Gambling: It’s genuinely bloodthirsty
Thom Cole’s article (“The ‘feminization of gambling,’ ” Nov. 5) in The New Mexican gives an accurate picture of what happens to people when they gamble with slot machines over an extended time.
The heartbreak, the financial devastation, the shame, the criminal activity, the isolation and the destruction of family are the likely consequences of prolonged slot machine gambling. The women in the article are not rare anomalies with extended gambling, but are typical and the logical outcome of the programming that makes the slot machines so addictive.
Slot machines do not respond to levels of skill and sophistication. The random number generator programming of slot machines determines whether a player wins or loses the instant the “play” button is pushed, and the video display that follows has no effect on the outcome of the game, but is only there to entertain and deceive the player into thinking he has some influence over the game. The machines are programmed to gradually extract all the player’s resources with a series of wins and losses, with the losses prevailing over time. Skill is irrelevant.
The gambling industry says it’s all about entertainment, but studies show that entertainment gamblers, about 75 percent of the patrons at most times in the casinos, generate only about 4 percent of the profits. Get rid of the addicts, and the casinos would close down. Studies, many of them government-sponsored, around the U.S., Canada and Australia show that between 45 percent and 70 percent of casino slot machine revenue comes from problem gamblers.
The gambling industry knows all of this but continues to make slot machines more sophisticated and addictive. Profit dominates the entire business model for casinos, and the social devastation isn’t even a consideration. Advice from the casinos to “gamble responsibly” is mere window dressing, and public relations cover for what is a genuinely bloodthirsty business. Guy C. Clark is chairman of Stop Predatory Gambling New Mexico in Albuquerque.