Weighing the risks before rolling the dice

Second of two parts

ON THE POSSIBILITY of casino gambling in Massachusetts, Attorney General Martha Coakley last week told the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce she was concerned that it would come with "some sort of money-laundering, organized-crime costs."

The question is how much dirty laundry comes with casinos. The biggest problem for Governor Deval Patrick is that the issue is not clear.

You can find studies that say casinos bring crime. "The costs do seem to outweigh the benefits by a fair margin," said David Mustard, an economics professor at the University of Georgia. You can as easily find studies that say the overall effect of casinos is fairly neutral. "In many ways, there is more smoke than fire," said David Giacopassi, a criminology professor at the University of Memphis. "Objective results do not indicate dramatic changes in communities with the arrival of a casino."

For some cities, perception outweighs the facts. "Biloxi has had some problems with the advent of casino gambling, but the mayor and police chief and other officials were cautiously in favor of it because they were in a depressed area," Giacopassi said. "Their view is that casinos breathed new life into their area, even with more traffic, congestion, and increased home prices."

Perhaps the biggest unknown is the level of human risk at stake in Massachusetts. Rachel Volberg, president of Gemini Research in Northampton, conducted a gambling survey for the state of California that was released last week. She found that 1 million, or 3.6 percent of California's adults, are problem or pathological gamblers. Ten percent of the state's nearly 28 million adults are at risk of developing problems, more than the national average of 7.7 percent. California is considering expanding slot machine gambling.

This risk is unknown in Massachusetts. Volberg says no useful prevalence survey for the state exists. "I'm not a proponent or an opponent," said Volberg, who has done surveys for several other states. "It is not an easy issue to analyze. It is hard to say where Massachusetts is right now. Unless you do a study ahead of time, you're losing the opportunity to assess the impacts."

Volberg, who has researched gambling behavior since 1985, is of the school that there are rises in crime associated with casinos but "neither the benefits nor impacts are as great or as dire as the political debate might indicate." The debate rages precisely, she said, because "there is no standard protocol that is agreed upon" by researchers.

Estimates of the social costs of pathological gamblers range wildly. On the high end is Hampshire College professor Robert Goodman, the author of "The Luck Business: The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America's Gambling Explosion." In a rough conservative estimate over the phone, Goodman said the social costs created from a 1 percent rise in problem gamblers in Massachusetts could be $400 million a year.

"It costs a lot when people don't pay debts, borrow as much money as they can, go bankrupt, commit fraud on credit cards and insurance, and in some cases engage in outright theft," Goodman said. "We didn't see outright increases in violent crime, but did see increases in white-collar crimes."

Mustard was the co-author of a national study last year that found a disturbing lag time for casino-related crimes to make their impact. It found that by the fifth year of a casino's opening, robbery and aggravated assaults went up 136 percent and 91 percent, respectively. Almost conversely, Giacopassi co-authored a 2003 study that found no consistent crime patterns in Midwestern and Southern casino towns.

"What you have is a myriad of issues and questions," Giacopassi said. "It appears that with a lot of thought and planning, some problems are going to arise, but if planning is in place, you may not experience an increase."

Patrick has to decide whether to visit the myriad of issues upon Massachusetts. Giacopassi says there is more smoke than fire. Goodman says states that "fight fire with fire" with their own casinos only get "a bigger fire."

Volberg urges the state to create an ongoing mechanism to monitor gambling. "It's easy to put rosy numbers on job creation and revenues," she said. "It is harder to put numbers on family breakups, depression, and divorce. Many of those negatives take much longer to manifest themselves than the benefits. It takes problem gamblers a while to run through their finances and relationships."

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.