The time has come to ban indoor smoking in RI casinos | Opinion

Katherine Stellato serves as the president of the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

The history of our nation’s efforts to mitigate the terrible effects of smoking and secondhand smoke, which we engineers call environmental tobacco smoke, can only be measured in decades.

In 1954, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill published an article in the British Medical Journal confirming a link between smoking and lung cancer. Ten years later, the first U.S. surgeon general’s report on smoking was published, recognizing a link between smoking and lung cancer. Another decade later, Minnesota passed the first statewide law limiting smoking in public places. Another decade later, the surgeon general issued a report recognizing the harmful effects of secondhand smoke.

This long policy timeline on an issue with an established scientific consensus has allowed for far too large a bill in terms of health, cost and human lives. Rhode Island has a chance to reduce misinformation surrounding environmental tobacco smoke by closing the last loophole that allows for indoor smoking in the Ocean State.

The Rhode Island Chapter of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers is a society of volunteers who are professionals within the HVAC industry, some of whom design and build air handling, air filtering and air cleaning systems. Our society’s unequivocal position is that there is not currently available or reasonably anticipated ventilation or air cleaning systems that can adequately control or significantly reduce the health risks of environmental tobacco smoke to an acceptable level. Any level of exposure can lead to adverse health effects such as cardiovascular disease and lung cancer.

Building systems can only reduce odor and discomfort, but they cannot eliminate risk. Neither air dilution, ventilation, distribution, filtration or cleaning should be relied upon to control environmental tobacco smoke exposure. The only way to make the buildings where we live, work and recreate safe is to fully ban indoor smoking.

Rhode Island has banned indoor smoking in public buildings in all cases but one: casinos. Even with top of the line air filtration, ventilation and cleaning systems in place, allowing smoking in casinos is still unsafe for patrons, and is especially unsafe for casino workers who are exposed day after day. Those who are not aware of the science and research regarding tobacco smoke and indoor air quality may be misinformed and misled on the subject.

We have an opportunity to write the end of this chapter in our state’s history books. House Bill 7500 and Senate Bill 2368 propose ending the loophole that allows for smoking in casinos. We can make casinos a safer space by doing what is best for our health and safety in the built environment.