Word: bets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tickets in either the state lottery or Lotto America, an organization that some experts think may be the nucleus of a national lottery; it currently operates in eight states and the District of Columbia and expects to sign up two more states this summer. Iowans can also bet at one horse track and three dog tracks, and in two years they will be able to become riverboat gamblers. This spring the state legislature approved a 1991 start for wagering on vessels plying the Mississippi...
Legal gambling also prompts more illegal wagering. It was once thought that lotteries and other state-run betting ventures would pull money away from ghetto numbers games, horse parlors operating behind candy-store fronts and the like. But the illegal games usually flourish alongside the legal ones and sometimes even piggyback on them. One example: since the Illinois lottery began daily drawings, Chicago numbers operators have adopted the state's winning number as the winning number in their own daily drawings. Since the state number is regularly aired on television, the numbers runners are saved the trouble of calculating...
...there is one opinion on which both gambling experts and ordinary bettors are in unanimous agreement, it is that state-sponsored gambling has been the driving force behind the huge increases in all types of wagering, legal and illegal. Legislators who approve lotteries, legal horse-betting parlors or riverboat gambling are spreading the message that wagering is respectable. "Gambling has been part of every known society," says Dr. Eric Plaut, vice chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Medical School, Evanston, Ill. "What has changed in the past decade is that it is now publicly...
Freddy's grim vision has not quite come true yet, but the extent of gambling among the American people is already as striking as the figures on the amount of money they bet. Dr. Howard Shaffer of Harvard's Center for Addiction Studies figures that the proportion of American adults who bet at least occasionally has risen from 60% two decades ago to 80% now; other estimates range up to 88%. Nor is betting confined to adults: Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John's University in New York City, found in a 1987 study that 86% of New Jersey...
...great majority of players who bet only occasionally, or regularly but lightly, gambling is no more than an inexpensive amusement. For others, it ruins lives quite as thoroughly as alcohol or drugs. Some of their stories...