Odds Are Good Gambling May Be Teen Vice of ‘90s

BOSTON — Place your bet against drugs. That’s the message some schools and youth organizations are sending to teen-agers by sponsoring casino nights as drug-prevention activities or anti-drug fund-raisers.

But when Andover High School in Andover, Mass., staged a “Gaming Night” as an anti-drug activity last year, some community members criticized the sponsors for promoting one addictive behavior to replace another.

Their concerns may be valid.

According to a number of people who track trends in youth behavior, gambling-related problems are increasing among teen-agers.

“We will face in the next decade or so more problems with youth gambling than we’ll face with drug use--particularly illicit drug use,” asserts Howard Shaffer, director of the Center for Addiction Studies in Cambridge, Mass.

The 10th annual study by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research recently found that illicit drug use has decreased among young people.

“There’s now . . . social pressure to avoid illicit drug use,” Shaffer says. “But simultaneously there is tremendous social pressure to gamble and to participate in the lottery.”

Durand F. Jacobs, a psychologist who has conducted extensive research on teen-age gambling, calls gambling “the growing addiction of the 1990s.”

“The favorite bet for high-schoolers is the lottery,” he says. Although it is illegal for people under 18 to buy lottery tickets in most states, enforcement is generally lax. California has thousands of automated lottery ticket vendors, says Jacobs. “It’s kind of like the cigarette machines, where nobody’s monitoring the sale of cigarettes to juveniles.”

Young people are also getting into casinos, where the legal age for admission is 21; some of the under-age gamblers are even treated to complimentary mixed drinks. Officials at the New Jersey Casino Control Commission report that 230,000 minors were denied entry to Atlantic City’s 11 licensed casinos last year; 23,000 more were escorted out of casinos.

The few existing studies of youth gambling provide cause for concern.

“Typically, the numbers have shown that there are higher rates of gambling among youth than there are in the general adult population,” says William C. Phillips, coordinator of counseling services at Bryant College in Smithfield, R.I.

Phillips has studied gambling among college students at nine colleges in six states: Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Nevada and California.

His study found that 87% of the students have gambled at some point in their lives. More surprisingly, 26% gamble weekly and 11% said they have gambled more than $100 in one day, with amounts ranging up to $50,000 in one week. Of those surveyed, 5.7% met the criteria to be described as “pathological gamblers.” For the adult population, that figure averages about 2% to 3%.

Henry Lesieur, associate professor of sociology at St. John’s University in Jamaica, N.Y., conducted a study of junior and senior high school students.

His findings are strikingly similar to the study of college students: The percentages of teen-agers ranking as “pathological” or “compulsive” gamblers--people who have lost control of their gambling activity--average about 5% of the teen-age population nationwide.

An “experimentation factor” may help explain why youth gambling problems are three times the adult rate, says Lesieur. Some researchers suggest young people will “mature out” of gambling behaviors.

Jacobs is skeptical about this possibility: “I have many reservations because the environment is being more and more invaded by gambling activities.” Thirty-two states and Washington have state-supported, actively promoted lotteries, he says.

“What we’ve got is a tremendous love affair with gambling right now in the United States,” says Jacobs. “And, of course, the basis for the love affair is that government officials are afraid to bite the bullet and raise taxes, so they’re using this as a form of revenue gathering.”

As more fiscal problems confront states, legislatures are looking more and more toward gambling to generate revenue. Some states use gambling revenues to finance education.

“When you finance education with the lottery, there is somehow the belief that the better the lottery goes, the better the educational system is doing,” says Lesieur.

He wonders why the public is so silent on this issue: “If the states that run liquor stores promoted alcohol the way that they promote lottery tickets, what would the public say?” He quickly answers his own question: “They’d be up in arms.”