- Military Casinos: Uncle Sam's One-Armed Bandits
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- US News May 20, 2002 Issue
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- Depressed, lonely, and thousands of miles away from her
family in Arizona, Air Force Technical Sgt. Gloria Calhoun was looking
for solace. She found it in the mesmerizing whir of the slot machines scattered
around Osan Air Base in South Korea, her overseas post in 1998. "Anytime
I wasn't at work, I was gambling," says Calhoun. To finance her gambling
habit, Calhoun wrote about $14,000 in bad checks, which eventually led
to a demotion and a 60-day jail sentence.
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- The Pentagon might seem an unlikely casino operator.
But since 1981, the Department of Defense has been raking in a tidy sum
from more than 7,000 slot and video poker machines on 94 U.S. military
installations overseas. In 2000, for example, the betting devices raised
$125 million, all of it earmarked to pay for various morale boosters like
family picnics and the construction of clubs, bowling alleys, and golf
courses on military bases. Service members, their dependents, and civilian
employees spend more than $1 billion annually gambling on base.
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- See no evil. Pentagon officials contend that gambling
revenues are an essential and harmless source of funding. What's more,
by providing slots, the Pentagon says it is giving service members a safe
alternative to gambling off base. But experts on gambling addiction argue
the activity is deleterious, often fostering a dependency that results,
as it did in Calhoun's case, in criminal behavior. "It's obvious that
on some bases, especially where there is a lot of isolation, this is not
something that is healthy," says Michael Catanzaro, director of the
gambling treatment program at Camp Pendleton, Calif., the military's only
such program.
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- Two Pentagon studies found that 2 percentñor an
estimated 30,000 service men and womenñ"possessed the indicators
of probable pathological gambling." Last year, Congress ordered the
Pentagon to investigate the impact of the slots on armed forces personnel.
The Defense Department initially hired a private consulting firm to conduct
the survey but dumped it midcourse, claiming it could adequately perform
the review in-house. The Pentagon's Morale, Welfare, and Recreation Department
took over the review, the same department that relies on the minicasino
revenues for its survival. Its conclusion: Slot machines have no negative
impact on troops overseas. ñ Mark Mazzetti
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- Copyright (c) 2002 U.S. News & World Report, L.P.
All rights reserved.
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- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020520/biztech/20gambling.b.htm
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