Casino Costs Far Outweighs Benefit to Community
Professor and doctor of economics Earl Grinols of Baylor University has made a groudbreaking study comparing the benefits of casinos against the cost. The professor has also written a book on the subject of the same nature when applied to communities.
Since the 1990s, Grinols has been studying the effects of casino gambling, even before a national commission took on the task. He began with a sociological study beginning in the mid-1980s for a single region and multiplied the result for the entire nation.
"This is a social problem equal in magnitude to some of the smaller social problems we have, like drug addiction and births out of wedlock. This is a social problem waiting to happen," Grinols said.
"Do the costs exceed or not exceed the benefits?" asks Grinols. "Surprisingly, I seem to be, as far as I'm aware, the first and only person who has tried to quantify the benefits in a theoretically sound manner."
Many communities are blinded by the glittering benefits that having a casino may entail, but Grinols warns us to take a closer look.
"They may quantify aspects related to a casino's presence, but those facts in themselves are not benefits, " Grinols said. "All things considered, and if you take atypical circumstances, casinos cost a community more than they provide in benefits. The ratio of costs to benefits is approximately three to one, " he said.
The costs that pile up according to Grinols, come in the form of law enforcement, government regulatory costs, suicide, illness, social service costs and gambling costs, all factors that stem from gambling addiction.
"I came up with a number of about $141 (per person) as the social cost per adult annually in an area that moves from no gambling to having pretty freely available casino gambling," Grinols said. He compared this to his estimate of what the average American is willing to pay to have a new form of entertainment which is $46.
"That amount of money is not the amount they're going to gamble; that amount is just the amount they want to pay to have that opportunity available to them," he said.
Grinols explained that gambling addiction is not mainly about the money, but the rush that the player gets from winning.
"Gambling addiction appears to be, for the most part, very similar to other addictions. Gambling addiction is associated with unemployment, financial problems. It's connected to spousal abuse and domestic abuse in terms of children," Grant said. "It goes on usually undetected. ... By the time it is detected, it's usually at a severity level that all hell has broken loose."
Dr. John Grant, a University of Minnesota psychiatrist and editor in chief of the Journal of Gambling Studies, warned of the lure of having accessible casinos nearby.
"There is some evidence that there are more rates of gambling addiction with more availability. A lot of my patients have told me that this wasn't really a problem until all the casinos opened. But the other thought is, would these people have found something else to become addicted to had the casinos never opened?" Grant said. "I think any time you want to indulge in something, and it's available, it's harder to resist."
Grinols cites the innocent looking slot machine as the main culprit.
"Slot machines are the most addictive form of gambling there. People call them the crack cocaine of gambling, because the addictions from casino gambling rise much faster than they do for other forms of gambling," he said.
"In some areas, if you take Las Vegas for example, because most of their gamblers are coming from outside the area and they take the problems home with them ... the benefits and the costs are going to be a little different for Las Vegas," Grinols said, by way of comparing the adverse effects of bigger casino sites to smaller communities.
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