"In response to the letter, “Casinos put employees and patrons at risk,” published March 7, on Connecticut trying to ban smoking at the two state casinos, it's ludicrous. They are sovereign nations with their own laws, and American citizens and lawmakers need to respect them. That's like another country telling the United States to change its laws — would you stand for that?

Mohegan Sun management and the Mohegan Tribe have gone out of their way to protect their patrons and employees by having spent millions of dollars on state-of-the-art ventilation systems and by providing non-smoking gambling areas for the patrons and non-smoking areas in the back of the house for employees. So for people to say the casino and tribe don't care is a shame.

As a non-smoker myself, I can understand people who do not want to be around secondhand smoke, and that's when you have choices to make about where you work or socialize. People have to make their own decisions in life. We can't have laws about everything in our lives, and if we did, then we would look like a communist country, wouldn't we? And that's not what America is."

Get the Story:
Paige Holzenthal: Stop Blaming The Casinos For Everything (The New London Day 3/10)
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