The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [40]
You wouldn’t know any of this from stories in the media. Front-page articles in 1998 went on about a nineteen-year-old from Long Island named Moshe Pergament, “a teenager who saw no way out of his gambling debt” (Seattle Times) and “decided to end his gambling and his life” (New York Times) after going $6,000 in the hole. Reporters told us almost nothing about Pergament’s pathway to either gambling or suicide, nor why this young man from an affluent family felt he could not get financial help or counseling. Nor did they question the tall tales of other kids they wrote about—kids such as “Greg from Philadelphia,” who told Time that a bookie “said he would cut off my mother’s legs if I didn’t pay.”13
Reporters do manage to find reputed experts who lend credence to their stories about teen gambling, but the same people get quoted time and again, sometimes saying precisely the same thing. “Public understanding of gambling is where our understanding of alcoholism was some 40 or 50 years ago,” said psychologist Durand Jacobs of Loma Linda University in both Time and the Los Angeles Times. He has been a favorite as well with the Christian Science Monitor, which has run a story almost every year since 1989 proclaiming that teen gambling is “growing.” 14
Read apart from the fear mongering coverage in which they are embedded, studies of gambling by teens suggest little cause for rampant parental panic. Psychologist Howard Shaffer of Harvard made headlines with his assertion that the rate of problem gambling among adolescents is more than twice that of adults. Depending on which report of Shaffer’s you read and which level of severity he is describing, the number of teens with gambling problems is between 4 percent and 22 percent. But Shaffer concedes that, as with other risky behaviors young people try, most will lose interest in gambling as they get older and settle into work and family roles.15
No one knows whether teen gambling is more extensive or injurious today than in previous eras. Many of us adults recall losing our lunch money in betting pools for sports events, poker games with our buddies, and “Casino Nights” the high school threw to raise money for the marching band. Some of us also remember our uncles’ or grandfathers’ stories about sneaking into racetracks and pool halls and wagering everything they made as newspaper delivery boys. Look beyond the scary headlines about today’s teen bettors and you discover they are probably no worse. Although they are coming of age in an era of explosive growth for the casino industry, most have resisted temptation and stuck to rather benign wagering. A survey of sixth- through twelfth-graders in Louisiana, conducted after riverboat and Indian casinos opened there, provoked alarmist reactions from politicians and journalists for its finding that about nine out of ten of the state’s adolescents had gambled. Yet unpack that shocking statistic and you discover that two thirds of the students had bought scratch-off lottery tickets, about half had wagered on cards and sports teams, and just 3 percent had been to a riverboat casino and 4 percent to a land-based casino.16
Cybersmut
About the only researcher willing to paint a picture of teens as casino aficionados was a young man whose studies made headlines in the early 1980s. He captured journalists’ attention with a survey he claimed showed that 64 percent of students at Atlantic City High School bet in local casinos. The researcher, Marty Rimm, also conducted an experiment in which, clad as an Arab sheik, he entered the Playboy Hotel and Casino and was offered instant credit and given royal treatment even though he was only sixteen years of age.
Vigorously criticized by the gaming industry as inaccurate, Rimm’s studies nonetheless garnered tremendous attention and motivated the New Jersey legislature to raise the gambling age in casinos from eighteen to twenty-one. It took another fourteen years, however,