By Tyler Schneider, Las Vegas Weekly
June 5, 2025- It’s an early Friday morning before Memorial Day and the slots on the Park MGM casino floor are already chirping when former smoker Chris Nelson notices a distinct absence of the smell of cigarettes.
“A smoking ban? Cool! I quit four years ago,” the Wyoming visitor says, unaware that the property became the only smoke-free casino on the Las Vegas Strip in 2020.
Others say they don’t mind either way, but a handful cite the policy as a key influence on their travel plans. Amy Chamberlain of California “wouldn’t even consider” staying elsewhere.
It’s been nearly two decades since Nevada legislators banned indoor smoking in public places, but the exceptions they made for businesses like casinos, bars, strip clubs and brothels remain intact. Aside from Park MGM, Strip resorts have kept casino smoking in place since then, but recent shareholder votes suggest public opinion could be trending in favor of eliminating that allowance.
According to an American Lung Association analysis of CDC data, only 11.6% of Americans were regular cigarette smokers in 2022—a sharp drop from 42.6% in 1966 and 19.3% in 2010. Based on a 2024 poll from the Nevada Tobacco Control and Smoke-Free Coalition, more than two-thirds of 800 registered Nevada voters now favor smoke-free casino policies. Participants were given an overview of counterarguments before weighing in, including concerns over casinos losing customers and revenue.
Not long after that finding went public, the American Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation (ANRF) and a handful of partners in the health care industry who own shares in Boyd Gaming, Caesars Entertainment, Penn Entertainment and Wynn Resorts submitted shareholder proposals calling for investors to ask operators to “commission and disclose a report on the potential cost savings” of smoke-free policies.
All but Penn attempted to block the question from appearing on their respective 2025 ballots, but each was overruled by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The ruling paved the way for 8.6% of Wynn shareholders to vote in favor of a smoke-free study on April 30, followed by 11% of Boyd shareholders on May 8. Wynn declined a request for comment on the vote, while Boyd did not respond.
Caesars and Penn are set to hold similar votes on June 10 and 17, respectively.
While the June tallies are also unlikely to garner a favorable majority, ANRF advocacy director Bronson Frick finds optimism in the fact that the Wynn result guarantees the topic will be revisited in 2026.
“I think it’s the beginning of a process, but these votes tell us that, even when the company opposes the measure, a significant percentage of investors are sending a signal that this issue is on their radar,” Frick says.
Anthony Lucas, a UNLV professor who spent a decade working as an operations analyst for MGM Grand, Palace Station and Harrah’s, believes the industry is still too “risk-averse” to go smoke-free without outside influence.
“Casinos are the last bastion for indoor smoking, and they’re concerned about gaming revenues because they worry that gaming and smoking go together like peanut butter and jelly. But players aren’t going to leave. They never do,” Lucas says.
The theory that casino smoking bans will drive away business has also started to show wear. A 2022 report from Las Vegas-based C3 Gaming found that adopting smoke-free policies “no longer causes a dramatic drop in gaming revenue,” while “non-smoking properties appear to be performing better.”
The results echoed a similar study by UNLV graduate Sojeong Lee, who examined the impact of a smoking ban at South Korea’s Kangwon Land casino in 2015. UNLV professor Ashok Singh, who helped Lee develop statistical models, says they found that the ban “didn’t really impact gaming volume.”
“The implication was that smoke-free casinos may save money by reducing costs for ventilation and employee health coverage,” Singh says.
Singh is puzzled by the industry’s hesitancy to explore that possibility. At the very least, he doesn’t “see any harm in doing a study,” and notes that UNLV researchers could do it for “no more than $25,000.”
Despite the CDC’s position that “separating smokers from nonsmokers, cleaning the air, and ventilating buildings cannot eliminate exposures of nonsmokers to secondhand smoke,” some resorts have opted to compromise by establishing separate non-smoking sections in their casinos.
Culinary Union secretary-treasurer Ted Pappageorge says the union has always prioritized member safety in contract negotiations, including advocating for improved ventilation. It also supports the smoke-free designation at Park MGM, where 1,400 of its 60,000 members work. Though it’s been “a few years” since the union surveyed members on smoking policies, he says they’re generally “mixed” on the issue.
ANRF’s Frick and UNLV’s Lucas say tribal casinos that went smoke-free after COVID saw little to no decline in revenue. Frick suspects that casino operators are willingly ignoring the signs.
“Nearly all commercial gaming operators never ask employees or customers about smoking status or preference. Why is that? One could wonder if it’s because they don’t want to know the answer,” he says.
Lucas believes it’s only a matter of time before smoking bans become the norm both on and off the Strip.
“I do think social pressures are going to force it at some point,” he says. “When it does happen, the bottom line is I think they’re going to be OK.”
