Greetings,  ,

The House Ways & Means Committee will vote this coming Thursday on HB593, the two casino monopoly bill. (Note the date change).

Please email Committee members. Ask them to drop the pretense that gambling addiction treatment programs and self-exclusion programs are a fix for the human suffering and negative economic impacts of slot casinos. Ask them to vote NO on HB593.

The Predatory Slot-Casino Tax.

The slot-casino tax in HB593 sucks as much money out of the NH economy as a 3% retail sales tax. Even worse, the slot-casino tax is a predatory tax on the weak and the unfortunate, a sneak-attack tax that funds government by wrecking lives and families.

Don't believe it? Look at the data.

The Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre (Table 17, page 42) found that 60 percent of casino tax revenue is extracted from problem and pathological gamblers for whom gambling is not voluntary.

Even the most ardent casino advocates now acknowledge the "proximity effect," where gambling addiction prevalence approximately doubles among populations living within 30-50 minutes' drive time of a casino. Massachusetts casinos are bad for New Hampshire. Casinos in New Hampshire are far worse for New Hampshire.

The New Hampshire Gaming Study Commission found that a single casino in either Salem or Hudson would create an additional 2,500-5,400 gambling addicts at an annual cost of $5,143 per addicted gambler. (See Table 11, page GSC 79 and page GSC 22).

Connecticut has two destination casinos, a gambling addiction treatment program funded at $1.9 million annually, and performs a detailed gambling impact study each five years. By 2009, 1.2 to 1.5 percent of Connecticut adults had become gambling addicts. The cost of these addictions is estimated at $13,586 per gambler per year.

Applying the real-world Connecticut data to New Hampshire and assuming the two casinos permitted:

HB593 causes 6,500 additional NH gambling addicts at a cost of $90 million annually.

Here are some of the costs:

• 60% of gambling addicts commit crimes
• 50% abuse spouses and children
• 50% will divorce
• 20% file for bankruptcy
• 20% commit or attempt suicide 

Warning to New Hampshire legislators who think they've figured it out:

Marvin Steinberg, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, says, despite the $1.9 million spent on gambling addiction treatment, little is done in Connecticut to address the costs to society of excessive gambling. "No one in the legislature has figured that out."

Fig Leaf: Addiction Treatment and Self-Exclusion Barely Work.

Self-exclusion and addiction treatment programs are useful, but they address, respectively, only 1 to 10 percent of the problem:

• Nowatzki and Williams (page 8) found that only 0.4 to 1.5 percent of Canadian problem gamblers sign up for self-exclusion programs.
• An American Journal of Psychiatry study (page 299) found that - even when such services are available - only 7 percent of lifetime pathological gamblers sought or received treatment.
• Petry et al found that "only 8 percent of [Gamblers Anonymous] attendees achieve a year of abstinence."
• A U.S. National Epidemiological Survey found that only 9.1 percent of gambling addicts used either Gamblers Anonymous or other treatment programs.
• The Australian Government found that only 8-17 percent of Australian problem gamblers seek treatment (page 7.3). 

Legislators craving a big new tax are ignoring this hard data.

Ask Ways & Means Committee members to say no to predatory slot machine casinos.

Email all members: ~HouseWaysandMeansCommittee@leg.state.nh.us