By MONROE ROARK
mroark@thecitizennews.com

As of last weekend, video poker machines are illegal in the state of Georgia. All of them were to be removed or destroyed by midnight Sunday night.

To listen to those responsible for this decision tell it, a scourge on the state has been eliminated. They say that video poker machines are addictive and cause financial ruin and misery to families whose members are sucked into its destructive web. That's probably true, but the real story is not that video poker is gone, but that the state-run lottery goes merrily along. What's the difference?

A story on the local news last week showed a small group of elderly black men being led from an abandoned house in southwest Atlanta where they had been gasp! gambling. The leader of the operation faces a possible felony charge. If he sold lottery tickets in a convenience store, there would be no problem. What's the difference?

The difference should be obvious. The state makes money off the lottery, but it doesn't get a dime from private gambling operations. Public statements about the evils of video poker and back-room dice games are the height of hypocrisy.

Many anti-lottery activists cite statistics showing how poorer people spend more money on lottery tickets than anyone else and causes poor families to fall even deeper into financial trouble trying for quick riches. That in itself is not enough reason to stop lottery operations; the state has no business telling anyone what they cannot buy just because they might have less money. The lottery is actually bringing in revenue from a group of people who pay little or no income taxes, so one could argue that the lottery is leveling the playing field in that respect.

But if it's all right to play the lottery, it shouldn't matter if it's with the state or with your neighbor down the street. If the state does not feel its own gambling operation is a moral blight on the community, then it should have no problem with employees participating in a numbers racket at work.

For those of you who have heard the term in movies but don't actually know what it is, a numbers racket is almost identical to the lottery. In the early 20th century, organized crime and other organizations would run numbers operations for anyone who wanted to play. People could actually bet a single penny on a group of numbers and have a chance of winning. The winning numbers each day were typically determined by the numbers of winning horses at a local track.

How does that differ from the lottery? Not by much. But if you are caught running a numbers operation, you're likely going to jail. It makes no sense.

But the state is making too much money off the lottery to allow any competition. They've got a monopoly on gambling in Georgia, and there's no way that's going to change.

Revenue projections now indicate that HOPE scholarships, which the lottery has been funding for nearly a decade, are about to outstrip lottery funds and the state may have to dip into the general fund to keep them going. This was predicted years ago when the lottery was begun, but lottery advocates refused to pay attention.

Now it looks like something will have to give in a few years; either a change in the way scholarships are given, or a tax increase to pay for them. In spite of this, Gov. Roy Barnes, who opposed the lottery as a state legislator, has vowed to keep the program going. So much for the lottery being a savior of education in Georgia.

But video poker is a "cancer," according to Gov. Barnes. Maybe if he could have set up some kind of tax schedule for the people who operate those machines, it would have been all right.

What has caused more misery to Georgians, video poker or alcohol? There's not enough room on this page to document the ways that alcohol abuse has destroyed families across the state, but that must be all right as well, since the state gets plenty of tax revenue from alcohol sales. And while states feel welcome to share in the huge bounty of the 'Big Tobacco" lawsuit and recognize that tobacco is a killer, no one feels obligated to outlaw it (as long as those taxes on each pack of cigarettes keep coming in).

I'm not a big fan of organized gambling, but seeing the state give itself a virtual monopoly on any industry, while having the gall to declare that private forms of that same industry are dangerous or immoral, is a scary proposition. What will be next?

[Monroe Roark can be reached at mroark@TheCitizenNews.com.]

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