In Atlantic City’s casinos, gamblers puff away as a no-smoking bill heads for a Monday state Senate committee vote

ATLANTIC CITY — The dull smell of smoke greets gamblers as they get to the top of the escalator leading to the casino floor of the Tropicana Hotel & Casino.

Bob Hafner, 56, of Long Beach Island, welcomes the haze and his contribution to it.

Hafner’s happy playing the slots while puffing away at a Cheyenne slim cigar, made, he noted, with only organic ingredients. He said he is doubtful that lawmakers will pass a total ban on smoking, an effort that reaches back two decades.

The New Jersey Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee is scheduled to vote Monday on a smoking ban that would close the loophole that allows smoking in Atlantic City’s casinos while banning smoking in other public places, including restaurants and bars.

“They won’t be able to ban it,” Hafner said. “There’s too many gamblers who are smokers.”

But other patrons joined the disgust voiced repeatedly by the dealers and their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW), who have continued lobbying to ban smoking in Atlantic City’s casinos as prior votes fell through.

Their members have testified to the devastating health consequences from decades of breathing in secondhand smoke at arm’s length, and organized into the group, Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects (CEASE).

“I’m an asthmatic, and it’s really triggering me,” said Randalynn Paige, 59, a social worker from West Orange, N.J., feeding money into a slot machine.

She said she’d already moved once to get away from smokers. “It is really something else,” she said.

A craps dealer working Sunday said he quit smoking 35 years ago but had endured secondhand smoke for 28 years and hoped the ban would finally become law. “I like the fresh air,” he said, not wanting to give his name because he was being interviewed while working.

Some gamblers, like a 65-year-old woman from Virginia, who wished to keep her gambling private and did not give her name (she is a high school administrator), can’t imagine gambling without smoking.

She said she and a friend “only smoke when we gamble.”

“We like to smoke and drink and gamble and leave our husbands at home,” she said Sunday afternoon.

In a statement, CEASE said the scheduled vote “is a critical step towards guaranteeing our right to breathe clean air at work and lawmakers must recognize the urgency of getting this bill passed.”

“Our lives should not be treated like bargaining chips, and we refuse to accept the status quo where we are expected to choose between our health and our paycheck,” the statement said. The UAW represents thousands of workers in Atlantic City casinos, including dealers at Caesars, Bally’s, and Tropicana.

State Sen. Vincent Polistina (R., Atlantic), who represents Atlantic City, has supported a ban but has recently urged a compromise that would allow enclosed smoking rooms to be staffed only by workers who volunteer for those shifts.

He said in an interview Sunday he was not on the committee voting Monday but would support a total ban even without his proposed compromise.

The union has vowed to fight any weakening of the total ban, and has referred to the rooms as the “Philip Morris Smoking Rooms,” a nod to the tobacco company. Members protested outside Polistina’s Egg Harbor Township office earlier this month.

Polistina said there has been discussion about having virtual dealers in the proposed smoking rooms, who would be shown live on video, to limit the number of people who have to work inside them. But he reiterated that he would vote for the complete ban if it came up for a vote on the Senate floor.

State Sen. Joe Vitale (D., Middlesex), who has introduced a bill every two years to end smoking in New Jersey casinos, told the New Jersey Monitor last week that he believes the bill will finally be passed. There were multiple hearings on the issue last session, but the bill never got to a committee vote.

In December, the Associated Press reported that members of the UAW disrupted a meeting of a state Assembly committee that had been scheduled to take a preliminary vote on a ban by lighting cigarettes and blowing smoke toward legislators.

“It’s going to get done,” Vitale told the New Jersey Monitor. “Not just this session, but more likely over the next few months.”