Anti-smoking inspectors fine almost 30,000 people

Since the adoption of the Tobacco Prevention and Control Law on January 1 2012, tobacco control enforcement agents have performed a total of 927,739 inspections, resulting in 29,958 charges to people who have been caught smoking in forbidden places, the Health Bureau has revealed.
These figures show that until October 31 last year, agents undertook an average of 663 inspections on a daily basis.
According to a statement issued by the Health Bureau on Friday, this year alone a total of 241,515 inspections have been carried out, which raises the daily average to 794 inspections per day. In this period, the services also received a total of 5,806 complaints, including 5,768 for smoking in places in which public smoking had been outlawed.
Among the identified cases of people smoking in prohibited places in 2015, the majority of illegal smoking cases (totaling 5,345 cases altogether) were perpetrated by male citizens. About 62.5 percent of these perpetrators were residents of Macau.
Internet cafés remain the places in which law infringement is most frequently detected, with a total of 1,171 cases (20.2 percent), while parks, gardens and recreational areas came in second with 745 cases (12.8 percent).
Regarding enforcement of the law in casinos, the bureau also noted that, from January 1 to October 31, 343 joint inspections operations were carried out by several departments, resulting in 368 individual cases of illegal smoking. In contrast with the outcomes of the majority of other cases in the territory, in the casinos, tourists reportedly perpetrated a total of 81.0 percent of the cases.
The Health Bureau also reported that, until October, they had received a total of 945 complaints about violations of the anti-smoking law in casinos, of which 417 (44.1 percent) were related to the Le Royal Arc casino. RM