Hospitality companies with casinos here in the United States have generally done an excellent job implementing sustainability programs. Witness the many articles here on Green Lodging News about the various gaming companies—especially those in Las Vegas. Where they are still failing is in the ongoing exposure of guests and employees to secondhand smoke in casinos where smoking is still legal. A recent study hammers home the danger in exposing individuals to secondhand smoke in a casino environment.
In case you missed it, the study published in Circulation, a journal of the American Heart Association, shows how implementing a smoke-free policy in casinos actually reduces the number of casino-related medical emergencies and ambulance calls (see article).
According to the study, on July 1, 2006, the state of Colorado implemented a state law making all workplaces, restaurants, bars, and public spaces smoke free with the exception of casinos; the law was later extended to casinos on January 1, 2008. For the study, researchers collected data on the number of ambulance calls that did not originate and did originate from casinos in Gilpin County, Colorado—a rural Colorado county with a large casino presence—for each month from January 2000 through December 2012 by the Gilpin Ambulance Authority. Gilpin County had a total of 26 casinos in March 2013 and during the study period, there were a total of 16,636 ambulance calls in total: 10,105 from casinos, and 6,531 not from casinos.
The study found that:
• After the initial implementation of the smoke-free law (that exempted casinos), there was a significant drop (22.8 percent) in ambulance calls not originating from casinos but no significant change in calls from casinos.
• After the smoke-free law was extended to casinos in 2008, there was a similar significant drop (19.1 percent) in ambulance calls from casinos but no change in calls originating outside casinos.
• In total, there was a reduction of about 180 calls per year from casinos and 175 calls per year from locations other than casinos following implementation of the two laws.
The Impact of Secondhand Smoke
The observation that the magnitudes in reductions in ambulance calls after the implementation of the smoke-free laws were similar for smoke-free casinos as well as other smoke-free venues in general suggests an effect of acute exposure to secondhand smoke, according to the study.
“There is strong evidence to suggest that the sheer volume of secondhand smoke that people are exposed to in casinos has an immediate and harmful impact on patrons,” said lead researcher Dr. Stanton A. Glantz, Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and Legacy Distinguished Professor of Tobacco Control.
“Casino owners who continue to fight smoke-free laws and continue to allow smoking in their casinos are literally gambling with the lives of their customers and employees,” Glantz said. “These are policies that can be changed and should be changed in order to save lives.”
Yes, people are literally dropping like flies in casinos that allow smoking. Don’t expect to find that kind of information in an annual report or sustainability report. I know it is all about money and giving paying guests what they want but at some point it has got to stop. There is a measurable cost to allowing smoking in casinos that affects every taxpayer in the communities where those types of casinos exist. That cost is just one small portion of the total cost we all pay for treating those impacted by first-, second-, and third-hand smoke.
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