In 1991, facing obvious limits to growth from meager water resources, Las Vegas power brokers decided to bring the drama of high stakes gambling from the casinos to the board room of the Southern Nevada Water Authority headed by the Bernie Madoff of Western water, Pat Mulroy.

The strategy was even proudly Ballyhooed in public. Las Vegas would just keep building beyond the capacity of its Colorado River allocation and dare other states or the federal government to stop them.

At the time, a spokesman for Nevada's Colorado River Commission even announced, "The federal government will never let Nevada go dry."

Thus was born the MGM Grand daddy of ideas: a giant straw to suck rural Nevada and western Utah dry and unload it on an all-you-can-squander Riviera of golf courses, desert sprawl and fire hoses synchronized to Frank Sinatra. The idea is worthy of Caesar himself at a Stratospheric cost of only $4 billion. It would be cheaper if they filled the Venetian with Dom Perignon imported from the real Monte Carlo.

But water piracy is difficult to pull off in the dark of night in that part of the world that is not Treasure Island. It turns out the ranchers and farmers aren't that excited to turn their communities in the West Desert into the Sahara Desert.

The biologists, geologists and hydrologists whose paychecks weren't signed by SNWA (and a few that were) Excaliburated that all the Luxorious "excess" water claimed by SNWA turned out to be a Mirage. And SNWA's assurance that Utahns can ignore the looming dust storms and air pollution headed our way is smoke and mirrors fantasy in the finest tradition of Siegfried and Roy, who have been replaced by a new act, Big Greed and Mulroy.

Seriously though, the only Utah residents who need to be concerned are those who breathe. Apparently Mulroy figures that if Utah can't have gambling we can at least enjoy casino-like air quality.

The SNWA pumping project will result in likely irreversible loss of critical native vegetation covering a desert expanse equal in size to the state of Vermont. Where water diversion projects like this have been done before in California and other parts of the world, the result has been exactly what was predicted: more dust, more pollution and more disease.

For example, a water diversion project in Uzbekistan has turned 90 percent of the Aral Sea into a gigantic dust bowl. The resultant increase in diseases like cancer has dropped the life expectancy of the affected population an incredible four years.

Medical research has clearly established that for particulate matter (PM) air pollution there is no threshold below which health effects are not seen. In other words, any increase in pollution will affect your family's health.

In fact, for many pollution components, including PM, the disease consequence is not linearly related to concentration. In the same way that smoking only a few cigarettes a day has almost as much clinical risk as smoking a full pack, exposure to low concentrations of PM carries a higher risk per unit of exposure than higher concentrations.

But there are additional, unique threats in West Desert soil. Mercury, erionite (an asbestoslike mineral that causes the same kind of mesothelioma cancer), the radioactive elements plutonium, uranium, cesium and strontium, and the fungal spores that cause Valley Fever (coccidioidomycosis) are all in high concentrations in Nevada surface soils.

These are some of the most toxic substances known, yet nothing appears in the Utah Department of Natural Resources' proposed agreement with Nevada to address this threat.

The public rationale of DNR Director Mike Styler to cooperate with Nevada now is to avoid a costly court battle later. But this agreement means water extraction, and water extraction will bring more legal battles not fewer. If public health impacts are suspected or even proven, the enforcement arm of this agreement is so vague it almost guarantees lawsuits between Utah and Nevada and between Utah and clean air groups concerned that Utah is not protecting public health.

If Las Vegas commits billions of dollars to begin pumping and uses the water to supply 160,000 new homes, no rational person would think that Utah could stop the pumping, regardless of any "agreement." When Los Angeles signed agreements regarding Owens Valley pumping, the city was sued but continued pumping for 21 years while the case meandered through the courts.

I don't travel to Las Vegas to gamble away my future. But I had no idea that Utah politicians could gamble away my family's future health without us ever stepping foot in a casino.

Dr. Brian Moench is a Salt Lake anesthesiologist and president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment.