Legislation sponsor commends sheriff, says constant attention is needed to stop ‘crack cocaine of gambling’

People will always gamble and they will gamble on anything, says Mike Beatty, the former state Senator who pushed the bill against video poker games, but some types of gambling are especially insidious. The video poker machines, often seen in the back of convenience stores, are the worst, he says.

Beatty, a one-term Republican Senator who represented Jackson County from 2000 to 2002, led the fight against video poker machines after South Carolina made them illegal and the machines began appearing throughout northern Georgia.

“There were stories of ladies, women who would leave their babies strapped into a car seat in the car while they played,” he said. “It’s the crack cocaine of gambling.”

The law, known as the Video Poker Act, was signed on Sept. 15, 2001.

The bill outlawed “any contrivance which for a consideration affords the player an opportunity to obtain money or other thing of value, the award of which is determined by chance.” The law specifically describes slot machines, card games, line-up and match-up games and any simulations of those games.

It was upheld by a unanimous decision of the Georgia Supreme Court in 2002. The machines still occasionally show up in some businesses, however, and it takes a sheriff or a district attorney who believes the illegal gaming is a problem to weed them out, Beatty said.

Clayton County Sheriff Victor Hill took that initiative on Tuesday, and when officers on his joint vice task force went looking for video poker machines in the county they found 404 machines in 88 convenience stores, deputies said.

The stores were served with letters warning that the machines were illegal and would be seized in 10 days if they weren’t removed from the county.
The letter cited Beatty’s law.

Hill and Beatty say the poker machines are problematic because they breed crime.

“If you have one addiction it can lead to another addiction,” Hill said. “It’s the little things that breed to the bigger things.”

Both men said gambling is directly associated with drugs and robbery — both the robbery of people who have won pay-outs and robbery by people addicted to playing.

The sheriff and the former senator spoke of being opposed to even legal addictions — Hill said smoking cigarettes could lead to smoking marijuana and prostitution and Beatty said he opposed the state lottery when it was proposed — but said they wanted specifically to see video poker addiction eliminated.

Beatty said that he is personally opposed to the state lottery, but it was approved by a constitutional amendment passed by the people of the state. Because the lottery is legal, he said, it is regulated.

“The thing that was so insidious about [video poker] was that the odds could be manipulated. I’m against any type of gambling anyway, but that particular type of industry lended itself to being manipulated and was so addictive,” Beatty said. “There was no type of regulation whatsoever.”





NOTE: Man, those guys are nuts. A sheriff who believes that smoking cigarettes leads to prostitution? I'd hate to get pulled over by that guy.

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