Anti-Smoking Movement Gets Foot in Nevada Door : Health: The state’s frontier ethic is yielding to efforts to restrict tobacco use in some public places.

Nevada’s libertarian streak was invoked two years ago in a law that insisted that schools, hospitals and other public buildings allow smoking. Nevada was no California, by God, a People’s Republic where crazed non-smokers and the health police stomp on individual rights.

Then the dean of the Nevada Legislature’s informal smoking caucus died of lung cancer. So did the Capitol lobbyist for the Tobacco Institute, another chain-smoker. Now Nevada is moving to shed its image as a place where it’s still common for people to eat, work and do business in public with a lighted cigarette hanging from the face.

Smoking will be banned in public buildings, except in designated areas, under a new law signed by Gov. Bob Miller. For the first time, some restaurants will have to offer smoke-free tables.

Casinos are exempt from the law, but some have begun to offer smoke-free gaming tables under the influence of customers from California. The Desert Inn and other hotels on the Las Vegas Strip forbid smoking in their showrooms.

Anti-smoking forces say it is about time, given the sobering facts about life and death in this fast-growing state. Smoking is more common in Nevada than anywhere, and the state ranks second in heart disease and other illnesses influenced by lifestyle, the Nevada Medical Assn. says. Las Vegas also has the highest lung cancer rate in the country, the group says.

“Nevada has a terrible record,” said Larry Mathies, the association’s executive director. “Almost seven of 10 Nevadans who die every year die of heart disease or cancer, nearly eight in 10 if you include other lung disease.” Adds Mathies, “We also have among the weakest smoking laws.”

Until now, the only Nevada law governing smoking said that no-smoking signs may be posted in public buildings, if smoking areas are also provided. But the law is seldom invoked, critics say. Likewise, few restaurants have opted to provide no-smoking areas, and casinos are still no place for those disgusted by the sight or smell of burning tobacco.

That’s the way it should be, smoker Bertha Gold said between $5 bets at an ash-littered blackjack table in the Mirage Hotel casino.

“I want to smoke when I come to Las Vegas,” said Gold, a visitor from New Jersey. “It’s ridiculous to try to police smoking in a place like this. You might even say it is un-American.”

More colorful prose comes from patrons who spent a recent weeknight yanking slot machines in the lobby casino at the turn-of-the-century Mizpah Hotel in rural Tonopah.

“So some yo-yo down in Vegas doesn’t think I should smoke? That’s bull,” said Jimmy Pines, who said he lives “out in the hills” that encircle town.

Nevada’s slowness to join the national trend against smoking is partly due to the unusual culture that has grown up around the 24-hour world of casino gambling. People here work erratic hours, there is a higher than typical share of broken families, and cigarette smoke has always been a feature of life.

Just as important is Nevada’s frontier ethic about personal behavior, whether gambling, prostitution or smoking, say the state’s emerging anti-smoking forces.

“We have a very libertarian culture,” said Mathies. “The freedom of the individual is part of what makes Nevada unique. Even something as moderate as limiting smoking is viewed as government interference.”

The huge influx of new arrivals that made Nevada the country’s fastest-growing state in the 1980s also brought pressure for less smoke in the air.

Mary Whalen, who moved to Las Vegas from Florida in 1987, was shocked to find a professor chain-smoking in her classes at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She complained to a dean, who did nothing, then led a petition drive that resulted in the creation of Nevadans for Nonsmokers Rights.

Whalen, the group’s president, said a third of the public buildings in the Las Vegas area do not restrict smoking to special areas. Public libraries only recently agreed to limit smoking, and the terminals at McCarran Airport just added roped-off smoking sections.

“It took 16 months of letter-writing and other pressure to get the airport,” Whalen said. “We’re the last of the good-old-boy states.”

The smoking-related deaths of Democratic Assemblyman Marvin Sedway and the Tobacco Institute lobbyist, Joe Midmore, are cited as sources of a new attitude about smoking in the Nevada Legislature.

Sedway was a colorful, powerful Democratic committee chairman with a strong aversion to bills that restricted smoking. In the last legislative session two years ago, he had a lot to do with the law that passed requiring smoking areas in public buildings, medical association lobbyist Marsha Berkbigler said.

The deaths had a sobering effect on lawmakers in the current session, she said, and along with the arrival of a new wave of younger legislators set the stage for a revamping of Nevada law.

“We took the position this is a health issue,” Berkbigler said. “Our citizens who die die at a much younger age.”

The new law requires non-smoking areas in restaurants with 50 or more seats and bans smoking in elevators, waiting rooms, buses and public buildings, except in optional smoking areas. The exemption for bars and most casinos was a practical necessity to avoid having the law blocked by the gaming industry.

The law passed over the strenuous objection of the Las Vegas Review Journal, whose editorial page editor, Rafael Tammariello, may be the most vocal pro-smoking voice in the state.

His Sunday columns decry local efforts to curtail public smoking in California, and applaud the free spirit of “Nevadism” that he says faces a threat from “the health and safety Nazis who want to make the world and Nevada a place devoid of risk.”

Last November, in a column that accused non-smokers of wishing to exile or imprison smokers, Tammariello called on smokers to organize and resist “the ravings of baby doctors and hate groups.” He likened the status of smokers to that of blacks under official segregation, a scenario called by letter-writer Robert M. Stanzler, a Las Vegas physician, “the most ludicrous analogy one can imagine.”

But other letters praise the paper’s stance, which has become a sore point with the anti-smoking activists.

“When the largest newspaper in the state is anti-public health, it’s hard,” Mathies said. “They took what I consider a fairly flippant attitude on the issue, which I can’t understand.”

In the same paper, entertainment columnist Michael Paskevich hailed a new policy of no-smoking in the showrooms at the new Mirage and Excalibur hotels and the venerable Desert Inn. At the Riviera, Liza Minelli insists that smoking be permitted, but when Paul Anka appears this summer smoking will be forbidden.

“The days of the smoke-filled Las Vegas showrooms appear numbered,” Paskevich declared.