States Rethink Gambling Limits

(Jack Nicas and Alexandra Berzon, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com) – A key vote in Missouri Wednesday will decide whether to relax measures aimed at keeping gambling addicts out of casinos, the latest push by a cash-strapped state to make gambling restrictions less stringent.

The Missouri Gaming Commission is deciding whether to scrap a voluntary lifetime blacklist for problem gamblers and replace it with a five-year suspension. That would allow nearly 11,000 self-banned gamblers back into the state’s 12 riverboat casinos. The self-exclusion list, implemented in 1996, has been a centerpiece of Missouri’s efforts to manage gambling addiction, and has been emulated in at least eight other states—usually without the lifetime ban.

Several states have sharply increased betting limits since legalizing gambling. Colorado changed its maximum bet in 2009 to $100 from $5, and allowed casinos to operate 24 hours a day. Previously, they were required to close from 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. South Dakota raised maximum bets in 2000, and Florida last year eliminated its limit altogether.

Such changes to gambling safeguards are driven in part by a push to boost tax revenue, as state governments balance their efforts to protect gambling addicts with the need to address fiscal woes. In addition, the gambling industry argues that the rules hardly curb gambling addiction.

States including Missouri, Iowa, New York and Nevada have also reduced funding for treatment of gambling addicts. In Florida, officials cut funding for the Council on Compulsive Gambling, a nonprofit group that coordinates treatment programs, to a tenth of the $2.6 million it was to receive this year so they could fill budget gaps elsewhere.

Bill McCarthy, a 77-year-old retired mechanical engineer from Kansas City, said he put himself on the Missouri ban list in 2004 in a fit of frustration over what he believes was a rigged video-poker machine. He said he’s not an addict, and that the Missouri list is ineffective anyway—he still gambles just across the border in Kansas. “Hasn’t slowed me down one bit,” he said. “It’s just an inconvenience.”

Others have written to the Missouri Gaming Commission to say the change would lead problem gamblers back to temptation. “My brother is a self-exiled bettor who lost everything he had at the casinos,” reads one recent letter to the commission. “Now you people are considering dangling a carrot in front [of] his nose.”

Experts say gambling addicts make up a small percentage of gamblers, but there have been signs of higher rates of addiction in places with easier access to casinos and other forms of gambling. The U.S. has an estimated 2.6 million gamblers considered to be pathological—those who gamble to the extent that it has a negative impact on their jobs, relationships or other important aspects of their lives, according to a survey by a group of state gambling-addiction program administrators.

Missouri was the first state to enforce a self-exclusion list, four years after it legalized riverboat gambling in 1992. A total of 16,135 gamblers have banned themselves for life from state casinos, and are subject to arrest on trespassing charges if discovered there. There have been nearly 2,400 arrests for violating the ban since November 2008, when the state started tracking the arrests.

Most states with casinos now maintain such lists, though most allow gamblers to get off them after a few years. Some gambling-addiction experts prefer limited-term lists, because they fear the prospect of a lifetime ban discourages many problem gamblers from signing on.

Addiction specialists say exclusion lists are difficult to enforce without a requirement that casinos check gamblers’ IDs, and they need to be accompanied by treatment programs. Lists “can help some people stay away, but for most people merely signing a self-exclusion list won’t control that urge,” said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. …..

A 2008 study of Missouri’s program by the Cambridge Health Alliance, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, found 81% of those sampled said they gamble less than before they banned themselves, and one in eight said he or she hadn’t gambled at all since signing up. But 16% said they still gambled at banned casinos, including one player more than 400 times.

James Mathewson, chairman of the five-member Missouri Gaming Commission, said the board decided in August to vote on ending the lifetime bans after years of phone calls and letters from banned gamblers who said their circumstances had changed. “Lifetime exclusion just seemed radical to us,” he said. He said he plans to vote for the change, partly because he thinks more problem gamblers would sign up. He said the vote isn’t aimed at raising revenue.

Commission spokeswoman LeAnn McCarthy said she has fielded about 400 phone calls since August—plus 14 letters, some handwritten—nearly all from banned gamblers who said they were never addicts or have healed. One sent a doctor’s note.

Troy Stremming, senior vice president of government relations for Ameristar Casinos Inc., which has two casinos in Missouri, said his company takes no position on the proposed change. “We have no desire to take advantage of anyone,” he said.

The lifetime bans were part of what comforted voters who decided in 2008 to repeal another major part of Missouri’s gambling-addiction efforts, which limited how many gambling chips players could buy an hour, in exchange for a tax increase on casinos, said Keith Spare, chairman of the Missouri Alliance for Problem Gambling.

“These are the hallmarks on how gambling was sold to Missouri,” said Mr. Spare, whose group has seen its funding to help problem gamblers cut.

Write to Jack Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com and Alexandra Berzon at alexandra.berzon@wsj.com.

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