Insight on the News: Gambling addicts need antidote - legalized gambling in the US

Why would any community welcome an industry that undermines the work ethic, spawns crime, hurts other businesses and costs jobs, increases divorce and child abuse, victimizes youth and the poor, while giving rise to suicide and several mental-health problems?

This is exactly what is happening in many of our states. The gambling industry's wen-oiled public-relations machine has done a masterful job of deceiving legislators and much of the public into believing that legalized gambling is not only harmless entertainment, but an economic windfall to boot. As a result, Americans will gamble more money this year than they will spend on groceries - some $500 billion.

But government's love affair with legalized gambling is exacting colossal social and economic costs.

The House Judiciary Committee is considering an important piece of legislation that would provide the first federal-government study of legalized gambling in two decades. HR 497, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Virginia Republican Rep. Frank Wolf would establish a National Gambling Impact and Policy Commission to assess the actual consequences of America's gambling addiction. Sens. Paul Simon, an Illinois Democrat, and Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, are sponsoring similar legislation.

Since 1976 - the only other time the federal government has looked at the gambling issue - legalized gambling has moved from a geographically isolated novelty to a fixture in many, if not most, communities across the nation. Every state but Utah and Hawaii sanctions some form of gambling, and our state governments continue to clamor for more. In 1994 alone, state legislatures considered more than 1,600 gambling-related bills.

HR 497 is long overdue, and comes too late, in fact, to help the 5 million to 10 million Americans already addicted to gambling. These individuals and their families not only suffer financial devastation, but astronomically high rates of divorce, child abuse and neglect, drug and alcohol problems and suicide attempts.

The commission could provide invaluable information to legislators and citizens that would enable them to make informed decisions about an issue that deeply affects the welfare of the entire community. Predictably, the gambling industry is scrambling to squelch this legislation; there is much they prefer the American people not know.

Such as the fact that gambling preys disproportionately on the poor. A study this year by University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor William Thompson focusing on casino gamblers in Wisconsin found that they are "skewed toward the poorer-income categories and the elderly."

Gambling proponents also would like to hide the political corruption that pervades the industry. Two well-connected Illinois GOP "insiders" were promised $10 million each earlier this year by a casino company in return for landing a casino riverboat license. A number of prominent Democratic legislators in Louisiana are under investigation by the FBI for allegedly accepting bribes in exchange for pro-gambling votes.

Gambling's intimate link to crime is another fact the industry has tried desperately to conceal. In virtually every community where gambling has been introduced - from Atlantic City to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Deadwood, S.D. - crime rates have skyrocketed. The crime link is compounded by the fact that otherwise law-abiding citizens who develop gambling addictions frequently turn, out of desperation, to criminal activity to finance their compulsion.

The legalized gambling craze is eating away at the fabric of American life, as millions of families can readily attest. The National Gambling Impact and Policy Commission would help ensure a robust, informed national debate on this issue. Until the facts about gambling are on the table, many communities will continue to be seduced by legalized gambling's siren song.

Ronald A. Reno is a social-research associate with the public-policy division of Focus on the Family.