Stop Predatory Gambling

Problem machines. Not problem gamblers.

by spgadmin

Yesterday there was another major story about the amount of injuries being inflicted by casinos and slot machines.

“Slot machines produce a trance-like state,” said Wiley Harwell, executive director of the Oklahoma Association for Problem and Compulsive Gambling. “People lose track of time and space. Logic and reason shut down. The back of the brain lights up They’re literally not cognizant that they are spending more than they should.”

It explains why in 2009, more than 600 Oklahoma citizens contacted government officials to say they have a serious problem with slot machines – think of it as “an addiction acceleration problem.”  Those are numbers from just one year in a state with a population of about 3.6 million people…roughly one percent of the entire population of the U.S.

In a sharp contrast, Toyota is being forced to do a national recall of five million cars and trucks because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had received reports of 100 incidents of “unwanted acceleration” over an eight year period. No one has referred to the one hundred drivers involved in these incidents as “problem drivers.”

Public officials must stop pointing their fingers at the people using electronic gambling machines as the “problem” and instead, focus their attention on problem machines, problem environments and problem business practices.

This reality is best illustrated by statistics from the Nevada Gaming Control Board. In 1997, there were about 197,000 slot machines in Nevada that won roughly $4.8 billion from gamblers. By 2007, the number of slot machines increased just 2.5 percent to 202,000, but the amount they won from gamblers jumped 72.9 percent to about $8.3 billion.

Electronic gambling machines have “an addiction acceleration problem” and they deserve the same intense scrutiny as any other product in the marketplace.

The key reason why these machines have avoided investigation is because government does not promote Toyota sales like it does predatory gambling in its endless pursuit for revenue.