We are in the middle of Responsible Gaming Education Week, the brainchild of two gambling groups to show gambling as a fun, responsible activity and to highlight and thwart potential gambling problems.
The American Gaming Association and the National Center for Responsible Gaming are selling rubber bracelets -- the new millennium's bumper sticker and fashion statement wrapped into one; these are orange -- in order to push and finance their cause: to gamble responsibly.
Although Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort Casino are not part of this program -- they work with the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling on similar gambling awareness issues -- it is important for people in Eastern Connecticut and beyond to continue to be viligilant of potential gambling dangers.
As people in this region have seen, gambling and other casino activities provide many qualitative and needed jobs, and are a vast entertainment source, but it's also an enormously profitable business for the owners. Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, for example, combined to bring in $52 milliona dayin June.
Those riches come at the expense of gamblers -- a small percentage of whom have an addiction that can destroy lives.
Knowing this becomes more important as gambling booms outside of the confines and regulations of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, N.J., and Indian casinos. It's easy for anybody with a credit card and a computer to play high-stakes games online. And poker -- which now blankets TV -- is the latest national craze.
More troubling, poker is becoming a game of choice and an obsession for young people -- many times, inexplicably, with parental knowledge and consent.
Poker kits are marketed as family activities and there are reports from all over the country about how parties for teens, and younger, are organized in homes. Would these be the same parents who a generation ago would have asked their teens to enjoy a beer or an illegal drug in the living room instead of with friends in the woods? Gambling, last we checked, was only legal for adults.
That said, like many adult activities, done in moderation and within means, gambling for many can be an enjoyable time -- especially if it is entered as an activity, and not a profit-making venture.
When you enter a gambling hall, bring your common sense. The orange bracelet is optional.