Profile of a lottery patron .
Lotteries create political dilemma for governments.
At the busy intersection of Falls and River roads in Potomac, where dozens of stores sell everything from French pastries to power saws, consumers can shop all day without finding a single Maryland State Lottery ticket for sale. Sixteen miles to the southeast, around the junction of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Good Hope Road in Anacostia, cash drawers open and close thousands of times a day in the lottery trade. The heavy players also include a much higher percentage of minorities. Of that small pool of heavy gamblers, one in five never finished high school, and more than one in three were African Americans, roughly double the rates among all Virginia adults surveyed. And in Washington, sales figures show that the city's most anemic lottery market lies west of Rock Creek Park in an area with the highest education and income levels and the thinnest concentration of minorities.