Legal jueteng can worsen poverty

During the liberal-democrat surge of the ’60s, a number of American and European thinkers took a second look at their criminal justice systems. Along with recasting jails into corrective rather than punitive clinics came a view that vice, unlike murder or robbery, was a victimless crime. Lobbies sought to erase prostitution, drugs and gambling from penal books. The notion was that so long as a person gamely offers paid sex, or takes marijuana of his own will, or gambles his own money – that is, unforced by white slavers or pushers or bookmakers – then it’s part of free choice.

After a few bold experiments here and there, vice-as-victimless-crime waned. Remnant studies jiggled the Philippines in the ’80s, but the idea was since deflated by a resurgent view that vice harms society and must thus be curbed. Prostitution, for instance, not only spurs human smuggling and disease, but degrades human dignity – that basic tool for one’s rise. Drugs not only induce violent crimes or deviant behavior, but also threaten to rear a generation of dolts who cannot produce or reproduce. Gambling too not only fritters away the fruits of one’s toil, but breeds a culture of dependency rather than of deed.

Advocates of jueteng legalization cite three reasons: it will in a snap remove official corruption since there would be no more racket to protect; it will free the scant police force to run after true criminals; it will raise State revenues from licenses and profit shares.

They may be right. Luzon’s yearly jueteng "sales" volume is estimated at P13-P30 billion. Less than a fifth goes to winnings, for jueteng draws are done on the sly, with no auditors to check for fraud, so financiers virtually can pick the least-betted two-number combination to win the jackpot. A third of the take goes to protection. Town police chiefs and mayors are said to receive as much as P50,000-P500,000 a month, depending on the locale’s betting volume. Provincial or regional chiefs and governors get up to P2-12 million a month. Reports have it that higher officials in Camp Crame or in Congress partake of the loot during seasonal crackdowns or inquiries in aid of extor..., er, legislation.

All that protection money, P4-P10 billion a year, can go to the State if jueteng, along with variant masiao in Visayas-Mindanao, are decriminalized. The Charity Sweepstakes’s EZ-2 Lotto, a play on jueteng, can be promoted to replace it. The extra money, as Pampanga mayors propose, can be used for police work, education and livelihood.

But what of the individual and social result of vice? Pampanga Rep. Reynaldo Aquino reveals that 15,000 families in his five-town district depend on the jueteng business. With President Gloria Arroyo’s all-out war on the illegal numbers game, he says, 20,000 schoolchildren may not be able to enroll this year for lack of cash. If only a government jobs program will accompany the anti-vice drive; then again, Aquino rues, the jueteng-reliant families are unskilled for gainful employment.

Aquino’s figures could replicate in hundreds of other districts. Still, that’s no excuse for kid gloves on vice. Shabu trade had hit annual volumes of P200 billion earlier in the decade. Street pushers, profiting 40 percent from P100-sachets of the white powder, were said to number at least 60,000 nationwide. Yet sheer quantity of people in want does not make pushing legal or moral. They have all to be arrested and punished for it, along with the drug lords. To let them off the hook sends the message that crime pays.

  More families than Aquino can count bet thrice daily on jueteng. They are equally poor and unlearned as the cobradors (bet collectors) and assorted vice profiteers. A P10- or P100-bet buys them the dream of a P4,000-P40,000 jackpot. But with an 800,000-to-one chance, there will always be more losers than winners. Still they bet on, waiting for luck to kiss poverty goodbye, at least for a week of splurging, before they go back to the daily rote of betting and waiting. So they sink deeper into penury in a culture of dependency.

  The problem with jueteng is that it has a way of transmitting poverty to the next generation. During his term as Isabela congressman, Heherson Alvarez found out that poultry and fish sales in the talipapa (flea market) dip in barrios where jueteng abounds. After a crackdown on vice, sales invariably rise. His conclusion: parents gamble away money that otherwise could have gone to nutrition – of themselves and their children. They may reason out that they bet on jueteng precisely to hit that jackpot to put Junior to college someday. But then, they deprive today’s toddlers of the means to ever reach college; that is, iodine from seafood to sharpen the mind, protein from meat to strengthen the body. Jueteng’s culture of dependency in effect ensures the bettors’ stay in penury, and their offspring when they grow up. The latter too will become bettors on dreams instead of citizens of deed. Thus viewed from government’s standpoint, to let jueteng thrive is to neglect the people’s wellbeing.

  Legalization adherents aver that jueteng has been with us for more than a century, making gambling part of our Chinese or colonial Spanish heritage. Habits cannot be legislated, they add, citing the failure of the Prohibition in the US. For opposers, however, it only means that alongside a vice war must be values and skills education, spearheaded by the government. No one but the hopelessly addicted will gamble if there are better options. Legalists counter that money for such mass education can only come from government-supervised jueteng. But still, at what social and cultural cost?

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