Casinos blow hot and cold on smoking policy

December 16, 2012|By Suzette Parmley, Inquirer Staff Writer

ATLANTIC CITY - They're hard to miss. Follow the smell, or the smoke billowing over their slot machines. Gambler-smokers are as much a fixture at casinos as cocktail waitresses in skimpy outfits.
But are gambling and smoking inextricably linked?

"They go together," Paul Fischer, a limousine driver from Clifton, N.J., said as he took a puff while playing a $1 slot at the Borgata recently.

"Every time I push a button on a slot machine, it goes hand-in-hand with the nicotine going to my brain," said Fischer, 62, who has been smoking for four decades. "It's the best of both worlds."

Christine LaCoste, an EMT from Bayville, Ocean County, said she experiences a similar craving whenever she's at a casino.

"Everything starts in your head and works its way down," LaCoste said, her left hand holding a cigarette and her right hand working a penny slot at Caesars on Wednesday. "It's an adrenalin rush.
Even when I stopped smoking . . . I'd go to a casino and buy cigarettes."

Eleven of Atlantic City's 12 casinos permit smoking on 25 percent of their gaming floors. All except Revel, which is completely nonsmoking and has taken heat for it.

In Pennsylvania, all 11 casinos permit smoking on 50 percent of their floors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that one in every four gamblers smokes; past studies by the University of Nevada, Reno, put the number at 20 percent to 25 percent.

In Atlantic City's primary gambling market, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, about 85 percent of adults do not smoke, the CDC said.

Though there is no definitive research to explain the apparent connection between gambling and smoking, interviews with a half-dozen random patrons at Atlantic City and Pennsylvania casinos found that among those who smoked - four of the six - lighting up at a casino came naturally, and that income level had nothing to do with the affinity for doing both.

For Revel, the issue is a touchy one. The $2.4 billion mega-casino has been struggling since it opened April 2 as Atlantic City's first fully nonsmoking casino.

Whether Revel - which last month finished next-to last among the dozen casinos in gross gaming revenue - is being hurt financially because gamblers can't smoke there, or whether that's just one of several factors ailing it, is difficult to say.