July 31, 1998

NYC

Lottery Fever: States Feed It, And Catch It

By CLYDE HABERMAN

hen 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.

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