Do the right thing
August 29, 2006
As an example of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, let me present three New Jersey congressmen who have come out against the introduction of video lottery terminals, or VLTs, in the Garden State. Though the stated reason for keeping video gambling terminals out of New Jersey is that they would draw away business from the Atlantic City casinos, the real reason for opposing them — a reason I wish had been mentioned by the congressmen, or acknowledged by the reporters covering the story — is that they are socially destructive.
VLTs have been called the crack cocaine of gambling. Unlike casinos, which are destinations set apart from the regular flow of life, VLTs can be jammed into convenience stores, diners, service areas and any other public area. The fast pace of the play has a literally hypnotic effect on vulnerable minds; VLTs are even more efficient than casinos at sucking dry bank accounts and credit card lines. Though I haven’t been able to find the link yet, I vividly remember a news story about a woman who let her young child die in a suffocatingly hot car while she stood inside a convenience store, obsessively working at a VLT. Multiple studies show that VLTs are the common denominator in many cases of gambling addiction. You won’t hear me saying many good things about James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, but the organization’s Web site has plenty of good information about the addictive nature of video gambling. Though the proposal for New Jersey is to locate VLTs in the Meadowlands and other racetracks, I hate to think of these things getting any kind of a foothold here. You can’t even argue for them on an economic basis: where the Atlantic City casinos have a limited benefit for the local economy (a highly debatable matter), VLTs benefit only the owners of the stores where they are located.
If social responsibility is too embarrassing an argument to appeal to our legislators, then I guess we’ll have to settle for protecting the investments of the casino operators in Atlantic City, who vampirize the local economy at a much slower rate.
August 28, 2006 at 5:57 pm
Congrats on the move to the new digs. I love WP, hopefully you will too.
And now on topic. I can see your point. But considering my father lives in Vegas and I visit whenever possible and I see there are video poker and slot machines at the airport, at the liquor store, at the grocery store, pretty much anywhere they can put one and the town doesn’t self-destruct.
Compulsive gamblers will find a way to lose their money regardless. I agree with you insofar as we shouldn’t make it easier for the least well off to part ways with their meager funds, but I think this issue is deeper than the means by which they feed their addictions.
August 28, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Hi Steve, here’s the story you referenced
Associated Press Online
July 21, 1999; Wednesday 01:48 Eastern Time
SECTION: Domestic, non-Washington, general news item
LENGTH: 382 words
HEADLINE: Woman Gets Probation in Infant Death
BYLINE: BRUCE SMITH
DATELINE: RIDGELAND, S.C.
BODY:
A woman whose 10-day-old baby died in a hot car while she played video poker for more than seven hours was given five years of probation after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter.
Gail Baker, a 28-year-old former Army sergeant, was on trial for the August 1997 death of her daughter, Joy.
”There are no words to express how I feel in the loss of a child,” Mrs. Baker told Circuit Judge Jackson Gregory on Tuesday as she fought back tears. ”Joy was my pride and joy.”
Mrs. Baker was originally charged with homicide by child abuse, punishable by up to life in prison. Involuntary manslaughter carries up to five years. Mrs. Baker spent 15 months in jail awaiting trial.
Mrs. Baker, then assigned to Hunter Army Airfield outside Savannah, Ga., left her child in the car while she played video poker at a casino along the South Carolina state line. The car’s windows were closed and the temperature outside reached the mid-90s.
Mrs. Baker never went to the car but looked out the casino door to check on Joy, police said. When she drove home that evening _ after her husband went to the casino to get her she noticed the child was no longer breathing.
The baby had died of dehydration after about two hours in the car, investigators said.
Then-Gov. David Beasley, who has called video poker the ”crack cocaine of gambling,” cited the death in calling for a ban on the game. Beasley was later defeated by Jim Hodges, who had financial backing from video gambling operators and has called for a tax on the $2.5 billion industry.
South Carolina has more video gambling machines than any other state about 34,000, nearly double that of Nevada.
The issue dominated South Carolina’s recent legislative session. During a special session last month, the Legislature agreed to hold a referendum in November to let voters decide whether to ban the game.
The child’s father blamed the death on his wife’s video gambling addiction and asked lawmakers to shut down the industry. ”Whatever we can do to close it down, I would support 100 percent,” Staff Sgt. Julius Baker said.
Mrs. Baker’s lawyer, Lionel Lofton, said the girl’s death cost the woman her military career. She was in the military about 71/2 years and now works as a cashier at a grocery store.
August 29, 2006 at 6:27 am
Hey Steve,
Loving the new look, congrats!
On VLTs, I’m coming at it from a different angle. New Jersey’s horse racing industry is never going to be able to draw the kind of big-name, big-money horses and trainers it SHOULD be drawing, until it can offer larger purses. And it’d be nice if the purses weren’t state-subsidized, the way they have been in years past.
Regardless of anyone’s feelings about the morality of gambling on horse racing, the fact remains that the equine industry in NJ employs thousands of people and keeps dozens of horse farms in the state operating.
Right now the only way to create the money needed to bolster the purses is to put VLTs at the tracks (see Delaware Park).
Your argument about VLTs being another poor peoples’ tax, like lottery tickets, is a valid one. However, I think it’s unlikely that, given the fight the AC casinos are putting up against installing VLTs in a handful of tracks, we’d ever see them in the neighborhood store.
AmyZQ
August 29, 2006 at 7:03 am
Hi, Steve. I’ll update your link info. Please increase the size of the font in comments. Some of us are middle-aged and don’t have the sharp eyes of youth, and many people don’t know that you can hold down the CTRL key and then turn the little wheel on your mouse to make the font size change on many web pages (fun facts to know and tell, amaze your enemies, amuse your friends).
With regard to VLTs, I am of two minds. One is that we should oppose socially destructive things and the other is that this may just be more of the “nanny state” stuff to which I do not subscribe. I agree that gambling addicts will find action regardless, as anyone who has listened to Arnie Wexler of Gamblers Anonymous speak can tell you. On the other hand, you don’t have to make it easy, and why put something that is dangerous in more places and make it more widely available? Let me put it another way. Given the socially destructive nature of cigarette smoking, which legislatures only just began to truly address in many places in the past twenty years, what would society have been like if smoking were legal but restricted one hundred years ago? Are there other socially destructive things to which access has been limited by regulation and what are the results?
People are always going to gamble because gambling goes back a very long way and, frankly, it’s kind of fun and people like to do it. I like to play cards, have played in AC a number of times, and I also like to go to the track at Monmouth Park around once a year, sometimes twice. I’m not a big gambler and not a addict by any stretch of the imagination (if I lose fifty dollars at the track or at cards, I get ticked off and refuse to go anywhere near gambling for most of the rest of the year). The majority of people who gamble are not addicts, so it begs the question: are VLTs really different.
I would argue that yes, they are, because they are designed to be addictive. Gambling establishments themselves are designed to keep you playing. It’s part of the business. It is big business, and if company X’s machines get more play than company Y’s, then company X is going to sell more machines, so you know company X is doing it’s best to make machines that hypnotize you into playing. So I think I have to agree that VLTs are addictive and destructive because they have to be in order to be successful.
The real question is how much do we need to protect our fellow citizens. I would say “yes”, we should keep them out of the corner convenience store and, likewise, they could probably, reasonably safely, go into the tracks. The logic that people are going to gamble there anyway makes sense. But why not just let the tracks install slots and be done with it?
I, for one, while opposing socially destructive activities, don’t want to personally get too far out in front of a movement against socially destructive activities. For one thing, I don’t think we need to be too much more of a nanny state. For another, when you get out in the front lines of opposing socially destructive activities, you tend to spill your drink. And that’s bad.
August 30, 2006 at 10:12 am
ooooh. Preeettty.
As far as the VLTs go, I prefer BLTs. With lots of mayo.
August 30, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Thanks for the magnifying tip, DBK – I’m 21 and I could barely read the regular-size font (even my glasses didn’t make a difference).