Beware, you vile and wicked sinners who debase yourselves in sordid dens of iniquity -- the state will catch you:
FORT WAYNE, Ind. (AP) — The Indiana police agency designated to search the state for illegal gambling has arrested more than 40 people on more than 80 gambling-related criminal charges over the past two years.
Few states have similar gambling control police, which Indiana legislators created in 2007 to crack down on illegal gambling when they approved adding slot machines at the state's two horse racing tracks.
The Gaming Control Division, part of the Indiana Gaming Commission, reports that more than 5,000 illegal electronic gambling machines often called Cherry Masters are no longer operating in the state, with many of them confiscated.
[. . .]
The gambling police unit has five officers assigned each to the north, south and central regions of the state investigating activities such as high-stakes poker games, dogfighting rings and sports-betting operations.
For instance, in Allen County last year, a gaming commission investigation led to the arrest of five men for their roles in a longtime poker den. All five have since pleaded guilty and received suspended sentences or probation.
I don't know why this particular double standard bothers me so much. It's not as if this is the only vice for which there is a state-approved version and a rogue, impermissible version. You can buy your state-authorized and -taxed hooch, but you can't make gin in your bathtub or buy it from anybody who does. You can go through the government-sanctioned cigarette system, but heaven help you if you buy a blackmarket carton or, worse, try to grow your own tobacco without the approved permit. And the issue isn't really one of hypocrisy -- the government seeming to preach one set of moral values but practicing another -- but simple protection of market share. If you don't exercise your vices through the government, the government doesn't get its share through taxes.
But this one does bother me more than the others. Perhaps it's because those who rail against vices (including those in the government) usually put gambling on a different level than smoking are drinking, which are seen as mere human weakness, bad habits that result from being too weak in the presence of temptation. Gambling is seen as a worse failing somehow, a sure sign of por moral character if not downright depravity. And gamblers often aren't risking just their own fortunes at impossible odds but taking the bread from the tables of their families.
So if gambling is seen as a worse vice, perhaps it's not so odd that I see the state simultaneously approving it and punishing it as a greater sign that it has no moral high ground to claim.
