Gambling often has terrible consequences for families and communities. According to the Council on Compulsive Gambling, five percent of all gamblers become addicted. Many of those turn to crime and commit suicide. We all pay for those tragedies. Harm to Businesses and the Economy.
Internet gambling is likely to have a deleterious effect on businesses and the economy.
It s redistributed among the rest of us in the form of increased prices on consumer goods. . . . Professor Kindt has described electronic gambling, like the type being offered in the virtual casinos on the Internet, as the hard-core cocaine of gambling. The Internet not only makes highly addictive forms of gambling easily accessible to everyone, it magnifies the potential destructiveness of the addiction. The odds can be easily manipulated and there is no guarantee that fair payouts will occur. Anyone who gambles over the Internet is making a sucker bet, says William A. Bible, the chair of an Internet gambling subcommittee on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission.