In New Hampshire, the 2011 fight to halt expanded predatory gambling is now being waged on four fronts:
1. SLOT CASINOS. Bills (LSRs 0409, 0734) will be introduced in both the House and Senate to legalize multiple slot casinos. Similar to past years' bills, these will include no means to stop casinos and slots from spreading statewide, downshifting uncompensated infrastructure, education, and social welfare costs onto every community in New Hampshire.
2. HIGHER BET LIMITS. A bill (LSR 0178) will be introduced in the Senate to increase the bet limit for poker and other games of chance. The ultimate impact will be to turn charitable gambling venues into gambling casinos. There is no limit under current state law as to the number and location of charitable gambling venues. Increased bet limits mean a casino in or near your town, whether you like it or not.
3. CAMEL'S NOSE REGULATION. A bill (LSR 0912) will be introduced to merge the lottery and the racing & charitable gaming commissions into a new gaming regulatory oversight authority (good, because better regulation of existing gambling is needed), but also to create a regulatory regime for slot casinos (bad, because this would waste taxpayer money on regulating an enterprise that does not exist and because this is the gambling industry's camel's nose, incremental approach tactic to legalizing slot casinos). The Gaming Regulatory Oversight Authority was charged with proposing these good and bad things and was funded with $250,000 of taxpayer money under which slot casino supporters backed off their demand that slot casinos be legalized as part of last year's budget compromise.
4. PULL TAB SLOT MACHINES. The Racing and Charitable Gaming Commission, as its parting gift to out-of-state gambling machine vendors, is preparing to authorize by rule (draft rule, Commission minutes) pull-tab (aka Lucky 7) and, possibly, bingo video slots. Attorneys General in every state that have opined to date have concluded that these machines are video slots that are illegal unless first authorized by statute. Legislators concerned about regulatory usurpation and over-reach, take note.
ACTION:
Call your legislator, asking them to oppose video slots, Lucky 7 slots, larger bet limits for charitable gambling, and establishing regulation for gambling that does not exist.
Watch Anytime: 60 Minutes: Slots Designed To Addict
Click here to watch this past Sunday's 60 Minutes feature on slot machines. Included are incredibly frank comments from gambling addicts talking about how slot machine addiction was more compelling for them than sex or human interaction ... and turned them into liars and thieves. (Partial transcript below).
The program did not have time to cover critical points in our argument against slot casinos:
1. Slot machines are carefully designed to maximize addiction and are entirely unlike any of New Hampshire's present forms of gambling.
2. 2-5 percent of adults in the 30-45 minute drive time area surrounding a casino become gambling addicts or problem gamblers, double the baseline of levels. A new casino will create more gambling addiction and more human misery in the surrounding area. The NH Gaming Study
Commission found (see pages GSC 21 and 99) that a single Rockingham or Hudson casino would create 10,000 additional New Hampshire addicted or problem gamblers.
3. Each addict damages the lives of ten additional family members, friends, co-workers, and strangers, meaning that ¼ to ½ of New Hampshire residents would be involuntarily harmed by slot casinos, often being manipulated into lending money or not having money repaid, or as a result of consequential job loss, family violence, or suicide.
4. About half the revenue at a typical casino (see Table 17) comes from gambling addicts and problem gamblers, whose gambling is no longer voluntary.
TAKE HOME:
Legalizing slot casinos would injure tens of thousands of New Hampshire citizens in order to tax their injuries. Our government would thereby be transformed from protector of the public safety into a predator on our communities' weaker members.
Partial Transcript of the 60 Minutes feature on slot machine addiction
"I found that the machines were wonderful. I loved the excitement. I loved the people, I loved the camaraderie, the high fives when you win. It was just very exciting," Sandi Hall told Stahl.
Hall lives only a short drive from thousands of slot machines in Rhode Island and Connecticut. Married with two daughters, she worked in a bookstore, and used to look at the casinos as an entertaining break. But eventually she was playing slots so much, she burned through her retirement funds.
"My every thought and every being, if I wasn't at the casino, I was figuring out how I was going to get there, where was I going to get the money," she remembered.
When Stahl pointed out she sounds like a heroin addict, Hall said, "It takes your soul, it takes your humanity. You drive home, pounding the steering wheel, promising yourself you're never going to go again, you're never going to do it again. And you know that you're going down, and you're going down, and you're going down. I became from a nice person, I became a manipulative, deceitful, lying person."
"Lies just manufacture themselves. You didn't even have to think about it," Marilyn Lancelot, another slot addict, told Stahl. Lancelot ended up embezzling over a quarter million dollars from her employer in Phoenix, Ariz. "My daughters lived two houses away, they did not know I was stealing money or gambling until one day, seven police cars drove into my yard and took me away in handcuffs. That's how they found out," she remembered.
And yet not everyone is convinced the machines addict people. Listen to Dr. Howard Shaffer, the director of the Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions, the man the gambling industry loves to quote.
"And your position is machines are not addictive, that machines, inanimate objects, are not addictive?" Stahl asked.
"Machines didn't make me do!" he replied with a smile. "If slot machines caused addiction, then most people who played slot machines would develop addiction, and it's the opposite."
"But at one point you said that slot machines were the 'crack cocaine' of gambling," Stahl pointed out. "And how does that square with what you're telling me today?"
"Not everybody who uses crack cocaine becomes addicted," Dr. Shaffer said.
"Yeah, but nobody's going to sit here and try to tell me crack cocaine isn't addictive. And if this is like crack cocaine, the conclusion is it's addictive," Stahl said.
"I don't come to the same conclusion," Shaffer replied.
"How could you not?" Stahl asked.
"Because a majority of people that have used cocaine have not developed cocaine addiction. Only a small minority have, and the same would be true with gambling," he replied.
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Comment: so, under gambling industry logic, why not legalize crack cocaine and tax addicts?
