News flash: A Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture researcher has concocted a delicious beverage with the potential to become a powerful revenue-generator for state government. In controlled tests, 95 percent of subjects enjoyed the drink and reported no ill effects. Unfortunately, 5 percent contracted an incurable illness.

	Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger image. Bruce Barron (nodicepa@aol.com) is a board member of No Dice, a Pittsburgh-area organization opposing the expansion of legalized gambling.

Would you rush to legalize the new drink, or would you keep it off the market to protect the 5 percent? In the case of slot machines, we have chosen fattening state coffers over protecting our neighbor. Pennsylvania has opened the gates to 61,000 slots, despite consistent evidence from around the world that the percentage of compulsive gamblers rises significantly -- typically to about 5 percent of the adult population -- when new, highly addictive forms of legalized gambling become available.

Gov. Ed Rendell and our General Assembly can't say they did it to strengthen the state's economy. William Thompson of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among the world's foremost unbiased experts on the economics of gambling, has demolished this myth. In a July essay for the Washington Post, Thompson did an impact analysis of our state's "Nevada East" slots bill and found that, for every slot machine installed in Philadelphia, the regional economy will lose $50,000.

Thompson's take on why Pennsylvania legislators went for slots: "For the same reason I've seen politicians pass laws like this in venues around the country: because all they care about is checking off a potential tax-reducing revenue item on their budgets. They'll get it, all right, and they're cynically willing to hurt the regional economy in the process."

But neither can they claim to be delivering us from property taxes. State Rep. John Maher, a Republican from Upper St. Clair who is a certified public accountant, has shown that most property taxpayers can expect only a pittance of relief.

Rather, it appears, the people who produced Pennsylvania's slots law under cover of darkness and rammed it through the Legislature in July had their own political interests, and those of the well-heeled gambling lobby, foremost in mind. Just look at what's happened since then:

With Gov. Ed Rendell's veto of slots legislation amendments last week, legislators' opportunity to own up to 1 percent of multimillion-dollar gambling operations remains intact

Casinos and the new state gambling board have retained their unprecedented power to pre-empt local zoning regulations in their site selections.

An aide to state Rep. William DeWeese, D-Greene, assured a Lancaster newspaper reporter in October that zoning pre-emption is OK because "These [parlors] are revenue producers. No one is going to put them next to a school or a church." Meanwhile, DeWeese himself enthusiastically supports Nemacolin Woodlands kingpin Joe Hardy's bid to place a casino right next to the international Bruderhof community's school and church in Fayette County.

New expenses related to gambling -- including untold millions a year to pay Gaming Control Board members, their staff and a whole new state police division as well as to cover state lottery shortfalls -- keep showing up.

Pocono Downs was sold for $280 million, over five times what a comparable facility, the Meadows in Washington County, cost in 2001. (When the same legislators who can't find dedicated funding for public transit take such extraordinary steps to hand racetracks an extra $200 million each in sales value, can anyone believe they have the public interest in mind?)

When the same legislators who can't find dedicated funding for public transit take such unparalleled steps to make the horse-racing industry profitable big-time, can anyone believe they have the public interest in mind?

Please understand: We're not trying to end all gambling. Go ahead and wager on the office football pool or on a poker game with your friends. But government merrily taking one-third of the revenue while addicted players gamble away their savings in a slots parlor where no one cares about their welfare? That should be unpalatable to all of us.

Offering a tiny sliver of this blood money to compulsive gambling hotlines won't solve the problem. Most addicted gamblers never call for help; in Connecticut, those who do have already lost an average of $114,000.

If pro-slots legislators really care about the public's well-being, they can at least implement common-sense provisions -- many of them already promoted by Philadelphia author and ex-gambler Bill Kearney -- to reduce the havoc caused by legalized gambling:

Require in-state gamblers to submit a form, signed by a spouse or friend, agreeing to keep the gambler's activities in control.

Require casinos to send monthly profit and loss statements on each gambler to the spouse or friend who signed the above-mentioned form.

Bar casinos from granting credit to gamblers or from accepting credit cards as payment.

Impose reasonable loss limits -- say, $200 a month unless a family member authorizes higher limits or gamblers certify that they have no dependents.

These steps are all technologically achievable and would spoil nobody's fun. But they won't happen, because they would spoil the governor's revenue projections. Rendell would never put it this way, but he's counting on 10,000 Pennsylvanians a year to lose their shirts so that he doesn't have to raise taxes. As for the resulting costs to society, well, nobody thought we needed to account for them in the revenue projections.

Of course, Pennsylvania is far from alone in blithely overlooking the desperation of its gambling-crazed citizens. In Oregon, for example, a casino has replaced breathtaking Multnomah Falls as the state's top entertainment attraction, while addicts' pleas for help overwhelm compulsive gambler hotlines' meager resources. Nationally, annual gambling revenues have ballooned to $72 billion, or $350 for every American adult.

But others are seeing the light. Nebraska business and political leaders, though outspent 15 to 1, spoke out firmly against legalized gambling and defeated two casino referenda. Michigan voters, having seen the impact of casinos in Detroit, just denied their racetracks the right to install slots. Connecticut has changed its laws to prevent further proliferation of Indian casinos there.

I believe that our age's legalized enslavement of pathological gamblers for financial gain will seem as cruelly inhuman to our descendants as the former forced enslavement of African-Americans now seems to us. In the meantime, we will not sugarcoat sad realities. When a hopelessly indebted gambler commits suicide, we will call on state legislators to attend the funeral. We will take every opportunity to help our fellow citizens understand the tactics, goals, and impact of the industry they help to finance every time they legalize or patronize a casino.

Any government that knowingly lures 5 percent of its citizens toward an uncontrolled addiction has lost its legitimacy. Until that legitimacy is restored, we cannot be silent.