Word: macau
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...dozen people have gathered inside the Industrial Evangelistic Fellowship's modest community center in Macau, where the Rev. Jimmy Tan strums his guitar and belts out Christian songs with the small group before him. Latecomers trickle in well past the meeting's 9:30 p.m. start time, but no one seems to mind - many of them work multiple jobs and are used to odd hours. Seated in a semicircle of plastic chairs, the engineers, police officers, health-care workers and casino dealers have something in common: they are all addicted to gambling. The group meets once a week to hear...
...Easier said than done. To get home after they leave the meeting, the afflicted must run Macau's gauntlet of gambling resorts, their mesmerizing neon and ritzy, come-hither ambiance carefully calculated to encourage a fling at the tables. Temptation seems to be everywhere. Since the city began issuing new gaming licenses five years ago, the number of casinos has more than doubled to 27, boosting tourism and investment and revitalizing Macau's economy (the city's gaming industry took in $6.95 billion last year, vaulting Macau past Las Vegas as the city with the most total annual wagering revenue...
...Asia does have a gambling problem - and because the industry is expanding rapidly throughout the region, mental-health workers and researchers fear pathological gambling could reach epidemic proportions in coming years. Macau's success has inspired other Asian cities and countries to allow new casinos. In Vietnam, a $4 billion luxury gaming resort will open near Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. Ground has already been broken for a pair of casino complexes in Singapore. The Philippine government is planning to open a 100-acre (405,000-square-meter) gaming complex that will employ 40,000 Filipinos in Manila...
...seeking culture," says Ong. "Professional counseling and psychotherapy still bear a negative image." And even those who recognize they need help may have difficulty finding it; there are few gambling-treatment programs like Gamblers Anonymous in the region and little public funding is available to form new ones. In Macau, the Industrial Evangelistic Fellowship's center is one of just three small organizations offering counseling to the city's growing number of gambling addicts. The only government-funded organization, the Resilience Centre, was launched two years ago and employs just three counselors. Last year, Recovery Circle, a Manila-based substance...
...that relatively small surcharge hardly seems sufficient to overcome the seductive pull of casinos and their multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. "The gambling industry is so big," says Poon Yan-chi, director of the Macau center where Tan delivers his PowerPoint presentations on the evils of gambling. "It's like David and Goliath." David sometimes wins. But that...