Casinos Editorial
Stabroek News
December 17, 2006

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As is clear from the page 3 report in our Sunday, December 10 edition, representatives from the three major religious communities in this country are opposed to legislative changes which would allow casino gambling. Some of them have an absolutist stance against gambling per se in any context whatever, while in a letter to this newspaper Roman Catholic Bishop Emeritus Benedict Singh put a more qualified position. He argued that lotteries, raffles and bingo "were not inherently contrary to justice but can become morally unacceptable when they deprive someone of what is necessary to provide for his or her needs and the needs of dependants…" However, he continued, groups were justified in organizing games of chance such as bingo and raffles on a short-term basis in order to raise funds for worthy causes.

Western secular governments have tended to draw a distinction - albeit imprecise - between public and private morality, and in a general sense have not attempted to legislate for every 'sin' known to humankind. The boundaries of the sphere of private morality have not remained stable down the years, although the experience of comparatively recent times has been that too much state intrusion into this area sometimes produces consequences which are infinitely worse than if the 'sin' had been allowed to continue unchecked in the first instance. The classic example of this is the flirtation of the United States between 1920 and 1933 with the banning of alcohol - Prohibition, as it was called - which produced the unintended result of giving an enormous impetus to organized crime, more particularly the mafia.

Where the Western state does interfere with private morality, therefore, it is usually because some 'immoral' activity would produce unacceptable social consequences should it be allowed to flourish unregulated. Such is the justification given for banning the use of and trade in narcotics. This is a modern position, since in the nineteenth century countries like Britain had no concerns about drug-taking among their own citizens. A substantial proportion of the British population of the time probably consumed opium in the liquid form of laudanum for medicinal, if not recreational purposes, while in Guyana, the government imported ganja from India for use by the indentured population on the estates, and made no attempt to close down the opium dens run by the Chinese in Georgetown. The tide began to turn against regarding the use of drugs as an exclusively private matter with the first International Opium Convention of 1912, to which the British lent their signature.

Gambling too is located in that grey area of private morality, which many Western secular authorities have decided not to ban outright, although they have sometimes imposed restrictions on it. The most recent example is the outlawing of internet gambling in the United States, although interviewees on a recent 60 Minutes programme suggested that the legislation prohibiting it had been motivated more by protectionist economics than the need to avoid unacceptable social consequences.

Even if it were morally desirable to do so, it would in practice be impossible to ban gambling in all its forms here, and the consequences of such a proscription would drive it underground, setting the framework for the evils associated with a Prohibition scenario. Apart from anything else, it would be very difficult to police and would constitute yet another encouragement to corruption among law officers. There is even a kind of local minor example of unintended consequences issuing from a ban: When cock-fighting was prohibited in the nineteenth century, it went underground, and with the added ingredient of excitement engendered by illegality, the betting associated with it then increased considerably in comparison to the days when the activity was legal. (Admittedly, of course, in that instance the outlawing of cock-fighting was not motivated by the gambling connected with it.)

As it is gambling of one kind or another has been entrenched in this society for centuries, making it that much more difficult to eliminate completely as some groups would prefer. It most likely arrived here virtually simultaneously with the Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century, since the first ordinance we know of in specific relation to it dates from 1716, when the Berbice Court of Policy put measures in place to prevent people from gambling away their entire salaries. More organized betting was given a fillip with the opening of the D'Urban race-course in 1829, while even the national lottery is not a new innovation, since there is a record of one being held in 1806. The ultimate game of chance in the nineteenth century was chefa, a kind of lottery organized by the Chinese gaming houses of Leopold Street, where the odds against the player were said to be 36 to one, and in which a very large number of punters from all races and classes participated.

While it is understood that the various religions and denominations by means of moral suasion can attempt to prevent members of their flock from participating in all forms of gambling, as said above, states for pragmatic reasons have to take a less rigid view. For the secular authorities the considerations in formulating responses to one or another form of gambling revolve around social impact. Since we already have betting and a national lottery, among other things, the question has to be asked, what makes casinos a special case?

With the arrival of internet gambling a great deal of concern has been expressed internationally about the spread of gambling addiction, although where the casinos are concerned, it seems the authorities may be leaning to the view that as in the Bahamas, locals will be excluded from entry. If the matter of gambling addiction is accepted as a compelling argument, it might be asked whether it is defensible to protect one's own citizens against the possibility of becoming addicts, while at the same time exposing foreigners to the danger. Bishop Singh, for one, feels that "enclaves of sin" are an offence to the common good, and that we should be striving for "humanistic tourism."

The argument of gambling addiction, however, can be applied to all forms of gambling, although from recent reports it seems that internet gambling might possibly be a special case. Be that as it may, the real issue for the administration in relation to casinos was first enunciated by former Sunday columnist Christopher Ram in a Business Page article, and it pertains to the high probability in our circumstances of this form of gaming becoming the vehicle for criminal enterprise of the organized variety. We have in this country a major problem of narcotics trafficking and an equally major problem of money laundering, and since many casinos overseas have been penetrated by organized crime, the authorities must concern themselves with what might happen here. Despite the new legislation on the statute books in relation to narcotics trafficking and attendant activities, law enforcement is extraordinarily weak, and it can be reasonably anticipated that casinos would represent an obvious temptation to the drug barons.

The last thing we want is to provide yet further avenues for narcotics interests to pursue their criminal activities, with the disastrous spin-off effects for the rest of society that these entail. Unfortunately, however, one suspects that the government has done everything back to front, and is going for consultations on casinos after it has already made up its mind to go to Parliament to change the law. One imagines that the proprietors of the new hotels being erected for the Cricket World Cup would have wanted some assurance from the authorities that they would be able to attract guests after the event is over, and presumably casinos were what they had in mind for that purpose. This notwithstanding, the main pragmatic argument against casinos at this stage of our development is not to be dismissed, and one waits to see what the government will do now that the major religious groups in this society have spoken out with one voice on the matter. It is a test of how seriously the administration takes the consultations.