Paul Cook, a health care reform volunteer from Lexington, gave a presentation relating stories from his own life and health problems to members of the Jenny Wiley Chapter of AARP on Tuesday.
slideshow
PRESTONSBURG – “Inside every person that is my age, there is a young person wondering what happened,” said Cherie Cook, as she waited for her husband, Paul, to address the Jenny Wiley Chapter of the AARP on the topic of health care reform on Tuesday.
Paul Cook, a health care reform volunteer from Lexington, gave a presentation relating stories from his own life and health problems to a full crowd of AARP members at the First Presbyterian Church in Prestonsburg.
“We’re all in this together,” Cook said. “This could be the most important time in history regarding health care.”
Cook, a survivor of six heart attacks, has a great deal of experience with the problems in the current health care system, citing numerous health issues, including his diabetes.
“My insulin costs $150 for a vial, and I use 10 vials in 90 days. That’s $1,500 on one type of drug,” Cook said. “The same company makes the insulin in Europe, and it is $15 per vial.”
While Cook admitted to the crowd that he didn’t know the full reasons for the difference in price, he said that something definitely needed to change.
Those in attendance also learned about the six priorities that AARP believes any health care reform bill should address.
“We need to guarantee access to affordable coverage for Americans age 50 to 64, closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap, lower the drug costs through generic biologics, reduce costly hospital readmissions through a Medicare follow-up, long-term care, and helping low-income Americans,” Cook said.
According to statistics provided by AARP, nearly 80,000 residents in Kentucky from ages 50 to 64 are uninsured.
For more information on AARP’s mission to promote health care reform, visit http://www.healthactionnow.org, or http://www.aarp.org/ky.
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They are on a witch hunt to persecute smokers and obese people and do their collective best to destroy gambling and bars in this latest round of prohibition..........look up the robert woods johnson foundation the finacier of the new prohibition movement. They have basically highered ACS AND ALA to do their bidding and become lobbyists to push smoking bans and obesity bans around america........heres a bit of there obesity handy work..
Mississippi Legislature
2008 Regular Session
House Bill 282
House Calendar | Senate Calendar | Main Menu
Additional Information | All Versions
Current Bill Text: |
Description: Food establishments; prohibit from serving food to any person who is obese.
Background Information:
Disposition: Active
Deadline: General Bill/Constitutional Amendment
Revenue: No
Vote type required: Majority
Effective date: July 1, 2008
History of Actions:
1 01/25 (H) Referred To Public Health and Human Services;Judiciary B
----- Additional Information -----
House Committee: Public Health and Human Services*, Judiciary B
Principal Author: Mayhall
Additional Authors: Read, Shows
Title: AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.
----- Bill Text for All Versions ----
| As Introduced (Current)
Information pertaining to this measure was last updated on 01/29/2008 at 11:24
End Of Document
Written By: Jerome Arnett, Jr., M.D.
Published In: Environment & Climate News
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Publisher: The Heartland Institute
Exposure to secondhand smoke (SHS) is an unpleasant experience for many nonsmokers, and for decades was considered a nuisance. But the idea that it might actually cause disease in nonsmokers has been around only since the 1970s.
Recent surveys show more than 80 percent of Americans now believe secondhand smoke is harmful to nonsmokers.
Federal Government Reports
A 1972 U.S. surgeon general's report first addressed passive smoking as a possible threat to nonsmokers and called for an anti-smoking movement. The issue was addressed again in surgeon generals' reports in 1979, 1982, and 1984.
A 1986 surgeon general's report concluded involuntary smoking caused lung cancer, but it offered only weak epidemiological evidence to support the claim. In 1989 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was charged with further evaluating the evidence for health effects of SHS.
In 1992 EPA published its report, "Respiratory Health Effects of Passive Smoking," claiming SHS is a serious public health problem, that it kills approximately 3,000 nonsmoking Americans each year from lung cancer, and that it is a Group A carcinogen (like benzene, asbestos, and radon).
The report has been used by the tobacco-control movement and government agencies, including public health departments, to justify the imposition of thousands of indoor smoking bans in public places.
Flawed Assumptions
EPA's 1992 conclusions are not supported by reliable scientific evidence. The report has been largely discredited and, in 1998, was legally vacated by a federal judge.
Even so, the EPA report was cited in the surgeon general's 2006 report on SHS, where then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona made the absurd claim that there is no risk-free level of exposure to SHS.
For its 1992 report, EPA arbitrarily chose to equate SHS with mainstream (or firsthand) smoke. One of the agency's stated assumptions was that because there is an association between active smoking and lung cancer, there also must be a similar association between SHS and lung cancer.
But the problem posed by SHS is entirely different from that found with mainstream smoke. A well-recognized toxicological principle states, "The dose makes the poison."
Accordingly, we physicians record direct exposure to cigarette smoke by smokers in the medical record as "pack-years smoked" (packs smoked per day times the number of years smoked). A smoking history of around 10 pack-years alerts the physician to search for cigarette-caused illness. But even those nonsmokers with the greatest exposure to SHS probably inhale the equivalent of only a small fraction (around 0.03) of one cigarette per day, which is equivalent to smoking around 10 cigarettes per year.
Low Statistical Association
Another major problem is that the epidemiological studies on which the EPA report is based are statistical studies that can show only correlation and cannot prove causation.
One statistical method used to compare the rates of a disease in two populations is relative risk (RR). It is the rate of disease found in the exposed population divided by the rate found in the unexposed population. An RR of 1.0 represents zero increased risk. Because confounding and other factors can obscure a weak association, in order even to suggest causation a very strong association must be found, on the order of at least 300 percent to 400 percent, which is an RR of 3.0 to 4.0.
For example, the studies linking direct cigarette smoking with lung cancer found an incidence in smokers of 20 to around 40 times that in nonsmokers, an association of 2000 percent to 4000 percent, or an RR of 20.0 to 40.0.
Scientific Principles Ignored
An even greater problem is the agency's lowering of the confidence interval (CI) used in its report. Epidemiologists calculate confidence intervals to express the likelihood a result could happen just by chance. A CI of 95 percent allows a 5 percent possibility that the results occurred only by chance.
Before its 1992 report, EPA had always used epidemiology's gold standard CI of 95 percent to measure statistical significance. But because the U.S. studies chosen for the report were not statistically significant within a 95 percent CI, for the first time in its history EPA changed the rules and used a 90 percent CI, which doubled the chance of being wrong.
This allowed it to report a statistically significant 19 percent increase of lung cancer cases in the nonsmoking spouses of smokers over those cases found in nonsmoking spouses of nonsmokers. Even though the RR was only 1.19--an amount far short of what is normally required to demonstrate correlation or causality--the agency concluded this was proof SHS increased the risk of U.S. nonsmokers developing lung cancer by 19 percent.
EPA Study Soundly Rejected
In November 1995 after a 20-month study, the Congressional Research Service released a detailed analysis of the EPA report that was highly critical of EPA's methods and conclusions. In 1998, in a devastating 92-page opinion, Federal Judge William Osteen vacated the EPA study, declaring it null and void. He found a culture of arrogance, deception, and cover-up at the agency.
Osteen noted, "First, there is evidence in the record supporting the accusation that EPA 'cherry picked' its data. ... In order to confirm its hypothesis, EPA maintained its standard significance level but lowered the confidence interval to 90 percent. This allowed EPA to confirm its hypothesis by finding a relative risk of 1.19, albeit a very weak association. ... EPA cannot show a statistically significant association between [SHS] and lung cancer."
In 2003 a definitive paper on SHS and lung cancer mortality was published in the British Medical Journal. It is the largest and most detailed study ever reported. The authors studied more than 35,000 California never-smokers over a 39-year period and found no statistically significant association between exposure to SHS and lung cancer mortality.
Propaganda Trumps Science
The 1992 EPA report is an example of the use of epidemiology to promote belief in an epidemic instead of to investigate one. It has damaged the credibility of EPA and has tainted the fields of epidemiology and public health.
In addition, influential anti-tobacco activists, including prominent academics, have unethically attacked the research of eminent scientists in order to further their ideological and political agendas.
The abuse of scientific integrity and the generation of faulty "scientific" outcomes (through the use of pseudoscience) have led to the deception of the American public on a grand scale and to draconian government overregulation and the squandering of public money.
Millions of dollars have been spent promoting belief in SHS as a killer, and more millions of dollars have been spent by businesses in order to comply with thousands of highly restrictive bans, while personal choice and freedom have been denied to millions of smokers. Finally, and perhaps most tragically, all this has diverted resources away from discovering the true cause(s) of lung cancer in nonsmokers.
Dr. Jerome Arnett Jr. .
Though repetition has little to do with "the truth," we're repeatedly told that there's "no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke."
OSHA begs to differ.
OSHA has established PELs (Permissible Exposure Levels) for all the measurable chemicals, including the 40 alleged carcinogens, in secondhand smoke. PELs are levels of exposure for an 8-hour workday from which, according to OSHA, no harm will result.
Of course the idea of "thousands of chemicals" can itself sound spooky. Perhaps it would help to note that coffee contains over 1000 chemicals, 19 of which are known to be rat carcinogens.
-"Rodent Carcinogens: Setting Priorities" Gold Et Al., Science, 258: 261-65 (1992)
There. Feel better?
As for secondhand smoke in the air, OSHA has stated outright that:
"Field studies of environmental tobacco smoke indicate that under normal conditions, the components in tobacco smoke are diluted below existing Permissible Exposure Levels (PELS.) as referenced in the Air Contaminant Standard (29 CFR 1910.1000)...It would be very rare to find a workplace with so much smoking that any individual PEL would be exceeded."
-Letter From Greg Watchman, Acting Sec'y, OSHA, To Leroy J Pletten, PHD, July 8, 1997
Indeed it would.
Independent health researchers have done the chemistry and the math to prove how very very rare that would be.
As you're about to see in a moment.
In 1999, comments were solicited by the government from an independent Public and Health Policy Research group, Littlewood & Fennel of Austin, Tx, on the subject of secondhand smoke.
Using EPA figures on the emissions per cigarette of everything measurable in secondhand smoke, they compared them to OSHA's PELs.
The following excerpt and chart are directly from their report and their Washington testimony:
CALCULATING THE NON-EXISTENT RISKS OF ETS
"We have taken the substances for which measurements have actually been obtained--very few, of course, because it's difficult to even find these chemicals in diffuse and diluted ETS.
"We posit a sealed, unventilated enclosure that is 20 feet square with a 9 foot ceiling clearance.
"Taking the figures for ETS yields per cigarette directly from the EPA, we calculated the number of cigarettes that would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold for each of these substances. The results are actually quite amusing. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a situation where these threshold limits could be realized.
"Our chart (Table 1) illustrates each of these substances, but let me report some notable examples.
"For Benzo[a]pyrene, 222,000 cigarettes would be required to reach the lowest published "danger" threshold.
"For Acetone, 118,000 cigarettes would be required.
"Toluene would require 50,000 packs of simultaneously smoldering cigarettes.
"At the lower end of the scale-- in the case of Acetaldehyde or Hydrazine, more than 14,000 smokers would need to light up simultaneously in our little room to reach the threshold at which they might begin to pose a danger.
"For Hydroquinone, "only" 1250 cigarettes are required. Perhaps we could post a notice limiting this 20-foot square room to 300 rather tightly-packed people smoking no more than 62 packs per hour?
"Of course the moment we introduce real world factors to the room -- a door, an open window or two, or a healthy level of mechanical air exchange (remember, the room we've been talking about is sealed) achieving these levels becomes even more implausible.
"It becomes increasingly clear to us that ETS is a political, rather than scientific, scapegoat."
Chart (Table 1)
-"Toxic Toxicology" Littlewood & Fennel
Coming at OSHA from quite a different angle is litigator (and how!) John Banzhaf, founder and president of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH).
Banzhaf is on record as wanting to remove healthy children from intact homes if one of their family smokes. He also favors national smoking bans both indoors and out throughout America, and has litigation kits for sale on how to get your landlord to evict your smoking neighbors.
Banzhaf originally wanted OSHA to ban smoking in all American workplaces.
It's not even that OSHA wasn't happy to play along; it's just that--darn it -- they couldn't find the real-world science to make it credible.
So Banzhaf sued them. Suing federal agencies to get them to do what you want is, alas, a new trick in the political deck of cards. But OSHA, at least apparently, hung tough.
In response to Banzhaf's law suit they said the best they could do would be to set some official standards for permissible levels of smoking in the workplace.
Scaring Banzhaf, and Glantz and the rest of them to death.
Permissible levels? No, no. That would mean that OSHA, officially, said that smoking was permitted. That in fact, there were levels (hard to exceed, as we hope we've already shown) that were generally safe.
This so frightened Banzhaf that he dropped the case. Here are excerpts from his press release:
"ASH has agreed to dismiss its lawsuit against OSHA...to avoid serious harm to the non-smokers rights movement from adverse action OSHA had threatened to take if forced by the suit to do it....developing some hypothetical [ASH's characterization] measurement of smoke pollution that might be a better remedy than prohibiting smoking....[T]his could seriously hurt efforts to pass non-smokers' rights legislation at the state and local level...
Another major threat was that, if the agency were forced by ASH's suit to promulgate a rule regulating workplace smoking, [it] would be likely to pass a weak one.... This weak rule in turn could preempt future and possibly even existing non-smokers rights laws-- a risk no one was willing to take.
As a result of ASH's dismissal of the suit, OSHA will now withdraw its rule-making proceedings but will do so without using any of the damaging [to Anti activists] language they had threatened to include."
-ASH Nixes OSHA Suit To Prevent Harm To Movement
Looking on the bright side, Banzhaf concludes:
"We might now be even more successful in persuading states and localities to ban smoking on their own, once they no longer have OSHA rule-making to hide behind."
Once again, the Anti-Smoking Movement reveals that it's true motive is basically Prohibition (stopping smokers from smoking; making them "social outcasts") --not "safe air."
And the attitude seems to be, as Stanton Glantz says, if the science doesn't "help" you, don't do the science.
March 8, 1998
Passive smoking doesn't cause cancer - official
By Victoria Macdonald, Health Correspondent
THE world's leading health organization has withheld from publication a study which shows that not only might there be no link between passive smoking and lung cancer but that it could even have a protective effect.
The astounding results are set to throw wide open the debate on passive smoking health risks. The World Health Organization, which commissioned the 12-centre, seven-country European study has failed to make the findings public, and has instead produced only a summary of the results in an internal report.
Despite repeated approaches, nobody at the WHO headquarters in Geneva would comment on the findings last week. At its International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon , France , which coordinated the study, a spokesman would say only that the full report had been submitted to a science journal and no publication date had been set.
The findings are certain to be an embarrassment to the WHO, which has spent years and vast sums on anti-smoking and anti-tobacco campaigns. The study is one of the largest ever to look at the link between passive smoking - or environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) - and lung cancer, and had been eagerly awaited by medical experts and campaigning groups.
Yet the scientists have found that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer. The research compared 650 lung cancer patients with 1,542 healthy people. It looked at people who were married to smokers, worked with smokers, both worked and were married to smokers, and those who grew up with smokers.
The results are consistent with their being no additional risk for a person living or working with a smoker and could be consistent with passive smoke having a protective effect against lung cancer. The summary, seen by The Telegraph, also states: "There was no association between lung cancer risk and ETS exposure during childhood."
A spokesman for Action on Smoking and Health said the findings "seem rather surprising given the evidence from other major reviews on the subject which have shown a clear association between passive smoking and a number of diseases." Roy Castle, the jazz musician and television presenter who died from lung cancer in 1994, claimed that he contracted the disease from years of inhaling smoke while performing in pubs and clubs.
A report published in the British Medical Journal last October was hailed by the anti-tobacco lobby as definitive proof when it claimed that non-smokers living with smokers had a 25 per cent risk of developing lung cancer. But yesterday, Dr Chris Proctor, head of science for BAT Industries, the tobacco group, said the findings had to be taken seriously. "If this study cannot find any statistically valid risk you have to ask if there can be any risk at all.
"It confirms what we and many other scientists have long believed, that while smoking in public may be annoying to some non-smokers, the science does not show that being around a smoker is a lung-cancer risk." The WHO study results come at a time when the British Government has made clear its intention to crack down on smoking in thousands of public places, including bars and restaurants.
POSTED: 3:38 pm EDT October 14, 2007
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Bingo games, once valuable social events and fundraisers for communities, are in decline throughout the state, according to churches, veterans groups and nonprofit organizations.
Some blame the slow disappearance of bingo games on Ohio's restrictive smoking law, while others point to a faltering economy, competition for gaming dollars and the increasing costs of operating a large bingo hall.
Joe Sferra, owner of Crown Wholesale in Youngstown, a distributor of bingo supplies, said he has seen a 15 percent to 20 percent decline in Ohio business during the past two years. He thinks the increasing prices of gasoline and natural gas in a slowing economy have had a "suppressing effect" on bingo play.
St. Joseph the Provider in the Youngstown suburb of Campbell is one of many churches that have stopped holding bingo nights. Bingo night used to draw up to 200 people, but in the past three years attendance has been too poor to justify the cost of running the games, said Chuck Zamary, who has helped with the church's bingo for the past two decades.
The proceeds had been used to keep tuition costs down at the parish school, he said.
Three years ago, the diocese declared that parish halls were part of parish schools and prohibited smoking during bingo as a result. The decline started after that, Zamary said.
Some bingo operators in Pennsylvania, which allows smoking during games, say Ohio players do leave the state to play. Paul Vanord, bingo manager for American Legion Post 299 in Sharon, Pa., said he has seen a significant increase in Ohio players since the Ohio smoking ban went into effect. Many come from Ohio's border cities like Hubbard and Niles, he said.
Bingo operators also attribute some of the decline to the emergence of electronic gaming machines such as Tic Tac Fruit in bars and other businesses, and the lure of both higher bingo payoffs and gambling resorts across state lines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Sferra noted that in Pennsylvania, where Bingo jackpots are higher, his business has declined far less, down 5 percent in the past two years.
Zamary said the smoking ban was a contributing factor in the end of bingo at St. Joseph's, but other developments, including the rapidly declining economy in Youngstown, also played a role.
"You can't blame it all on no-smoking," Zamary said.
Other problems with maintaining the games include increases in the cost of utilities and advertising, and larger jackpot payoffs in an effort to attract players.
"It's not just us," Zamary said of St. Joseph's loss of bingo business. "You're going to see more that have to close."
« harleyrider1978 wrote on Thursday, Jul 23 at 03:51 PM »
After the Smoke Cleared, Where Did All the Bingo Players Go?
By STEPHANIE STROM
Published: April 24, 2008
Banning smoking at charity bingo games may have health benefits, but it is proving harmful to earnings.
In Minnesota, which adopted a statewide ban on smoking in all indoor workplaces in October, revenue from all charity gambling dropped nearly 13 percent in the last quarter of 2007, compared to the same quarter the year before, according to state officials. More than half of the drop — the equivalent of about $100 million annually — was attributed to the new law, they said.
Charlie Lindstrom, who runs the bingo nights at an American Legion post in Fergus Falls, Minn., said some of his former customers now drove to casinos on Indian reservations, where they can puff away, or across the border to Fargo, N.D., where veterans’ organizations are exempt from that state’s smoking ban.
On a good night, Mr. Lindstrom said, bingo at the post used to attract 50 to 75 players. Nowadays it is more like 30 or 40.
“It’s had a profound effect on us here,” Mr. Lindstrom said. “We’ve sponsored several baseball teams here in the past, but we can’t give as much now because the smoking ban has really reduced our revenue.”
Mr. Lindstrom is not alone. Managers of charity bingo games in California, New Jersey, New York and Washington State also say their states’ smoking bans have forced cutbacks in their budgets and in their support for various causes.
Few believe they can cultivate new nonsmoking players. They say smoking goes with bingo like peanut butter with jelly. Michael J. Surwill, bingo chairman at Elks Lodge No. 2501 in Ocean Springs, Miss., estimated that smokers outnumbered nonsmokers three to one at the lodge’s weekly game.
Last year, his bingo game produced $23,000 that supported a shelter for abused women, a drug awareness program and a camp for young cancer survivors, Mr. Surwill said, adding, “I’m sure we wouldn’t raise nearly that much if we banned smoking.”
Veterans’ organizations like the American Legion, fraternal groups like the Shrine and Moose clubs, local drum and bugle corps and churches have long depended on revenue from gambling, though it has been on the decline — and not solely because of smoking. A proliferation of casinos on reservations, changes in state gambling regulations and, now, a faltering economy have all played a role.
Some advocates of smoking bans said the costs of smoking to the state in terms of public health and productivity greatly outweighed the losses to charity. And some argue that the revenues will return in over the long run.
“Around the country,” said State Representative Thomas Huntley, Democrat of Duluth and a chief sponsor of Minnesota’s Freedom to Breathe Act, “whenever places have put in smoking bans, there is a six-month period where there is a drop in business in bars and restaurants, which is where this gambling takes place, and after that, it starts to rebound.”
But bingo managers in states where bans on smoking have been in effect longer say nonsmokers cannot make up for the decline in revenues from smokers. Instead, they say, their industry has undergone a wave of forced consolidation.
“We actually benefited from it, but for the wrong reason — my competition was forced to close,” said Clyde Bock, bingo manager for the Ruth Dykeman Children’s Center in Seattle.
When Washington’s ban on smoking took effect in 2005, Mr. Bock was able to partially enclose a porch where bingo players could still smoke, and he got it approved as a separate facility. “It cost me $8,000, but it protected my customer base,” he said. “Other games weren’t so lucky.”
Still, revenues are down. In 2006, the bingo operation at the children’s center, which then belonged to Big Brothers Big Sisters, generated about $325,000 a year, after expenses, and employed 17 people. A year later, under the auspices of the center, it produced $150,000 and employed 13 people.
“People underestimate the impact smoking bans will have,” Mr. Bock said.
Washington used to be home to 100 bingo halls that raised money for charity. Now there are fewer than 20.
Bret Rios, director of operations for the Blue Devils, a nonprofit drum and bugle corps in Concord, Calif., says his organization, too, has felt the effects. “A lot of people who play bingo like to smoke,” Mr. Rios said
Bingo is the largest source of revenue for the Blue Devils, which operates musical groups that involve more than 500 children each year. In 2005, bingo provided $1.2 million for the organization’s activities, covering more than half its costs.
Mr. Rios said bingo revenues were down about $10,000 a month since Contra Costa County imposed more stringent restrictions on smoking in 2006. Attendance at the nightly games has fallen to about 225 on average, compared to 300 or more before the ban took effect.
The Blue Devils had spent roughly $70,000 to create a specially ventilated separate room for smoking bingo players, which the county ordered closed under its new regulations. The organization replaced it with a covered patio in its parking lot, but smokers are not happy with it, Mr. Rios said.
“You’ve got to get up and down, up and down, to go out and smoke,” said Judy Aiello, 53, who has played bingo at the Blue Devils parlor for about 20 years.
Ms. Aiello said friends who used to play at the Concord center now went to American Indian-owned casinos or bingo parlors in the adjacent county, which has less stringent smoking restrictions than Contra Costa.
Ms. Aiello and other smokers also spoke of tensions between smokers and nonsmokers. Some nonsmoking bingo players have complained that the smell of smoke wafts in from outside, and the Blue Devils group was recently forced to place notices at entrances, reminding smokers that the county forbid them to light up within 20 yards of doorways.
“Why do all the nonsmokers have all the rights and the smokers have none?” said Rhonda Convino, 37, who smokes but has remained loyal to the Blue Devils games.
Mr. Rios said he felt caught between a rock and a hard place.
“I’m not a smoker, and I’m not fond of smoking,” he said. “I wouldn’t go to a place that smelled of smoke and spend a lot of time there. But they’ve gone way too far — you know, they’re even thinking about passing a law that would make it illegal to smoke in your own home.”
Told about that idea, Representative Huntley of Minnesota chuckled. “I don’t think I’ll take that idea up,” he said. “I’m still pulling the knives out of my back from the last time.”
By KEN MAGUIRE | Associated Press Writer
12:09 PM EDT, September 13, 2007
WATERTOWN, Mass. - Pauline LaCava can rattle off locations of bingo games that closed in her hometown as fast as she can scan her bingo sheet, dabbing pink ink marks on numbers as they're called at Saint Patrick Church in Watertown.
"There used to be one every night of the week," said LaCava, 80, seated at the rear of the Catholic church basement, where the night's top prize will be $330. "I definitely feel the casinos hurt bingos. Foxwoods has the bingo every day and every night."
Bingo had been a reliable source of revenue for churches, schools, youth sports leagues and veterans' organizations since the early 1970s. The games have been on the decline for several years, in part because of aging players, smoking bans and the lure of Keno and casinos.
Now, bingo players and the organizations that benefit from the games in this area worry that proposed casinos would be the final blow. Two Indian tribes want to build casinos in Massachusetts, and Gov. Deval Patrick is nearing a decision on whether to expand legalized gambling.
"It will close us down," said the Rev. Francis Daley, pastor of Saints Martha and Mary Church in Lakeville, which borders Middleborough, the town in which the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe wants to build a $1 billion casino. "We cannot compete with their prizes."
The Thursday night game attracts 120 players, raising $40,000 per year for the church, helping pay bills at a time when overall contributions to Catholic churches are down.
Lynn Patterson, who runs the bingo at Holy Name Church in Springfield, which raises $70,000 per year for the parish school, said she has lost players to the Connecticut casinos, which buy ads in local newspapers.
"That's an hour from where we are. I can't imagine having one 10 minutes away," she said, referring to another casino proposal for the town of Palmer. "It would definitely hurt."
Bingo revenue is currently at a 32-year low, according to the charitable gaming division of the Massachusetts Lottery. Gross revenue last year was $102 million, the lowest since 1974, the third year of legalized bingo in Massachusetts. It was $252 million in 1993, but has slid every year since.
Organizations get less than 20 percent of the gross revenue after paying out prizes, expenses, and 5 percent state tax.
Bingo organizers who see the effects elsewhere say they have reason to worry.
Foxwoods Resort Casino opened a bingo hall in 1986, and its full casino in 1992. Mohegan Sun opened four years later. From about that point, charitable bingo revenues have fallen. Gross revenue from charitable bingo fell from $34.6 million in 1995 to $23.7 million last year, according to Connecticut's Division of Special Revenue.
In the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, N.Y., bingo receipts fell by 36 percent from 2000 to 2006, including a 9.6 percent drop last year, said spokesman Kevin Keenan, who blamed Canadian casinos and a workplace smoking ban.
In Ohio, the Aquinas Central Catholic School in Steubenville, located near two West Virginia casinos, eliminated bingo two years ago after a drop in attendance.
"Slot machines, craps and blackjack _ on a relative scale _ are very exciting and are going to draw people away from bingo," said Dartmouth College economics professor Bruce Sacerdote, who co-wrote a 2005 report examining the economic impact of legalized gambling in Massachusetts. "The nature of the game is a big deal. The size of the jackpot is a big deal."
The Massachusetts casino debate reignited this year after the Mashpee Wampanoags won federal recognition as a tribe, bought land in Middleborough and unveiled plans for a resort casino to compete with Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun.
The Aquinnah Wampanoag Indians have declared that they'll open a casino if their Mashpee counterparts do the same. State Treasurer Tim Cahill has proposed that the state beat tribes to the punch by allowing commercial casinos.
The Legislature still needs to approve expanded gambling before a full-scale casino can be built.
But even without legislative approval, recognition gives tribes the right to operate bingo parlors, and the Mashpee Wampanoags have said they'll do that in Middleborough if they can't build a casino.
Beside a handful of lawmakers, opposition to casino gambling has been limited.
The Roman Catholic church, historically outspoken on matters related to family values, has taken a reserved approach.
Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley has declined several interview requests on the subject. On his blog, however, he wrote that casino gambling "is fraught with many dangers for a community," including gambling addiction. He said the state should raise taxes rather than rely on casinos "which will result in many ruined lives, ruined businesses and ruined neighborhoods."
O'Malley didn't mention bingo, but did note that the church's position on gambling is "nuanced."
That could be because about a third of the existing 280 bingo licensees are affiliated with the Catholic church _ parishes, schools, and groups with Catholic ties, such as the Knights of Columbus _ according to an Associated Press review.
A reader's response on O'Malley's blog took the cardinal to task. "There are as many compulsive bingo addicts as there are compulsive casino gamblers. Are you prepared to ban bingo in the Boston area?" The cardinal did not respond.
Some say there's little comparison between casinos and bingo.
"It's more than just a gambling situation. It's a place for people to go and socialize," said Rev. Daley of Lakeville. "People going to Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun aren't going to socialize. A lot of them have supper here before the game begins. It's a way for people to check in with each other."
There is hope for bingo lovers, however. Clyde Barrow, a casino researcher at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, said despite the Mashpee Wampanoags' statements about opening a bingo hall, they might not, because casino investors are interested in the more lucrative games, such as slots. For casinos, he said, bingo is "less and less a preferred form of gambling."
Back in Watertown, Pauline LaCava said even the inexpensive bus trips offered by the Connecticut casinos can be a drain on the elderly. "They're too tired to go to bingo that night," she said.