More employers demand applicants quit smoking

Until the day he was offered the job as executive sous chef of the new Hollywood Casino Columbus, Tim Dionisio smoked a pack of cigarettes a day.

And when things got hot and hectic in the kitchen, and there wasn’t time to go outside for a cigarette break, “I popped little bags of spitless chew in my mouth.”

Dionisio is now four months into a cold-turkey goodbye to tobacco products. Instead, he chain-sucks Werther’s Original candies.

“I go through a bag every two days,” he said.

Quitting wasn’t by choice, but from necessity, if he wanted to work at Hollywood Casino Columbus, which opened on Oct. 8. It does not hire smokers or allow employees to smoke on the premises or even in their homes.“Once I realized the offer was serious, I stopped smoking that day,” Dionisio said. “And I couldn’t use a patch or gum because they have nicotine in them and would have shown up on the (drug) test.”
Job-seekers must pass a drug test that includes nicotine screening, and, once hired, employees caught smoking can be fired.

“This (casino) is a brand-new project, and we wanted to set the tone from the start, that wellness is important,” said Ameet Patel, general manager of Hollywood Casino, which is owned by Penn National Gaming.

Although it is not yet a trend, a growing number of companies — especially hospitals — refuse to hire smokers, says The Columbus Dispatch. Ohio-based companies with this policy include Scotts Miracle-Gro and the Cleveland Clinic.
The goal is to improve the health of employees and reduce the company’s health-care costs.

However, this policy has raised legal and ethical issues and has some asking: Where will it stop?
“The slope is slippery,” said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit spinoff of the American Civil Liberties Union that opposes the hiring bans.

“Smoking isn’t the only thing that affects your health; there’s drinking, eating red meat, exercise or not exercising — even your sex life affects your health,” Maltby said. “And once you say it’s all right for employers to tell someone what they can and can’t do in their private life, you don’t have a private life anymore.”