Stop Predatory Gambling

Government creates addiction in order to feed off of it then breaks promise to fund help for the victims

by Les

From The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm:

It was the sop lawmakers tossed to Floridians apprehensive about the social effects of legalized gaming: Don’t worry. Some portion of these suckers’ losses will fund a prevention program for problem and pathological gambling.

Governors Chiles and Bush both championed these programs. And Florida voters, contemplating a constitutional amendment to legalize slot machines in South Florida in 2004, were led to believe that prevention services were part of the package.

In 2005, a mechanism to provide prevention funding, including money for outreach, advertising, a 24-hour helpline and training for casino employees, was included in the enabling legislation for the new racinos. It was the law. The language was unambiguous. Florida statute 551.118 required: “The compulsive or addictive gambling prevention program shall be funded from an annual nonrefundable regulatory fee of $250,000 paid by the licensee to the division.”

Note the verb “shall.” Which, according to my American Heritage Dictionary, connotes “an order, promise, requirement or obligation.” None of the above, apparently, in Tallahassee.

Every year, the five South Florida pari-mutuels with slots have each ponied up $250,000, a total of $1.25 million, to go along with $1.1 million in prevention money collected from the Florida Lottery. Somehow, when the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation added up the money this year, the total came to $264,000. The other $2.1 million, despite state law, despite the escalating need, simply vanished into the department’s general fund.

Pat Fowler, director of the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling, the non-profit contractor providing the state’s training and outreach, said Monday that even that last $264,000 seems to be jeopardy for next year. (At least the Seminoles, who voluntarily provide $1.75 million a year to fund actual treatment for gambling addiction, haven’t welched on their deal.)

Fowler said Tallahassee invariable invokes the Council “when the state wishes to expand gambling and the gambling industry wishes to expand.” Such talk always comes with the promise of a dedicated funding source to “address the negative impact of gambling.”

“Only to find out later that the money is gone,” she said.

Money to alleviate gambling dependency is disappearing even as the state’s dependency on the gambling industry escalates. A proposal for three big Vegas-style resort casinos in South Florida has support in Tallahassee. Which has set off a clamor for more games and less taxes from South Florida racinos and for video gambling terminals for the state’s other pari-mutuels. Meanwhile, a thousand utterly unregulated gambling arcades have been allowed to flourish in neighborhood strip malls.

Florida, plainly, has a gambling addiction. Someone in Tallahassee should call the hotline. Quick. Before the funding runs out.