Insight | Twists and turns of the smoking regulation

Paulo Barbosa

The Executive Council concluded its revision on Macau’s Tobacco Prevention and Control Law last week, proposing a full smoking ban in casinos.
The move, made against the will of the gaming operators, was followed by at least two statements published on the Government’s Information Bureau online platform, which attempted to explain the reasoning behind the decision.
The first one cited the Heath Bureau director, who stated that the negative impact on the economy is only a “forecast” and a “hypothetical question.” He also explained that the decision to abolish smoking lounges inside the casinos protects non-smokers from the harm of passive smoking.
The second statement, titled “full smoking ban in casinos ensures the health of both residents and tourists,” (an obvious overstatement) cites Alexis Tam, who said “the government led by Chui Sai On intends to ensure the health of the locals, and thus assumes a firm stance regarding the full smoking ban in casinos.”
It just so happens that this “firm stance” is relatively new and coincides with a crackdown on smoking in the Chinese mainland. Anti-smoking regulations have been shifting over the past few years, and casinos claim to have spent over MOP1 billion adapting to those regulations and building smoking lounges.
The permissiveness of smoking in casinos seems to have gone from 100 to 0 real quick. Since 2012, the Tobacco Prevention and Control Law has banned smoking in most indoor spaces, but back then, casinos were an exception to the rule. One year later, a partial smoking ban came into effect on mass gaming floors in 2013, which allowed casinos to allocate no more than 50 percent of their gaming area to smokers. A full smoking ban on mass gaming floors was then implemented on October 6 last year, and operators were required to build smoking lounges. Smoking is still allowed in VIP areas today.
One question arises when looking at these shifting regulations: If the government is so concerned with the effects of passive smoking, why did it mislead the gaming operators to set up expensive equipment last year? Why is Alexis Tam bringing up World Health Organization studies and saying that “passive smoking contains 250 health-threatening substances, 69 of them carcinogens?” Wasn’t that a problem three years ago, when smoking regulations were introduced and casinos were exempted from them?
The Times visited the smoking lounges of three gaming operators (Sands China, Melco Crown Entertainment and MGM China) in order to understand how these smoking lounges are run. In a report published last Monday, 29 June, we explained how the concessionaires spent millions on setting up specially engineered smoking rooms and on improving the overall ventilation systems across their properties.
The results are smoking lounges equipped with an independent ventilation system and the kind of technology usually used in hospital operating theatres. Those smoking rooms do not contaminate the rest of the property (there’s almost no mixed air) and the smoking air is extracted and vented outside.
The impact of the smoking rooms on the health of casino workers seems to be minimal. Only smokers are affected, but that’s their choice. It’s hard to imagine something more ridiculous than a moralist government in Macau.
If the government is genuinely concerned with the health of both residents and tourists (as I believe it is) it should, for example, invest in green transportation and curb the usage of private cars, the fumes of which can almost choke children on the busiest streets (that’s half of the city nowadays).
And if authorities want to show evidence that the lounges damage public health, please show scientific data. It’s not enough to have the Health Bureau director claiming that the impact of the measure on gaming revenue is “hypothetical.” Operators have made their studies already.
The abovementioned MDT report describes how the locations of smoking lounges have been carefully planned. “Where the smokers are in the casinos, we certainly saw the revenue move to around the smoking rooms,” said MGM’s Mel Hansen. If that wasn’t the case, operators wouldn’t invest so much in smoking rooms.