re on the lottery than those with high income (70,000 or over) (245-57). Assume for a moment that everyone who played the lottery was a casual player and spent the average amount of 74 dollars a year on tickets. If this were so then the sales for 1997 would have dropped from 36 billion to 7.4 billion. Further, states with lotteries tend to have more crime than those states without according to The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Property offenses per 100,000 population increases by 112.7% when a state operates a lottery. Since 1987, there has been an increase of an additional 5,478 property offenses in each state in every year that a lottery is operated (7-19). Because of the easy access to lotteries and the Internet, children in America are now starting to gamble. The National Impact Study Commission provided a study reporting that the percentage of sixteen to seventeen year olds who are at risk of becoming pathological gamblers is twice that of adults. Children as young as eleven are gambling among themselves and picking up lottery tickets at the local convenience stores. Twelve to seventeen million juveniles in the U.S. have gambled for money, and as many as two million have experienced serious gambling-related problems. In 1970, the Mayo Clinic treated pathological gamblers between the ages of 30-35, but in 1990 it was 17-70 (Clarke 29). Compulsive gamblers are a big problem. 2% of the U.S. population are compulsive while 3% are problem gamblers. 60% of these people planned how they would commit suicide and 20% attempted suicide. 99% of compulsive gamblers commit crimes, and 100% of compulsive gamblers become physically abusive, especially towards children. In 1992, there were 706 chapters of Gamblers Anonymous, but now in 1999 there are 1,340 chapters (National Coalition against Legalized Gambling 1). There are three main reasons for the increasing problem of compulsive/problem/pathological gambl...
