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Once medical science began to discover that smoking cigarettes was bad for smokers as well as the people around them, smoking in public spaces became more and more rare in the United States. Little by little, hospitals, restaurants, supermarkets, auditoriums, and just about any other public indoor space you can think of began to ban indoor smoking and, in some places, outdoor smoking, as well.

Until the 1970s, smoking on planes was very much allowed. Most airlines had separate smoking and non-smoking sections, but when you’re packed together in a tin can, that doesn’t help the non-smokers much. Bans began in the 1980s and spread until the year 2000, when in-flight smoking was fully banned on both domestic and international flights.

That being said, indoor smoking does remain in very few airports across the country.

Casinos

Casinos are among the last public indoor places where smoking has still been allowed. Although hotels and resorts in Las Vegas have varying levels of being smoke free in their hotels, restaurants, convention centers, etc, there’s grand total of one casino in Sin City that’s 100% smoke free – it opened in late 2020.

You’d think that when only 11.5% of the population still smokes, more casinos would have gone smoke-free. But that hasn’t been the case. Still, non-smokers keep on trying.

Putting it to a vote

Case in point: Shareholders of publicly traded casino companies Caesars Entertainment, Bally’s Corp. and Boyd Gaming all recently overwhelmingly voted against proposals to—get this—not even end smoking in casinos but just to study potential cost savings from implementing smoke-free policies.

Nonprofit health care company Trinity Health did its part, as a very small stockholder at Caesars, to propose commissioning research. They, along with the Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation, argued that the gaming companies could face risks from indoor smoking, such as higher employee health insurance premiums, higher maintenance costs and deterring potential customers who don’t want to breathe second-hand smoke while they gambled.

It didn’t help

According to results published in an SEC filing, more than 81% of votes were cast against the proposal at Caesars’ annual meeting this month.

The same thing happened at Boyd, where more than 63.5 million votes were cast against the proposal on May 9th, during its annual shareholder meeting, according to the company’s SEC filing (18.5 million voted for it).

As per Bally’s SEC report, nearly 24 million shares voted against the proposal, while more than 3.1 million shares favored the smoking study.

Since the votes surpassed the 5% threshold required for a proposal in its first year, the smoking issue can be brought back for a vote at both Bally’s and Boyd’s shareholders meetings next year.

But for now, smoking will reign supreme in casinos all up and down the Las Vegas strip.

I recommend going to Park MGM.

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