When you buy a lottery ticket, what you are buying is a chance…a chance to come away with more money than you started with. The more you could potentially win, the less likely you are to win it. Basically the lottery, just like any gambling, is a rush…in fact it’s really no different than any other vice (if you want to call it a vice) or for that matter any other hobby. It can be an experience, in fact for some, it’s nothing more than a source of entertainment. The money I might spend going to a concert for example, for a set amount of time, I get an experience, and once it’s done, it’s done. Let’s say I spent $100 on a concert ticket for a show that lasted 2 1/2 hours. Well, someone could buy 100 scratch offs, win some of it back, reinvest it, win some of that back and so on until they lost the whole $100, and they’d probably have 2 1/2 hours of entertainment scratching off those tickets. Or they could spend a few hours in a casino. Or they could spend it at the bar. Or they could spend it on cigarettes, or drugs, or they could buy DVDs and CDs with it, or whatever.
My point is, there are a myriad of ways we can spend our money on things that don’t feed us, clothe us or shelter us, or make us better people per se. Giving people an opportunity to spend their money on things they don’t need…you could say that’s the American way (aka capitalism). But think back to before you had a lottery in your state (we got ours 20 years ago), if you can remember back that far. When I was growing up (and my wife had the same experience), looking at the adults around me, it didn’t matter if they were unemployed and having a hard time paying the bills, there was always money for beer and cigarettes. That’s an addiction, and gambling can be the very same thing. But I never expected the government to step in and say “we’re not going to sell beer and cigarettes because some people can’t afford them but buy them anyway.” And the thing about addicts is, you can’t get them to seek help unless they’re ready to admit they have a problem…and if they see themselves as just having fun, then they’re not going to see it as a problem. Addiction is a disease, no matter what you’re addicted to, but ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING enjoyable can be addictive to somebody. At what point would you want us to say this is addictive to a large enough number of people that NO ONE can partake?
I have my addictions…food…particularly sweets. I’m far heavier than I ought to be, and I’m diabetic, and I try to avoid foods I shouldn’t eat, but I crave them, I enjoy them greatly, and I ahve to realize that if I eat candy, I’m potentially harming myself…yet, I still eat candy. I’m not going to say that candy should be illegal because I can’t control myself around it. That wouldn’t be fair to the people I know who are healthy and like to eat candy but whose appetites aren’t stronger than their bodies. But look at alcohol…I like to have a glass of wine every now and then, maybe a couple of mixed drinks here and there…even an occassional beer. I probably on average have about 5 alcoholic beverages a month…I enjoy them when I have them, I don’t overdo it. By look at my dad who drinks whiskey all day every day, or my brother in law who will drop $100 a week at the bar, even though his only source of income is a part time job at Walgreens. They can’t handle alcohol, but does that mean I shouldn’t ever be able to drink? And gambling…my parents LOVE to spend time in casinos…if they go on vacation they will hit every casino on the path. They probably visit casinos 100 times or more a year…and they can afford to do it…when they couldn’t afford to do it, they didn’t go as often. I suspect they have an addiction, but theirs hasn’t gotten out of hand in terms of what they can afford. I like to go a couple times a year, and some times I win (never more than a couple hundred dollars) and some times I lose (never more than I can afford, usually less than 100 dollars) and that’s enough for me. But I’ll see people taking 2 slot machines at a time, throwing $10 a bet in each one every 5 seconds, then I’ll hear stories about people who’ve embezzled over a million dollars from their employers and blown it at these same casinos. Yeah, I see people who can’t afford it buying 20 scratch offs at a time just about every time I go to the gas station.
But you know what? Just like they put warnings on cigarettes that no one who smokes ever reads, there are usually brochures at the counter where you can buy scratch offs telling you where you can get help. If the Powerball goes over $200M, they start to run ads saying to gamble responsibly. They put the help there for IF you need it, but neither taking away the opportunity to do the activity, nor trying to force an anti gambling message down their throats is the right choice. Even if you were to make a case that my enjoyment of the occasional scratch off ticket (I buy maybe 5 or 10 dollars worth a year on whims and maybe half that many Powerball tickets) isn’t worth allowing people who can’t afford it access to gambling, well what about Vegas? What about the poker or dice game they can hook up with their buddies?
It’s a simple fact that you can’t legislate vices, that’s why prohibition failed and that’s why nearly half of Americans report having tried marijuana even though it’s illegal. What we can do as a society is expect people to take personal responsibility for their own finances, we can offer them help if they’ll take it, and we can lament that some people just never make the responsible choice, but we have to look inside ourselves and ask ourselves really, have you NEVER spent money on something you really wanted but couldn’t really afford….really?
In short, to answer the question, can playing the lottery pull peoples’ focus away from the important things in life, the answer is yes and no….yes, because any enjoyable activity is inherently a distraction from the things you should be spending your mental energy on, and no because if you’re a responsible person who is not addicted to that activity, you will be able to juggle both, and therefore it is really the addiction coupled with a lack of personal responsibility that can drive your focus away from that which is really important.
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