By CLYDE HABERMAN
When a Bronx waiter is so overcome by Powerball fever that he plunks
down $3,000 that should have gone for his trade-school tuition, when
presumably solid citizens waste hours standing in line to buy a pipe
dream, when ill will flows likes a river outside overburdened lottery
shops in Greenwich, Conn., some people question the wisdom and even
morality of government turning itself into a numbers runner.
Arnie Wexler has been asking that question for a long time.
Wexler is a counselor on compulsive gambling from Bradley Beach,
N.J., and has himself had to grapple with addiction demons that first
seized him in the early 1960's. He liked playing the numbers in those
days, when they were illegal.
"The first time I bet, I hit the number," he recalled.
"The second time I bet, I hit the number again. I thought it was an
easy way to make money. Then for the next seven years, I didn't hit
another number."
It was a ruinous life, as it is for millions of Americans who are
gambling addicts. They are hardly helped by the fact that the one who
now urges them to place a bet is the Governor instead of a numbers
racketeer.
Buy a lottery ticket, states tell taxpayers. New York State alone
makes $1.5 billion a year from its various games. And the beauty of it,
New York and other states say, is that you support education with every
dollar you put down. They could just as easily say that your lottery
money supports welfare and prison programs, since all government
revenues are, as the budget makers would put it, fungible. But how many
Lotto tickets would be sold with a cry of "support welfare"?
Governments also make good money taxing sales of liquor, tobacco and
pornographic videos. Somehow, you never hear elected officials urging
their constituents to do their civic duty by drinking up, lighting up
and turning on while Debbie does Dallas.
"Can you imagine what would happen if they did that?"
Wexler said. "People would go nuts."
Governments do not think twice, though, about dangling before people
the chimera of instant wealth through state-sponsored numbers games.
Make that instant unearned wealth.
Even a moralist like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani does not blink when it
comes to pocketing gambling money. Not to pick on the Mayor; he is no
better or worse than most on this issue. But more than most, Giuliani
casts his policies as moral imperatives, whether he is talking about
methadone maintenance as being part of a culture of addiction, or
welfare as erasing the work ethic, or sex shops as corroding
neighborhoods.
Yet even he becomes a strict pragmatist when it comes to the idea of
a possible casino on Governors Island. Go for the money, he says. His
concern becomes not to keep New Yorkers off the road to perdition but,
rather, off the road to Atlantic City.
A S Wexler sees it, government itself has become hooked. "The
states are addicted to gambling revenue," he said. "They think
they've found a painless way to steal your money." And with
something like the Powerball frenzy, he added, "you've got gamblers
in recovery who are getting urges, flashes, thoughts, anxieties."
"There'll be some relapses," he said. "No question
about it."
Several studies, including one by the Harvard Medical School,
conclude that the spread of casinos and state lotteries has been
accompanied by sharp increases in the incidence of compulsive gambling
among adults and, even more so, among teen-agers.
The New York State Council on Problem Gambling, a nonprofit group
based in Albany, compared 1996 with 1986 and found that the number of
New Yorkers with gambling problems had increased by 74 percent. It has
reached the point, the council said, that 7.3 percent of New Yorkers
over 18, or more than 750,000 people, have experienced trouble at some
point in their lives.
"There is absolutely no doubt that state lotteries make it
worse," said Laura M. Letson, the council's executive director. And
she argued that the state has "a moral and social obligation to set
aside funds to help people to suffer the adverse effects of its gambling
policies."
To be fair, New York puts up $1.5 million a year to support programs
for problem gamblers. That amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of its
lottery profits. If that were the kind of money that came with the top
Lotto prize, many bettors would not waste their time buying tickets.
