Garvey: Gambling is a Highly Addictive Disease

Slots are not an appropriate fix for Maryland s budgetary woes. Any temporary influx of revenue will be quickly overtaken by the expense of caring for destroyed families, and most of the revenue will be returned to the owners of the slots and the gambling sites, not to the public coffers.

Gambling is a highly addictive disease, which should not be encouraged by the state. Slot machines have been carefully designed to encourage users to stay engaged and keep playing. Even our state lottery, which does not have the hypnotic power of slots and in which the outlays for individual tickets are small, has taken too much money from those who can least afford it — low wage earners who do not fully understand the odds against them and have unrealistic hopes of winning large amounts of cash.

Turning to slots for public revenue is a shamelessly destructive and cynical approach to addressing Maryland's budget deficit — one that state residents and state politicians should immediately banish from further consideration.

Carol W. Garvey, MD, MPH, Potomac

The writer was the Montgomery County health officer from 1995-2003.

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