Gambling with the nation's health?

Lottery is immoral

The whore and gambler, by the state Licensed, build that nation's fate.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

EDITOR,--Martin McKee and Franco Sassi's editorial raises an issue that has been largely ignored in the polemic arising since the introduction of the National Lottery.1 Well directed and amply endowed publicity can realise whatever it sets out to achieve, and selling vice is no exception. When governments set about peddling vice, however, perhaps we need to wake up and ask some questions. None would argue but that gambling is a vice--one in which most of us indulge from time to time without harm. But, as with all vice, there is the problem of over-indulgence, or addiction.

Is there any moral difference between a government that decides one day to nationalise the manufacture of alcohol and then to promote its consumption with a massive publicity drive to raise funds for worthy causes and a government that selects gambling and does likewise? The outcry that would accompany government promotion of alcohol would be focused on the harm that would be inflicted on those (a minority) who would become dependent on alcohol and on the other undesirable effects of that illness, such as road traffic accidents, family violence, and financial hardship. Why then is there no such outcry against government sponsored gambling? Again, addiction to gambling affects a minority of those who indulge in the lottery (and in the philosophy of morality the size of a minority is not permitted as a premise), and the social effects of gambling excesses are not dissimilar to those of alcohol dependence albeit they are less clearly defined, leading to poverty and the need to find alternative sources of finance. But the social effects of the lottery reach far beyond the unfortunate sector that becomes so hopelessly besotted by the television diceman.

An enormous fiscal readjustment in society has resulted since the introduction of the lotteries in both the Republic of

Ireland and theUnited Kingdom, with the established charities now faced with starvation while the exchequer is fattened. How many other as yet undetected readjustments have also taken place, such as the diversion of family funds to the lottery from the nutritional needs of children, with consequences that may not become apparent for a generation? Moreover, such occult effects will manifest themselves in the most deprived sectors of society, in which the lottery gives the greatest hope of release from abject poverty. Ironically, the lottery may be perpetuating the deprivation it seeks to alleviate.

Is it not incumbent on us, therefore, to insist that the government takes more account of the issues, real and potential, that may result from the lottery? We might start by having the lottery acknowledged for what it is--another tax which most affects the lower income groups of society.