Editorial: Betting with your life

When Pennsylvania lawmakers created so-called protections for nonsmoking patrons in the state's nine slots parlors, they didn't bother to require licensees to erect walls to separate the puffers from other gamblers.

So the health of patrons and gaming workers clearly is secondary to Harrisburg's interest in milking revenue from the cash cow of legalized gambling.

Casinos say they need smokers to make a profit, and that's that.

Now, though, with the coming of table games to the existing slots joints - and two planned for Philadelphia - thousands more people will spend their free time inhaling dangerous secondhand smoke.

Full-blown casinos will draw more customers, plus add 4,000 people to gaming payrolls. That means the public-health threat from smoking in casinos is about to become far more troubling.

As in Atlantic City, Keystone State gambling interests lobbied hard for an exemption from the 2008 law banning smoking in most indoor settings. The casinos hit the jackpot - even winning permission to end-run Philadelphia's more comprehensive smoke-free law so that city casinos, too, would be smoke dens.

In making their pitch, industry officials keep coming back to their studies that show smokers are heavier gamblers than the rest of the populace. In effect, they argue that the business of regularly relieving gamblers of the rent money depends heavily on letting people puff while wagering.

As restaurant and bar owners have found under smoke-free laws, however, smoking customers continue to dine out and drink without being able to smoke indoors. For local gamblers who have come to appreciate that they don't have to trek all the way to the Shore, it should take much more than the end of smoking in Pennsylvania casinos to get them to rejoin the traffic jams on the Atlantic City Expressway.

From another perspective - that of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of PA - there's good reason to break the link between smoking and gambling: Studies show smokers crave betting more than others, and are more likely to become problem gamblers.

With more revenue expected to flow from table games, casino operators should be in a better position to do what's right for the health of employees and patrons.

But it's up to Gov. Rendell, state lawmakers, and state health officials to revamp the rules and clear the air in casinos.

There's just no good reason that Pennsylvania workers and patrons are protected from secondhand smoke in almost every setting but casinos.