OC NJ Daily Reports
The United States has always been the home of gambling around the world. The fame of Las Vegas stretches far and wide, but this country’s relationship with gambling is a lot more complicated than the depiction of Sin City on the silver screen would have you believe.
While excess gambling may be encouraged and even welcomed in the Nevadan city, across many other states in the country there’s an altogether different attitude to gambling. Here in New Jersey, our laws buck the trend.
Casino gambling, as well as online poker and live casino facilities, are available in New Jersey as long as they hold a license from the DGE. That makes New Jersey stand out in an American context, as most, if not all forms of internet gambling, are illegal in most US states.
We look at whether New Jersey’s relaxed laws are benefitting the state or not.
Safer Gambling
The law should safeguard people and evidence shows that anti-gambling laws in states such as Utah and Hawaii do not do that.
The purpose of any law must be to protect the citizens or the institutions that they rely on. In the context of gambling, tough laws prohibiting online gambling are almost always put in place to safeguard citizens.
It’s argued by many in favor of online gambling prohibition that the activity is intrinsically unsafe and poses a risk to minors and those prone to addiction.
Unfortunately for lawmakers, online gambling and gambling in general are not as straightforward as that. Let us take Utah for example, the only mainland state in the country where online gambling in all forms is illegal.
Do the good people of Utah not place wagers online? Of course not. While there are no official figures to show how many Utahns gamble online – they wouldn’t after all – anecdotal evidence suggests that plenty of them do.
Instead of gambling with licensed Utahan companies, residents are often placing wagers with overseas betting companies. This means they are not protected by law if and when things go wrong.
Nationwide empirical evidence recently published showed that Americans wagered $1 billion with overseas betting companies in the last year alone. Not one single cent of that money was protected by American law.
In New Jersey, whatever gripes we may have with licensing and regulations, we can at least agree that our online casinos are accountable to state law and that users reap the rewards of the security that that brings.
Source: https://ocnjdaily.com/njs-relaxed-gambling-laws-benefitting-state/
