Americans now spend over $300 billion each year in legal gambling, and the gambling industry has become a major contributor to tax revenues. In the past 30 years, nearly all states have permitted some form of gambling, and 126 Native American tribes now operate reservation casinos. Yet, even as legalized gambling has grown by leaps and bounds, public opinion has turned against it, and political opposition has mobilized. Some critics of gambling want to return to the situation before World War I, when virtually all gambling was illegal in every state, while others want to regulate the industry to channel the popular appetite for gambling into its arguably less undesirable forms. Legalized Gambling: For and Against captures all the main arguments on both sides in this increasingly heated controversy, with 23 carefully-selected contributions by a balanced range of writers.
