help but wonder what kind of a message we are portraying to the public.  What I mean is that if someone off of the street were to walk up to someone attending the event and ask what event the DECC was hosting I feel they may be slightly put off when they learn it's a conference based around health and notice all of the people smoking around them.  It's seems to be an oxymoron when you think about it.  I realize that we cannot ask people to not smoke entirely throughout the event, though I wonder if there isn't a better way to take care of the smoking situation. Two steps I thought could possibly be considered for next years conference would be to have a seminar topic of smoking and how to smoke in a 'healthy' manor.  The other would be to possibly have areas set up for the people to specifically be able to smoke in.  I'm not sure how likely those steps are, I just feel that at a health event more precautions could be taken when it comes to dealing with health to show people that we do take health seriously.