The instant Tammy Brady felt the lump in her breast in February 2022, she knew it was cancer. With no known genetic predisposition for breast cancer, she suspects 38 years of working in smoky Atlantic City casinos played a role.
“I was just trying to make a living,” said Brady, 56, a dealer and supervisor at Borgata in that New Jersey resort city. “You don’t think, you know, that you’re going to get sick at your job.”
Some casinos continue to allow indoor smoking even as the share of Americans who smoke fell from about 21% in 2005 to 12% in 2021 and smoking is banned in at least some public spaces in 35 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. Still, 13 of the 22 states and territories that allow casino gambling permit smoking in at least part of their facilities.
Brady is among the casino employees, anti-smoking advocates, and public health experts who argue it is long past time to snuff out casino exemptions from smoking bans, given the dangers of secondhand smoke. But they’ve faced stiff pushback from some gambling industry leaders, including in Missouri, Louisiana, Kentucky, and New Jersey, who argue that smoking bans drive gamblers away — especially in places where patrons can go instead to a casino in a nearby jurisdiction that allows them to light up.
The science disagrees with you:
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/health.html
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/secondhand-smoke/policy.html
You don’t have the freedom to hurt others, period. If you must smoke, do it in a place where others are not subjected to it. It’s not hard.
I don’t have the freedom to play music loud enough to damage your hearing in the casino. I don’t have the freedom to shine UV-B lighting at you in the casino. I don’t have the freedom to release poisonous gases at you in the casino. All of these things hurt the people around, so we don’t give people the freedom to do them.
Everyone should have access to a safe work environment, especially hospitality workers. Their jobs are already hard, why do you want them to also get hurt?
The CDC advances data reviews incentivized by War on Drugs dollars. They are hopelessly corrupted on the topic of tobacco.
Causation has never been demonstrated, only correlation, correlation that always comes from cherry picked populations.
Nearly 100 years of science completely agrees with me. But prohibitionists don’t care about reputable science. They care about protecting their propaganda soaked circlejerk.
Grandma got old, got cancer, and died. When asked “why did she get cancer” instead of being honest and saying “there is no way to tell. Unfortunately that is just what happens when you get old. You get cancer and die” doctors ate up the dishonest and easy answer of “it was the cigarettes, so take that as a lesson kiddos, don’t smoke!” And like the misinformed emotional dolts they were, those kids went on to restrict the freedoms of their peers.
You want to get all self righteous? Lobby for the dismantling internal combustion car manufacturers. Lobby for the dismantling of DuPont. Lobby for the dismantling of Monsanto. Lobby to ban use of plastics. These things actually expose everyone on Earth to things that actually have proven causation to cause cancer that doesn’t conveniently require 30 years of brewing for the cancer to happen.
Again, you want a non-smoking casino? Go to a non-smoking casino? Are there no non-smoking casinos? Start your own and/or fuck off.
Simply put, grow the fuck up.
Ok, you don’t trust the CDC because of the USA’s war on drugs policies/funding. Fair enough. Here’s information from only non-USA health organizations:
https://www.who.int/activities/protecting-people-from-tobacco-smoke
https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/environmental-burden-of-cancer/second-hand-smoke
https://weekly.chinacdc.cn/en/article/doi/10.46234/ccdcw2022.020
https://www.health.gov.au/topics/smoking-vaping-and-tobacco/about-smoking/passive-smoking
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/smoking-tobacco/health-effects-smoking-second-hand-smoke/second-hand-smoke.html
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/quit-smoking/passive-smoking-protect-your-family-and-friends/
Should I find more, or is World Health Organization, EU and the governments of China, Australia, Canada, and the UK enough? All of these organizations agree that second hand smoke is harmful.
I’m not being self-righteous, I’m saying you don’t have the right to hurt other people. I understand that your argument is that second hand smoke doesn’t hurt other people, so I assume you would agree that you don’t have the right to hurt other people (but maybe you wouldn’t agree, idk). Now we’re just determining who’s right, you and the tobacco industry, or every science-based health administration and organization in the world and the general consensus of the medical community.
If you ultimately do agree that second hand smoke is harmful to others, you’ll have to decide if you want to update your belief that these laws shouldn’t be passed and maybe start smoking further away from people, or if you want to change your morality to say you have the right to hurt other people.
You can also do nothing, ignore all of the evidence I’ve presented to you, and just try not to suffer from too much cognitive dissonance.
Oh, you mean all the countries that America at at least one point or another subsidized?
The ones that have been fighting for America’s teat since WWII?
No, surely you mean the ones who supposedly champion freedom above all else…
Oh, none of those?
Gotcha.
Jfc. You’re a lot better at moving goalposts than showing anything reputable that contradicts decades of research by countless independent groups. Take some of your own advice: grow the fuck up. Have some respect for people other than yourself.
One of your sources is CHINA which is openly antagonistic with the US about every opportunity they can get and their response is hurr durr those are all countries sucking up to the US.
Meanwhile I don’t see him backing up any of his shit with sources.
Save yourself some time. They’re just a shit troll.