Sunday, February 6, 2011

Missouri's Introduction of Self-Exclusion

In the United States, the first government-sponsored self-exclusion program was instituted by the state of Missouri in 1996. One of the people involved with the creation of the Missouri program has written a brief essay describing the initiation of self-exclusion; the essay, "The Emergence of Self-Exclusion Programs," appears on pages 3 to 6 of a 2010 publication (54-page pdf here) from the National Center for Responsible Gaming. (The entire volume, brought to my attention by the Pennsylvania press release linked in the previous post, is devoted to self-exclusion; more commentary on the volume, I suspect, will e-materialize on this blog in the future.) Missouri's voluntary self-exclusion program emanated from publicity concerning its involuntary program. Like many jurisdictions, Missouri bars some individuals (often those with gambling-related offenses in their background) from entering casinos. When a list of such excluded individuals made the news in 1995, a person suffering with his inability to control his gambling asked if he similarly could be banned. From such humble beginnings has grown a program that now includes more than 15,000 people who have volunteered for a lifetime ban on patronizing Missouri's casinos.

2 comments:

  1. You may have talked about this before, but have there been any significant efforts to create national or regional opt-out programsso that people can self-exclude from all states near them at the same time?

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  2. Update!: The National Center for Responsible Gaming publication linked to in the post indicates (in the Appendix, on page 40) that Mississippi reserves the right to pass along its self-exclusion list to the commissions associated with Louisiana and Choctaw casinos. Further (from page 45), the Seminole Tribe (operating in Florida) shares its self-exclusion list with all seven of its casinos. In South Africa (page 47), the self-excluder can choose whether to limit the ban to an individual venue or to have it in effect nationwide.

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