Casino gamblers

Madam - Sophia Foster Hildebrand in her cover story "the lure of quick riches: of your June issue reported that "in the

Solomon Islands ... casinos ... were caus ing more social damage than benefits.”

While the name of the author and the content of the story sound familiar, I dis agree to a certain extent. For one thing, there has not been any empirical research carried out, published or anything for that matter in Solomon Islands which con cludes that casinos were causing more social damage than benefits to Solomon Islanders.

In fact the social damage linked to casi nos would be trivial for Solomon Islands because of the fact that majority of the 300,000 islanders live in one of the nine scattered provinces of Solomon Islands and not in Honiara where the casinos are.

In Honiara the social damage would also be trivial on the grounds that a large proportion of the Honiara populace consist of unemployed people. In Solomon Islands, like any other Pacific island coun try, unemployed people do not receive unemployment benefits. Therefore they may not have the money to gamble at casi nos.

It would be partially correct to say that only those Honiara people in the formal and non-formal sector employment are the ones likely to gamble. However, it would still be erroneous to conclude that casinos create more social damage for two princi pal reasons.

First, a large proportion of those who have the money to gamble do not enter casinos because they are devoted Christians.

Second, only a small proportion of the Honiara populace who are “lukewarm”

Christians gamble at casinos. Not the majority of Solomon Islanders as your story seemed to imply.

In this connection, to say that casinos create more social damage was not entire ly true in the context of Solomon Islands.

Raynold Moveni Honiara

Solomon Islands.

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