The big push is underway in the legislature to let Missourians bet on sports. A House committee has held a perfunctory hearing on two bills that have a tax structure in which the state will LOSE money. An industry that profits from tilting the tables against its customers is about to tilt the tables against the state. And it’s likely the legislature will let them get away with it.
An article last week in The Hill, a D.C. publication that reports on government, says gambling addiction is going to be “the next opioid crisis.”
And the casino industry does not seem to care. At least not in Missouri.
Nationwide legal sports wagering will be five years old this year. The Supreme Court threw out the national ban on it in 2018. The growth of this betting has been nothing short of explosive. Missouri legislative fiscal experts say profits from sports wagering will exceed profits from all table games in all of our thirteen casinos in just three years.
The gambling industry has spent, and is spending, huge amounts of money wooing state legislatures. Last year The New York Times investigation detailed how it was done in Kansas. The newspaper also had a reporter in Missouri but when the issue died in a completely dysfunctional Senate, the investigation focused elsewhere.
It’s coming to Missouri—on the gaming industry’s terms. A bill in the House that would allow sports wagering on the state’s terms will get a hearing this year but will go nowhere. That’s the official word.
The industry-backed bills set aside up to one-half million dollars for dealing with people who are affected by gambling addictions. If you think the casinos are being noble and responsible in doing this, you are wrong. They want nothing to do with that funding.
The money, instead, will come from the fund underwritten by fees the casinos pay for each person who enters the gambling area—fees that have been rendered woefully inadequate because of inflation since they were put in place n 1993. The industry has fought, successfully, every attempt to bring the two dollars up to contemporary values.
One result of that resistance is that funding for our veterans homes is about one-third what it was a decade ago and it’s going to get worse. Even the host cities of our casinos have seen their casino payments decline by about half, a circumstance their association doesn’t seem to think is worth discussing.
The bills in the House that set aside that half million dollars take it from the programs that draw support from that admission fee fund, meaning taking funding away from the veterans homes, the host cities, a state college scholarship program and a National Guard funeral escort program.
The industry doesn’t care. It accepts no financial responsibility for those who develop problems by over-participation in its offerings.
The Hill article says, “Most Americans ignored the opioid crisis, a staggering increase in overdose deaths in the 1990s and 2000s, until the government and news media processed the data and tendered a response.” Timothy Fong, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, told the publication, “We have a movement toward expanding what was once considered a sin, what was once considered a vice, and embedding it at every level of American culture, down to kindergarten.”
“You have exactly the same players you had with opioids. You have government. You have industry. You have civilians, a lot of whom will benefit from this. And then you have a population who will develop an addiction, let’s say one [to] one-point-five percent of the population. It’s a hidden addiction. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it.”
We’ve looked at a lot of studies in this country and others of gambling addiction. All of them point to gambling addiction at least tripling with the advent of sports wagering.
Lia Nower, the director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, told The Hill, “Gambling is a very different addition from drugs or alcohol. If I’m drunk or high, at some point my family is going to figure it out. With gambling, I can be sitting with my kids, watching cartoons, and gambling away my house, my car, everything I own, on my mobile phone. How would you know?”
Nower says New Jersey, the first state to have newly-legal sports wagering studied the issue of problem gambling BEFORE it allowed sports wagering. But she says most states “are just legalizing this stuff without any idea of the effects.” Missouri seems to be in that category.
We have yet to hear anybody outside of those with special interests in the topic, even so much as mention this coming potential public health crisis. Passing a bill with a pick-a-number amount set aside—subject to appropriation by the legislature—is not addressing the problem. And having the industry that causes the problem directly take responsibility for it seems to be out of the question.
The Missouri Gaming Association once proclaimed, “As good corporate citizens, casinos do more than a fair share for military veterans…We honor and support our military veterans and will continue to do so…”
Just don’t trouble us to adjust outdated admission fees to stop the financial bleeding of Missouri’s nursing homes for veterans. And certainly don’t expect us to have any financial responsibility for veterans or anyone else who become the victims of our enterprise.
Just remember, we’re good corporate citizens. And we expect the people you elected to represent you and to protect your citizens’ interests to do what we want.
“I do think there are watershed moments in all public health crises. Unfortunately, it usually takes some kind of crisis or tragedy to turn the tide,” says Nower.
The “next opioid crisis” and accompanying tragedies is developing at the state capitol. Does your legislator care?
