With Oregon agreeing to allow gambling into the state, the price exacted on the residents of the state seems easily broken down into a manageable amount. When you take the amount of money that the lottery has generated, it comes out to $1.09 million. Then you divide that amount by the number of people in the state of Oregon. You are now looking at $311 paid by everyone in Oregon. Of course, this does not take into consideration the age of those people, because it is per person, not per person of gambling age. When you take those figures and adjust them to represent the true number, removing those who don’t play, those that are not old enough to play, etc., then you are looking at a much higher number per person. 

Opponents to the slot machines in the state say that those numbers are just one way of looking at the price residents of Oregon have to pay. They claim that those numbers do not take into consideration the way the money is being come by – and that the social ills and the crime that come with any kind of gambling is too high a price to pay. They want to remind everyone that the lottery used to bring in $33 million in sales and that more than half was returned as prizes. It was not the booming business that it is today.  

With the lottery slot machines, anyone can lose more than they can afford to lose, which leads to much more than just a lottery issue, it leads to those who are using it as a way to supplement their income. They keep playing hoping that the money will come back to them. Supporters say not true, that the amount does come back to those that pay and that it also helps out schools and various other programs. They believe that the lottery doing better is not a negative thing for the state, rather a positive.

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