Breaking casinos' bank

The restaurant industry has never wielded more lobbying clout than it flexes at present. Yet in the intensifying struggle over smoking bans, the trade looks like Woody Allen trying to body-slam Mike Tyson. The fight against smoking laws is no longer a head-on attempt to beat back the prohibitions; that doesn’t work anymore. The strategy today is to keep all leisure-dependent businesses subject to the same clean-air mandates, so none has an advantage in competing for smokers’ dollars. And in that contest, the industry is having its lunch eaten by the gaming business.

A number of areas that snuffed out smoking were unable to extend the bans to Native American-run casinos because the gaming parlors were technically on the ground of a separate sovereign nation, and hence exempt from state law. Okay. Not good, but at least there was a rationale to the exemptions.

Not so in New Jersey, where some Atlantic City casinos will be exempt from a statewide smoking ban when it takes effect April 15—fittingly, Tax Day. The stated reason is that gamblers smoke; indeed, lawmakers apparently decided, many of those game-of-chance fanatics would rather smoke than gamble, so if they can’t do the former, you can forget about the latter. The casinos’ revenues, now topping $5 billion a year, could be eroded.

And what about restaurant patrons who might scramble some eggs at home rather than have a breakfast and a cigarette at the local diner? Or the yuppie who spends so much time outside smoking that he orders a drink or two less at the bar? Or the party that hurries through dinner, foregoing dessert or a second bottle of wine, because some members want to light up on the drive home? Aren’t there financial implications to thwarting those smokers, too?

The real reason is the financial might of gaming. It delivers more state revenues—some $400 million annually—than Jersey could generate this side of a Soprano crew operation. And what’s left after the gaming taxes are channeled to the treasury—what the casino operators get to keep—funds an obviously effective lobbying effort for the bet-meisters. The pool of funds is large enough to have a horse dive into it on the Atlantic City pier.

And now the same thing is happening in Colorado. State representative Jim Sullivan, a Republican, has said he can’t support a proposal to ban smoking in all workplaces unless an exemption is granted to the state’s 19 casinos. His reasoning: “Gamblers are smokers," he was quoted in Denver’s Rocky Mountain News as saying.

Last time we checked, so are some restaurant patrons. If workplace smoking bans are going to fair, and effective, the field of coverage has to be leveled. Because this is one of the instances where the restaurant industry can easily be misspent, it has to tout its own numbers—the headcount of employees (translation: voters) who will be affected. The trade lost in Jersey, but it needs to regroup and keep the situation there an exception, not the rule.