Macau’s days as a smokers’ paradise could be about to come to an end.
There’s a lame joke doing the rounds that the only place in Macau where you can’t smoke is a cigarette warehouse. Even fireworks wholesalers seem to have a relatively relaxed approach to customers’ love of the evil weed.
All that could change soon however. Beijing is going to draft laws to ban smoking areas in all public places, the Beijing Evening News reported. And where Beijing leads today, the rest of the country often follows.
China’s leaders may not be fully signed up tree huggers just yet, but environmental issues on both the micro level of personal health and the macro level of reducing carbon emissions certainly seem to be firmly on the national political agenda.
Some Macau casinos have already introduced modest no smoking zones. Hong Kong however recently banned the distribution and sale of so-called ‘smokeless smokes’—an electronic gadget that looks like a cigarette and gives the user a nicotine hit, without the nasty side effects of tar on the lungs and smoke in the next person’s face. Cynics say that was because the Hong Kong government is worried about losing valuable tax revenue from normal cigarettes. The product also had the potential to cause near-terminal confusion in the minds of the city’s anti-smoking inspectors, who now roam the streets and trawl the bars, handing out on-the-spot fines to offenders.
The English-language newspaper China Daily said Cui Xiaobo, a professor from the Capital Medical University who participated in the drafting of the new Beijing law, stated it will force all public places to be 100 percent smoking-free. Even smoking rooms and areas will be completely removed from public places.
It may just be a matter of time before even Macau’s baccarat tables become smoke free zones.
