October 28, 1997

There is another aspect of the casino question that I've been wondering about.

It is what will happen if ten or twenty years from now the media start running stories about the families that have been ruined by the gambling addiction, and more people begin to see the enormous social costs that have been associated with gambling in other societies in which it was common. My fear is that if tribes have become so closely associated in the popular mind with casinos, that they could well bear the brunt, probably becoming scapegoats, of a moral wave of outrage at gambling when the social costs of widespread and relatively unrestricted gambling begin to become apparent to the population as a whole.

I remember in the 1980's a Pennsylvania couple sold their house to buy thousands of lottery tickets in hopes of hitting the jackpot. I suspect that in the future, there may be lots of stories like this, stories of tragedies inflicted on innocent family members by parents or spouses whose addiction costs the family everything it has.

I am the son of an alcoholic who did similar things to his family. It was not pleasant. Gambling is at least as powerful an addictive agent as is alcohol.

It would be a double tragedy if in addition to the other social costs, tribes were persecuted for the very casinos that they once saw as their salvation.

-Gordon Bainbridge
(Northern California)