Gambling with Lives

The following are excerpts from a lengthy article that's worth the time to read --

Gambling with Lives

After a federal court ruled against the state’s attempts to keep out large-scale casino gambling, the tribe assured residents that a casino would provide thousands of jobs. I was an editorial writer for The Day of New London at the time with experience in addiction counseling, and I grew concerned about the possible negative impact. And so, as the tribe began to construct the casino, I conducted a series of telephone interviews with Atlantic City officials to gauge what we could expect in Connecticut.

The Atlantic City beat cops spoke frankly about the rise in crime they witnessed after the casinos opened in the late 1970s, and others were equally blunt about the decline in the number of local businesses, the continued decay of urban neighborhoods, and the stubbornly high unemployment in the wake of casino gambling. Subsequent studies would later prove the point: In 1976, when New Jersey voters approved casino gambling in Atlantic City, unemployment in the city was 14.7 percent; in 1997, it was 12.7 percent. During those two decades, the number of locally owned businesses in Atlantic City dropped by half. But even at the time, the message I heard was clear: Don’t believe the promises of good times to come. Casinos bring with them a dark underside, and Connecticut had better get ready.

A look at social problems in Nevada, particularly Las Vegas, increased my worry. Las Vegas, then and now, struggles with high rates of suicide, dropouts, childhood problems, and low educational attainment. Later studies again confirmed those early concerns: In 1997, a study of death certificates in Reno, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City found those cities had suicide rates that were up to four times higher than in cities of the same size where gambling was not legal.

In 1999, the National Gambling Impact Study Commission released its findings, the most critical and least challenged of which was the discovery that problem gambling doubles within fifty miles of a casino. The statistic is no surprise to anyone who lives near a casino. The effect of casino gambling has become the old news of shared anecdotes at town meetings and backyard barbecues. And the state government—which early on negotiated with the tribes to get 25 percent of the revenue from slot machines—has done little to stem the tide, content to collect more than $1 million a day from the casinos and additional millions from the state lottery, which has been legal in Connecticut for decades.

Occasionally the cost of casino gambling becomes more public—as when, over the last decade, several officials from different towns, all women, were convicted of embezzling money to play the slot machines at the casinos. The tax collector of the town of Ledyard, Yvonne C. Bell, a grandmother with no previous criminal history, was convicted in 2001 of stealing more than $300,000 to feed her slot-machine habit. Another tax collector from the nearby town of Sprague was convicted of stealing $105,000 to gamble away. In 1992, the year Foxwoods opened, there were 43 embezzlements in Connecticut; in 2007, there were 214 such crimes, ten times the national average.

Part of the reason that gambling spread so far and so fast is that the industry markets its product as just another form of harmless fun. In a brilliant move, the industry coined the term gaming as the euphemism of choice. Organized religion was slow to challenge the spread and, even today, rarely speaks out. Most of all, government has become predatory in its use of gambling as a worry-free method of increasing revenue without raising taxes. Indeed, the states have moved from granting permission to cheerleading. Government boosterism has legitimized gambling, eroding what few moral scruples remained on the part of average people against engaging in a behavior that, just a few decades ago, would have been considered largely unacceptable.

The complex nature of the task [of assessing impact costs] didn’t stop the University of Nevada at Las Vegas from doing its own study in 2003. Professor Bill Thompson estimated that the cost of social problems in southern Nevada, a region that includes Las Vegas, amounted, conservatively, to at least $300 million to $450 million a year and possibly as high as $900 million—more than the taxes that gambling contributed to the state treasury.

The federal government did undertake an in-depth study of gambling twice, in 1976 and in 1996, when Congress authorized the National Gambling Impact Study Commission. The 1996 commission had a budget of only $5 million, with only a little over $1 million of that for research. The late Senator Paul Simon (D-Illinois), who coauthored the law that created the commission, told me that gambling interests lobbied so heavily against the proposal he felt lucky to get any budget for the venture at all. And its most important recommendation, that the country put a moratorium on the spread of casino gambling, has been ignored. State revenue from gambling has risen 65 percent since 1998, the year the commission concluded its research. In 1996 there were 500,000 slot machines in the United States; in 2008, the count had reached 817,000, about one for every 275 adults, which does not include slot machines that are illegal or engineered to fit legal definitions of sweepstakes games or bingo machines. The Association of Gaming Equipment Manufacturers projects that the United States will gain an additional 156,000 machines by 2012.

Besides minimizing or ignoring altogether the negative impacts of gambling, elected officials are equally unenthusiastic about open debate that might stem the race for easy money. Pennsylvania, for example, legalized slots in the middle of a July night in 2004 without hearings, research, or public comment. Unabashed gambling booster Governor Ed Rendell said, “For every one person who falls addicted to gambling or loses their paycheck, I’ll show you 500—mostly seniors—who spent $40 at a casino and had the best day of their month.” Surveys vary, but most pin the percentage of Americans that are either problem gamblers—or the more damaging manifestation, pathological gamblers—at around 3 to 4 percent. Those percentages, however, do not include the millions of people who may be at risk.


The slot machine, which is at the root of so much addiction, is responsible for 70 percent of the gambling revenue in Las Vegas—and the percentage is higher elsewhere. Slot machines are vacuum cleaners designed to swallow money, yet they remain among the least reported, least understood technological innovations influencing modern life.

As one gambling analyst told the newspaper Gaming Today, “The longer you sit in front of one, the more you lose. Next to prostitution, it’s the world’s greatest business. There is no other business in the world where people budget money to lose to you.”

... Harrah’s discovered that 90 percent of its profits came from 10 percent of its most avid customers, according to Binkley. This is unsurprising. Many reports suggest that addicts produce a disproportionate share of casino profits. A 1998 Nova Scotia study found that 6 percent of regular gamblers produced 96 percent of gambling revenue, and a whopping 54 percent of the revenue came from just 1 percent of problem gamblers—leading researchers to conclude that, at any one time, half the patrons in front of slot machines in Nova Scotia were problem gamblers. A 1999 study estimated that more than 42 percent of all spending at Indian-reservation casinos came from problem gamblers. A study in Australia concluded that problem gamblers were only 4.7 percent of the population yet generated 42 percent of machine revenues.