Crusade to outlaw smoking in casinos is waged in hostile territory

By Liz Benston

Monday, Dec. 13, 2010 | 2 a.m.

Paul McIntyre is smiling at the Global Gaming Expo, belying the fact that he is embedded deep behind enemy lines.

From his 10-foot-square booth sandwiched between displays of gambling tables and slot machines, McIntyre — representing the nonprofit groups Kids Involuntarily Inhaling Secondhand Smoke and Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights — is pressuring casinos nationwide to ban smoking. He is sitting at a long table covered with stacks of fact sheets about smoking and colorful brochures showing smiling casino and restaurant workers. Bookending the table are two giant posters, including a photo of a young female casino dealer.

This is the final frontier for anti-smoking advocates — the casino industry’s premier trade show, which wrapped up in Las Vegas last month — and not an entirely welcome place to be.

Few stop at the booth. Those who do usually have something to say.

“People expect to smoke and gamble when they come to Vegas,” said Joe Marth, a young man whose Arkansas company makes casino surveillance cameras. A stone’s throw away, he has been eyeing the booth all day and comes over for a closer look.

“It’s not going to happen,” he says when asked about the prospect of banning smoking in casinos.

“That’s what they said about airplanes and restaurants,” McIntyre responds, smiling.

Because McIntyre believes victory is inevitable, he views his booth as a kind of peace offering. His brochures do not demand so much as request that employers ban smoking “because it’s the right thing to do.”

In his compact quarters, McIntyre may be more of a modern-day Gen. Custer, leading his small battalion to the slaughter.

The belief in the right of Nevada gamblers to smoke, protected by the state Legislature and enshrined in its courts despite a national backlash against smoking, is stronger than ever in the recession. Casino operators are unwilling to risk the potential loss of revenue if players were forced to step outside for a smoke. But there is a broader fear of the unknown. As gambling spreads worldwide, Nevada’s “live and let live” culture is not just a catchphrase but an increasingly valuable outlook distinguishing Las Vegas from other tourist destinations, they say.

McIntyre is here to tell casinos the other side of the story: The public is increasingly averse to smoking. Smoking policies lead to messy lawsuits, legal bills and expensive settlements. Even Macau’s smoky casinos — which host chain-smoking Chinese and generate more gambling revenue than anywhere else on the planet — are going smoke-free, he argues.

Then there is the case of Vincent Rennich, a nonsmoking former casino dealer who lost part of a lung to cancer and won a $4.5 million settlement this month from his employer of more than 25 years, the Tropicana Atlantic City. Settlements have also been paid out by casinos to workers in Indiana and Louisiana.

Wynn Las Vegas has lost Round 1 of a lawsuit by casino dealer Kanie Kastroll, charging the casino with breaching a common-law duty to provide a safe workplace.

In court filings, Wynn offered the same argument Nevada casinos have successfully made for years: They can’t be liable for allowing customers to smoke in places where Nevada law specifically permits smoking.

That position “ignores the potentially intricate interrelationship between this statute and common-law duties” to employees, U.S. District Judge Lloyd George wrote in a September order denying Wynn’s motion to dismiss the case.

The order follows a precedent established in employer secondhand smoke lawsuits more than a decade ago, and more recently in the casino industry, “to hold companies responsible for the effects of workplace smoking,” Kastroll’s Chicago attorney Jay Edelson said.

“We are seeing the courts being receptive to the plight of workers,” Edelson said. “One of the most basic rights of employees is that they work in safe conditions.”

Meanwhile, government scientists fire off reports detailing the health risks of secondhand smoke. Last week’s report by U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, for example, concluded that inhaling even small amounts of tobacco smoke can immediately damage human cells and, over time, lead to cancer.

Such developments have so far fallen on deaf ears in Nevada, where well-funded health advocates avoid pressing the issue with casinos, which drive the state’s economy, leaving such confrontations to isolated activists that have gained little public support. Health groups lack any coordinated, full-frontal plan to attack smoking in casinos.

Although McIntyre initiates friendly conversations indoors, an unaffiliated anti-smoking advocate gets a rough reception outside the exhibit hall.

That’s where convention security and police are swarming around Stephanie Steinberg, the Colorado-based founder of Smoke-Free Gaming and a more confrontational opponent on smoking.

The petite Steinberg isn’t much of a threatening presence. But her oversize posters — “What happens in a casino stays in your lungs,” one says — are tantamount to a guerrilla attack on the state’s chief industry.

Bicycle cops are telling her to move from the sidewalk in front of the convention center to the corner of Paradise Road and Convention Center Drive. She protests before moving, preferring that her signs be seen versus her being hustled into a patrol car.

Steinberg has no intention of paying $5,900, like McIntyre did, for a booth at the convention. In fact, her posters appear to be garnering more attention than McIntyre’s more demure brochures.

McIntyre — a former public relations manager for the California Restaurant Association who fought smoking bans before his industry switched sides in the 1990s — says the soft sell works better with business than threats.

“No one should have to choose between their job and their health,” he says. “They will come around.”

That seems unlikely as casino managers pass by, shaking their heads.

McIntyre says he’s seen it all before.

“A few years ago, a guy at the nightclub and bar show (in Las Vegas) flipped the bird. Or they’d chew me out and run away. But by last year, the attitude had become so much more tame and civil that I thought, ‘There are too many people agreeing with me.’ ”

Most restaurants and bars nationwide are smoke-free — the result of state and local smoking bans passed in the wake of health warnings and litigation. With some exceptions, U.S. casinos remain safe havens for smokers.

Which means McIntyre and his booth will be back next year, glad-handing and smiling his way through a tough, but perhaps softened, crowd.