Gambling addicts: Our forgotten heroes

HERE'S TO ALL THE problem and pathological gamblers out there. For years, Southern Nevada's prosperity has hinged at least in part on them.

Their spending patterns sustain more than depressing bars anchoring unsightly strip malls in every corner of the Las Vegas Valley. The losses of problem and pathological gamblers also fatten the bottom lines of companies that own neighborhood megaresorts. Thusly enriched, those companies build more neighborhood casinos. The new properties in turn create more jobs, which means more people, which means more local gamblers, some of whom will become addicts and ... on and on it goes in a dismal downward spiral of a.) ecologically unsustainable sprawl and b.) soul-crushing despair. Or as the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce and the Southern Nevada Water Authority like to call it: growth.

It's exactly the sort of thing that Official Nevada and the gambling industry would rather not discuss, and so no one knows for sure, but several analytical stabs undertaken by the occasional damned pundit over the years (some of them published in the free weekly with sex ads in the back you're reading right now) suggest somewhere between one-fourth and one-third (if not more) of all the gambling revenue in Southern Nevada is money lost by people who live here.

Is that a lot? It always seemed like a lot.

How much money lost by locals is lost by locals with a problem? That's a tougher nut to crack. But look at it this way: Whatever percentage of the population is addicted to gambling, those addicts are going to concentrate in certain places. Which is to say if 6.4 percent of Nevadans are problem or pathological gamblers (as one study found), the percent of Nevadans who are in a neighborhood casino at any given time and who are problem or pathological gamblers is probably higher still. Since "time on the machine" is a really big deal with problem gamblers, in all likelihood they are also going to be in the aforementioned neighborhood casino for more hours of the day than the general population, and on more days of the week. Which suggests that they are losing more money per person than everybody else, and probably a lot more.

So it's not a stretch for a reasonable person to ask, if not for problem and pathological gamblers, would gambling companies that cater to locals even show a profit?

Perhaps someday someone on the Nevada Gaming Control Board will grow a pair and ask that question of the companies themselves.

Meantime, thank goodness for hardcore gambling addicts who refuse to let a little thing like the possible structural collapse of the entire American economy bother them. Because taken as a whole, Southern Nevadans are totally wimping out, gambling-wise.

Gambling "win" in Clark County (home of about 85 percent of the Nevada gambling market) in January 2008 was down $39.1 million from January 2007, the most recent month-over-month comparison released by the state Gaming Control Board. Revenue on just the Fabulous Las Vegas Strip, the heart of America's gambling industry and the Southern Nevada market that caters most to tourist gamblers, was down by more than $8 million.

But -- and this is just bizarre -- for the same January-to-January comparison, a much larger decline in gambling revenue of $14.5 million was reported on ... the not-so-fabulous Boulder Strip, home of Sam's Town, Boulder Station, all those dives in old Henderson, etc.

North Las Vegas and the "balance of county," the other two Gaming Control Board market designations that, like the Boulder Strip, are composed primarily of properties catering to local gamblers, declined by $4.5 million and $5.8 million, respectively.

While the comparisons aren't clean and neat -- some Nevada residents gamble on the Strip, some tourists gamble in neighborhood megaresorts -- the numbers reflect a harsh drop-off in gambling by locals, especially in percentage terms: Gambling revenue declined on the Las Vegas Strip by 1.3 percent in January 2008 compared to January 2007; the Boulder Strip and North Las Vegas markets, by contrast, both declined by about 16 percent each.

January's declines, to be sure, were inordinately gaudy. But the same pattern of wholesale slacking on the part of resident gamblers can be found, albeit less dramatically, through the first eight months of the fiscal year. Boulder Strip and North Las Vegas gambling revenues, after more than a decade of steadily growing by double-digit percentages, have gone down. Over the same eight-month period, gambling revenue in Strip megaresorts owned by the largest transnational gambling/hotel/tourism conglomerates in the world has actually increased slightly. (Now, clearly, is no time to raise the gaming tax.)

Although the amount of money tourists are losing on the Strip is going up, it's not going up as much as the expert-texperts had projected, and that's one reason the state is having budget problems. But Nevada residents are clearly not bellying up to video poker machines like they used to, and that's also putting a hurt on the local economy and the state's budget.

Nevadans who have cut back on gambling to save money probably are not driven by constant compulsions to lie to their spouses and their bosses and their kids and themselves to assure that come hell or high water they somehow manage to get time on a machine. The people who find it easiest to gamble less, or not at all, are the same people for whom gambling is just another form of harmless entertainment, like a concert, a movie or a titty bar.

But gambling revenue generated by locals has become increasingly important to Southern Nevada's economy and the state's tax base.

So, here's a salute to the true Nevada patriots who never give in and never give up, the community's problem and pathological gamblers. Las Vegas and all of Nevada depends on them -- perhaps now more than ever.

On the other hand, if they absolutely insist on putting their own interests ahead of everyone else's, they can, s'pose, contact the Problem Gambler's HelpLine at 1-800-522-4700 or visit www.nevadacouncil.org.

Hugh Jackson is a longtime local journalist, former senior editor of CityLife and the proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner (www.lasvegasgleaner.com), where he blogs.