It seems unlikely anything will be done to prevent casino smoking
for the forseeable future, at least in Las Vegas. My concern is not
myself ... nobody forces me to go there. But I can't help but
wonder what is happening to the people who work in these places, day
in and day out! It's not pretty.
What amazes me is that for so long, the act of smoking in public has
been ACCEPTABLE in societal as well as legal terms. Shouldn't
walking around in public, spewing nauseating fumes that sicken
anyone who gets even the slightest whiff of them, be illegal, for
the same reasons that urinating, screaming at the top of one's
lungs, having sex, etc. IN PUBLIC are all deemed unacceptable and
illegal behaviors, simply because of their capacity to offend? Why
did cigarette smoke have to be subjected to the far more rigorous
test of being UNHEALTHY for you before it started to be banned? The
answer is obvious---the multibillion-dollar tobacco lobby.
There's a sound analogy--in the 70's (and before), smokestack
polluters were a major concern and a prime target of environmental
legislation. The key concept that reinforced antipollution
legislation was that by dumping their waste out the back door, as it
were, manufacturers were unfairly passing part of the cost of
producing their products onto the public at large. If you produce X
amount of pollutants in the course of manufacturing a widget, then
the cost of proper disposal of those pollutants is a cost that
should be borne directly by the manufacturer.
In a similar fashion, if you choose to smoke cigarettes, you are
effectively exchanging some portion of your life for the pleasure
you get by smoking (plus the cost of the cigarettes themselves, of
course). Now, if you smoke where anyone who doesn't smoke can smell
it, you are inflicting displeasure on that person as an added cost
of obtaining YOUR pleasure. That person's displeasure will be a
function of his or her proximity to you as well as his sensitivity
to the smoke, but it's safe to say that if you smoke in public, you
WILL annoy and disgust a certain amount of people. So you are
obtaining pleasure at the cost of making someone else uncomfortable
(never mind SICK; I don't think that cigarette smoke needs to be
proved unhealthy to be unacceptable).
I think that the fundamental rule governing human activity in our
society is that you can do what you want as long as you don't
interfere with anyone ELSE's ability to do what THEY want. This
extends to: you cannot cause another person pain, mental or
physical, or deliberately obstruct another person in his attempt to
conduct his business.
So returning to the cigarette smoker: How does he handle the fact
(incontrovertible) that when he lights up, he is going to sicken and
irritate a certain portion of the people around him?
1. "F***'em." (Indifference; callousness)
2. "I have the right to smoke" (countering my argument, above, by
saying, in effect, that "my" rights outweigh all of "yours")
3. "I NEED to smoke" (often not consciously voiced, but a definite
feeling that feeding one's compulsive addiction should give a person
priority over others' discomfort)
4. "It isn't THAT bad" (deliberately understating the effect that
cigarette smoke has on the surrounding environment, in an attempt to
rationalize it)
I'm afraid all of these tactics are bankrupt. Nevertheless, if a
smoker wants to maintain any shred of self-image, he HAS to use one
of the above excuses.
I just am certain that if a person is that careless of the health
and well-being of the persons around him, then he or she is an unfit
member of society. We sanction and soemtimes imprison those
individuals who indulge their pleasures and/or addictions at the
cost of society in general. The only reason we don't regard public
smoking as criminal behavior is that so many huge corporations
profit directly from it. It's sort of like: if ammunition
manufacturers started a massive ad campaign for people to celebrate
happy occasions by firing automatic weapons into the air (like they
do in the nuttier parts of the Middle East), in an attempt to boost
bullet sales, I'm SURE, with a few billion dollars spread
judiciously around, we could get all those silly municipal laws
prohibiting weapons discharge wiped off the books. After all, I own
a gun. Don't I have the right to fire it, as long as it's not
pointed at anybody? Don't I have the right to smoke, as long as I
don't bother to acknowledge or identify the people whom it affects?
A few years ago I had a thought ... why not put smoke filters
inside the machines ... to draw in the smokey air and run it through
a filter and back into the room.
Then some poor bastard would have to go around periodically, opening
the machines and changing the filters. A disgusting job at best.
This would be another case of the cost of smoking being passed on to
another person who doesn't deserve the burden. Consider what the
casinos already spend to cope with smokers: complex air filtration
systems, an army of porters whose sole job, it seems at times, is to
clean up cigarette debris; higher insurance rates, etc. etc. I doubt
that the casinos would retrofit their machines and then create a
whole new position of "machine filter cleaner" whose status, both
esthetically and socially, would be two or three rungs below the guy
who cleans the toilets.
BTW, shouldn't a nonsmoking casino better be able to offer fullpay
games, given its lower costs? Or is the sad truth that a majority of
the "lemmings" (those people who play VP badly enough to subsidize
the rest of us) are also smokers, and if you eliminate the smokers,
you eliminate too many of the lemmings?
···
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, "brumar_lv" <brumar_lv@y...> wrote:
Glad to have you back,