Gambling is one vice I have a handle on.īut a lot of people don’t have a handle on it.Ĭasinos - and the lottery, for that matter - prey on the poor and desperate. I’ve been in casinos all over the country, usually playing low-stakes poker, never winning or losing more than a few bucks at a time. One, I’m with the anti-gambling legislators in spirit. There was also a rift on the conservative side of the aisle over the morality of state-supported gambling. Some legislators tried to tie the gambling proposals to Medicaid expansion. The gambling proposals got tied up in a web of complicated alliances and last-minute deals in this year’s budget. That one’s still being built but you can go over and gamble in what amounts to a giant portable classroom.Īnd North Carolina has been a lottery state since 2006, as you well know if you’ve ever been stuck in a convenience store behind somebody buying a stack of scratch-offs. Those modifiers are necessary because North Carolina already has three active casinos: one in Cherokee, one in Murphy, and the Two Kings casino over in Kings Mountain. Note the phrasing there: four more casinos, video lottery terminals. But one thing that dropped out along the way was a plan to legalize four more casinos, as well as video lottery terminals.

Roy Cooper will let it become law without signing it because of problems he has with other parts of the budget. The legislature finally passed a budget late last week.

We’re just haggling over how much we want to admit it.

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