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November 12, 2006

Time to End Oregon State Lottery

Lisa Lednicer of The Oregonian has written an excellent piece on the growing problem of women addicted to gambling. It is an issue that is near and dear to my heart.

I've never been even remotely interested in gambling, thanks to my father. I grew up in Reno, and he spent his career working in the casinos there. He would take me in to his offices, where he showed me the hidden cameras watching to be sure neither employees nor customers cheated. He told me stories of foiled robberies, employees caught working with customers to rip off the casinos, and poor sops who would gamble away their paychecks every payday. He also explained the odds of winning – or should I say, the strong odds that you would lose.

For some reason, my brother did not absorb the lessons and became addicted to gambling. He wasted countless hours hunched over machines, glassy-eyed, pressing the buttons and slowly losing everything he had.

I have a good girlfriend who is a gambling addict. Without her husband's knowledge, she managed to run up $50,000 in debt on their credit cards in a very short time. Now she is working three jobs to pay it off. Needless to say, it has put a strain on their marriage, but to her husband's credit he is willing to work with her and stand by her so long as she is willing to take responsibility for what she did to their financial health and work off her gambling debt.

What is very interesting is the way Oregon has itself, as a state, become addicted to gambling. We now need the nearly $500 million a year that it generates for the state to help pay for schools, economic development, environmental programs, and parks. Taverns all across the state are literally able to survive, even with poor management, simply because the lottery machines are so profitable. It is not unusual for a small, rural tavern to gross nearly half a million a year on a handful of machines. That is a lot of money being pulled out of a small, local economy where many households are already struggling to make ends meet. And funding public services that way is lazy and irresponsible.

I must admit I do not understand the pull of gambling. It does not tempt me in the slightest. But I know for many people, the pull is as irresistible as a fix to an addict. That this gambling addiction is being fueled by a government revenue-generating program is shameful. And that shame is not, in my opinion, mitigated by the fact that we use some of those proceeds to offer treatment to gambling addicts. Expecting them to call the helpline number on a sticker placed on the machine is as ridiculous as expecting smokers to quit because the Surgeon General placed a warning on every pack of cigarettes.

I do believe in personal responsibility and freedom, and many people gamble without ever becoming addicted to it. You could say the same exact thing about most recreational drug use. But we don't have the government selling drugs and using the profits to treat addicts, do we? And even if it would generate vast amounts of money to fund education, would we want that? I surely hope not.

Posted by Becky at November 12, 2006 02:21 PM