Prohibition Laws and Gambling

Unlike alcohol, gambling did not just dissipate in meek submission to laws that prohibited it.

As the government found out when it started to try to apply the prohibition laws, drinking was too enjoyable to plenty of people for the practice to cease their existence - law or none of it.

Respectable individuals who wouldn't think of fighting or stealing simply never felt that Prohibition was effective of a law or that they were atrocious for disobeying it.

This holds true for gambling. It is almost impossible, as law enforcement agencies found out, to steer people away against activities when the people themselves don't want to be protected.

Moreover, criminal activities spread while legal ones had been stopped to satiate the public demand for gambling and liquor. Of course, such businesses were difficult to maintain than legitimate ones - and both led to a high degree of corruption in the police forces as well as giving organized crime activities fabulously wealthy.

In 1933, Prohibition was declared void by public vote. Legitimate gambling's comeback was slower, except for Nevada - which cleverly aimed the gambling business of the entire country - by putting an end on betting prohibition.

New Hampshire organized a state lottery in 1963 and this paved the way for the start of legalized gambling over the last eighteen years since.

On the whole, it is naturally expected that almost all states will follow the lottery trend before the end of the 80s, and lots of places have crossed the line to acquire some of the gambling profits out of these syndicates and into every state's repository.

For example, New York City operates off-track betting houses where horse fanatics can bet two dollars on their favorite horse without ever going out of the neighborhood or hang around with the local bookmaker.

Many localities are operating baseball and football pools, hence accepting and legitimizing what everyone has been aware of for such a long time - that professional sports are closely involved with gambling.

Poker houses, those who made a mark from the nineteenth century, are making a revival on both coasts. Atlantic City, on the other hand, poses a challenge to the ever-present glittering, brazen Las Vegas.

The once-and-future playpen Atlantic City has a new promise on life. If the assumptions of gamblers are any manifestation, Atlantic City is going to be a hit.

As this city expands, it will definitely find its dear market - just as the posh brownstone gambling houses found in the Eastern Seaboard and New York did - a century ago.