Thursday, October 27, 2005

Avoid Gambling in Casino Tropez - Casinotropez.com Cheats - Casino Tropes is Fraud

'Gambling Has Permeated Every Corner of Society and is Inflicting Great Harm on Families, Individuals and, Especially, on Children.'
  In his April letter to 2.4 million families, Focus on the Family President and federal gambling commission member, James C. Dobson, Ph.D., addresses the "alarming penetration of gambling into the world of children and teenagers."

In a second letter on gambling to his constituents recently, Dr. Dobson exposes the dangers of underage gambling, the lottery and Internet gambling. He cites statistics showing that staggering numbers of Americans -- particularly young people -- are addicted to various forms of gambling. Studies indicate that as many as eight percent of U.S. teens are already hooked.

"Gambling promoters try to downplay the high rates of gambling addiction among young people, saying they will grow out of such behavior," says Dr. Dobson. "Some undoubtedly will, but many will not. For millions, the hold of gambling addiction is every bit as powerful as illegal drugs or any other addiction."

One of the main areas Dr. Dobson addresses is the problem of lotteries. He notes that state-run lotteries promote aggressive advertising and marketing aimed at society's most vulnerable: the poor and children. "No matter how proponents attempt to dress it up, the governmental lottery continues its shameless exploitation of the poor," Dr. Dobson stated.

"Historically, governments have outlawed or tightly regulated gambling. Now they promote it with vigor. Indeed, today's politicians love lotteries because they allow them to feed their voracious appetites for revenues without having to pay the political price for raising taxes. Truly, the fox is in the henhouse," says Dr. Dobson. Dr. Dobson also noted that the lottery serves as a "gateway" for youth into even more addictive forms of gambling.

Dr. Dobson currently serves on the federally-appointed National Gambling Impact Study Commission. The commission recently finished up two years of studying the social and economic impact of various forms of gambling on our nation. The nine-member commission will present its findings to Congress and the President on June 18, 1999.

Please call for further information. The letter mentioned above is as follows:
 

April 1999

Dear Friends:

In January, I dedicated my monthly letter to the subject of Las Vegas- style casino gambling and the activity now referred to euphemistically as "gaming." Many of the disturbing facts and findings included in that statement came to light during my 19 months of service on the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, although I was writing on my own behalf and not in an official capacity. Nevertheless, my letter was quoted during the weeks that followed by hundreds of newspapers and other publications.

I mentioned at the conclusion of my letter that I planned to write later about other (non-casino) aspects of gambling, which has permeated every corner of society and is inflicting great harm on families, individuals, and especially, on children. Today, I will deliver on that promise.

Before proceeding, however, there is a fundamental question that I should try to answer. It is, so what? Why should it matter that gambling is spreading like wildfire in many nations of the world? Who really cares, after all? Isn't wagering just a harmless form of entertainment that is of no serious consequence? Perhaps more to the point, why should Mr. and Mrs. America, including those who are reading this letter, bother themselves with this issue at all, especially if they are not gamblers. Let me attempt to explain why I am concerned about what is happening.

I described in my previous letter how gambling destroys marriages, undermines the work ethic, increases crime, motivates suicide, destroys the financial security of families, and is related to any number of other social issues. But there is another concern that should pose major worry for mothers and fathers. It is the alarming penetration of gambling into the world of children and teenagers.

Are you listening, parents? Your kids may be at risk at this very moment. Studies show that about two-thirds of teens have gambled in the past year(1). Sometimes they are betting on sports or cards with their friends, but a staggering percentage are gambling on legal activities despite their ages. In Massachusetts, 47 percent of 7th graders, and three-quarters of high school seniors, have played the lottery(2). Massachusetts' attorney general found that two-thirds of underage teens who tried were able to bet on keno games run by the lottery(3). In a survey of 12,000 Louisiana adolescents, one-quarter reported playing video poker, 17 percent had gambled on slot machines, and one in ten had bet on horse or dog racing(4).

Even more significant is what is happening to these young people as a result of their involvement with gambling. The survey of Massachusetts high school students found that one in 20 had already been arrested for a gambling- related offense; 10 percent experienced family problems due to gambling; and 8 percent had gotten in trouble at work or school because of gambling(5). A new Louisiana State University study shows that Louisiana youngsters in juvenile detention are roughly four times as likely to have a serious gambling problem as their peers. Two-thirds of the hard-core gamblers in detention admitted stealing specifically to finance their gambling(6).

As for gambling at the college level, Sports Illustrated produced an in-depth three-part series that described gambling as "the dirty little secret on college campuses, where it 1/8gambling 3/8 is rampant and prospering(7)." Betting also threatens the integrity of collegiate athletics. A national study by the University of Michigan earlier this year found that 45 percent of male college football and basketball players admit to gambling on sports, despite rules explicitly prohibiting such activities. More than 5 percent admit shaving points, leaking inside information for gambling purposes or betting on their own games(8).

Studies indicate as many as eight percent of teens are already hooked on gambling(9)! For all their pious talk about wanting to prevent underage gambling, many operators actively attempt to cultivate betting habits in the next generation. That's why casinos in Louisiana have donated computer equipment and library books -- along with cards, dice and T-shirts emblazoned with casino logos -- to schoolchildren there (and why a grateful superintendent repaid their generosity by making a television commercial for a casino!) (10). That's why games in children's arcades inside casinos are virtual copies of adult casino games(11). That's why casino complexes now appeal to children with amusement rides, theme parks and movie theaters -- often forcing kids to walk through the casino floor to get to these attractions!

A few short years ago, one had to travel all the way to the Nevada desert to gamble. Not only did this keep gambling away from children, but it isolated it in Las Vegas and sent a clear message that gambling was a potentially harmful, if not seedy, activity. No longer! Now many of our children are confronted with state-sanctioned gambling virtually every day.

In South Carolina, children stumble across video poker machines (called the "crack cocaine of gambling") in convenience stores, pizza parlors, and bowling alleys. With more than 30,000 video poker devices scattered across that state, elementary school children can stop by on their way to and from school to pump money into these machines -- legally! The law in South Carolina does not prevent children from playing, it only prohibits them from collecting any winnings! And who is there, mind you, to enforce that aspect of the law?

Tragically, the power structures in our society -- the media, our schools, state governments, and even some churches -- are all sending a message to children that gambling is legitimate and harmless recreation. Millions of kids also see their parents gambling, and they can't wait to get in on the "fun." Last fall McDonald's restaurants in Colorado even joined in the fray, running a "McLotto Meals" promotion promising a free lottery ticket with the purchase of certain meals. Can you imagine the outrage if McDonald's had offered a free package of cigarettes or some other dangerous product with its meals, especially given the millions of impressionable children it serves?

But, predictably, there was no protest in the media or anywhere (to my knowledge) except from Focus on the Family.

Gambling promoters try to downplay the high rates of gambling addiction among young people, saying they will grow out of such behavior. Some undoubtedly will, but many will not. For millions, the hold of a gambling addiction is every bit as powerful as illegal drugs or any other addiction. A study of Gamblers Anonymous members found that only 8 percent were able to stop their gambling even after attending GA for two years(12). Many of these young troubled gamblers will remain mired in the cesspool of gambling addiction for years and years to come.

After my January newsletter, I received letters from a number of Christian families whose lives have been shattered by gambling. One came from the Cook family of Lakeside, Montana, who gave me permission to share their story with you. Bob and Robin Cook sent their middle son Rann -- raised in the church, honor student, high school speech champion -- off to college with high hopes. Instead, Rann, feeling alone and isolated, got sucked into gambling on video keno machines that flourish across the state. He pawned all his possessions for gambling money, lived out of his car, forged checks from his parents' account, and pawned family belongings to feed his gambling habit. Bob and Robin made the heartbreaking decision to report their son to the authorities as a last-ditch effort to "save him from himself." After several months in prison, Rann remains in the state correctional system. Besides the pain of losing their son to gambling, the greatest and ongoing struggle for the Cooks has been the total denial of treatment from a state that refuses to recognize gambling as a problem -- yet profits handsomely from the losses of addicted gamblers such as Rann.

This is why you should be interested in the information I am about to share. It could be of great relevance to your family, even if you are not a gambler. And because of the impact of gambling on the poor, it is a Christian duty to use our influence to limit the spread of this industry.

LOTTERIES

With that background, let's turn our attention now to the subject of lotteries, which I've come to believe are among the most pernicious forms of gambling. Their harmful nature was widely understood before 1963, when New Hampshire organized the first modern-day lottery. Now, 37 states operate these highly profitable gambling monopolies, which prohibit competition and profit from the desperation of the poor. In 1997, statewide lotteries extracted $16 billion from ordinary people hoping and praying for the jackpot(13)! How times have changed.

Historically, governments have outlawed or tightly regulated gambling. Now they promote it with vigor. Indeed, today's politicians love lotteries because they allow them to feed their voracious appetites for revenues without having to pay the political price for raising taxes. Truly, the fox is in the henhouse. Last March our commission traveled to Boston to examine the impact of lotteries. It was the perfect laboratory to study their phenomenal growth. Massachusetts sells more than $500 worth of lottery tickets each year for every man, woman, and child in the state(14)! The lottery accounts for 13 percent of the state's entire budget(15). Of course, it didn't start out that way. The Massachusetts lottery began in 1972 with a 50-cent ticket and a weekly drawing. Then came instant scratch tickets. A few years ago the lottery added keno. Now residents have their choice of 33 different instant games along with 1,600 keno locations and daily lottery drawings. Sales soared from $71 million in the first year to more than $3 billion today(16).

Other lotteries have followed suit, each constantly seeking new ways to entice citizens to part with their money. Many states, like Massachusetts, now offer lottery games mimicking casino-style gambling. Several of them operate electronic slot machines called video lottery terminals (VLT). They have proven to be very popular and highly addictive. The number of Gamblers Anonymous meetings in Oregon rose from three to more than 30 after VLTs were introduced(17). Researchers in South Dakota documented a direct correlation between gambling addiction and VLTs in that state(18).

Another trend is the constant need to increase top prize amounts. Lottery administrators are concerned about a phenomenon they call "jackpot fatigue," meaning gamblers no longer get excited at the prospect of winning only a few million dollars. Therefore, greater prizes are needed to get their money. Remember the craze over the $295-million Powerball jackpot last summer? Lottery officials defend their livelihood by asking what harm there is if someone who can afford to bet chooses to throw away a dollar on an 80-million- to-one longshot. But that is not where Powerball and other lotteries make their money. They rake it in from "players" such as Ernie Kovic, a 28-year- old Bronx waiter studying aircraft design at a trade school. Last summer, Kovic stood in line to buy $3,000 worth of Powerball tickets -- money he had been saving for tuition. Kovic told the New York Times: "If I win, I won't have to go to school. Heck, I can buy my own aircraft." Guess what? Kovic lost, as did 79,999,999 other gullible bettors(19).

There are a multitude of Ernie Kovics wasting their savings, their families and their futures chasing the tantalizing but false hopes hawked by state lotteries. Ten percent of lottery players account for half of all lottery purchases(20). The Washington Post, after examining lotteries in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, DC, concluded that they "rel 1/8y 3/8 on a hard core of heavy players, who, on average, have less education and lower incomes than the population as a whole(21)."

The Boston Globe documented how the lottery saturates poor Massachusetts neighborhoods with outlets. For example, Chelsea, an economically struggling community, has one lottery retailer for every 363 residents. By comparison, the affluent suburb of Milton has one for every 3,657 residents. Chelsea residents, many of whom are on welfare, spend nearly 8 percent of their incomes on lottery tickets. That amounts to more than $900 per person, annually(22). During a lunch break from the Boston commission hearings, our staff and I drove to another economically depressed community named Mattapan. I stood in a liquor store there and watched poor people coming in to buy lottery tickets. The scene saddened me. I asked one man, who stated he was 58 but looked more like 70, why he came in to buy several tickets nearly every day. He said, "This is my retirement plan. I'm going to hit it big." He continued on: "I play every day... I lose more than I win -- but I won $100 one time."

Before leaving, the store owner told us, "The lottery is no good. It robs from the poor. It robs from my neighbors. People lose a lot of money. The government has no business being involved." Then we learned that when the social security and welfare checks arrive, local residents line up outside the store and down the sidewalk hoping to parlay their meager subsistence into instant wealth.

It's the same story everywhere. In Texas, the poorest citizens, who together earn only 2 percent of the state's total income, buy 10 percent of lottery tickets(23). In Colorado, the 32 counties with the highest per-capita lottery sales each have incomes below the state average(24).

Lottery advocates are incredibly crafty and manipulative of the public. They link state-sponsored gambling programs to funding for education, which dupes people into believing that buying a ticket will somehow benefit children. It is a lie. School support rarely increases after lotteries are sanctioned because state support is then withdrawn. The one exception so far is the Georgia lottery's HOPE scholarship program, which pays college expenses for certain students. But even in this instance, the Georgia lottery sells $250 of tickets per person in poor neighborhoods compared to less than $100 per capita in affluent areas(25). Meanwhile, the average family income of Georgia residents receiving HOPE scholarships is $13,000 higher than the state average(26)! No matter how proponents attempt to dress it up, the governmental sponsored lottery continues its shameless exploitation of the poor.

Lottery administrators know exactly who their customers are, which is why they often target the poor with their marketing schemes. An advertising plan for the Ohio lottery recommended that "promotional pushes" take place at the beginning of the month. Why? Because government benefits, payroll and Social Security payments are released on the first Tuesday of each calendar month(27). An infamous Illinois Lottery billboard campaign in a Chicago ghetto showed a picture of a lottery ticket with the caption: "This could be your ticket out(28)." Fat chance!

Lotteries also foster a "get-rich-quick" mentality while belittling the work ethic. A Massachusetts lottery ad offered two options for "how to make millions." Let me quote: "Plan A: Start studying when you're about 7 years old, real hard. Then grow up and get a good job. From then on, get up at dawn every day. Flatter 1/8your 3/8 boss. Crush competition ruthlessly. Climb over backs of co-workers. Be the last one to leave every night. Squirrel away every cent. Avoid having a nervous breakdown. Avoid having a premature heart attack. Get a face lift. Do this every day for 30 years, holidays and weekends included. By the time you're ready to retire you should have your money." Or "Plan B",: Play the lottery.

Lottery ads such as this mock the virtues of study and work and build an expectation that almost never materializes. Harvard Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel writes: "With states hooked on 1/8lottery 3/8 money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across America must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune consigns them(29)."

States spend more than $400 million each year trying to lure residents to gamble on lotteries(30). Here in Colorado, according to the Rocky Mountain News: "The lottery spent $25,000 for a study called Mindsort to analyze the left and right sides of the human brain to understand how to manipulate player behavior. Officials say they aren't trying to hook people into playing the lottery. But page 15 of the Mindsort report... describes certain people as less likely to begin playing, but 'once hooked, 1/8always 3/8 hooked(31).'" A Maryland state audit proposed research into "what game is most effective in luring an individual into playing for the first time(32)."

Further, lotteries face little real regulation. The states do nothing that might jeopardize this lucrative revenue stream. Lotteries also are exempt from Federal Trade Commission truth-in-advertising standards(33). Thus they are free to make outlandish claims. Consider this example cited in The New Republic: "Take a current Washington, DC, lottery ad campaign for DC Daily Millions. The slogan is 'A Million a Day -- Just Play.' D.C. Daily Millions would be more accurately titled D.C. Daily Thousands: no one has won more than $5,000 in the history of the game(34)." Other state lottery advertisements are morally offensive, like the one run by the state of Connecticut, imploring citizens to "get even luckier than you did on prom night(35)." 

Lotteries also mislead citizens about the odds of winning, often advertising the top prize but giving the odds for winning any prize -- which, in many cases, turns out to be just another lottery ticket(36). In some ways it is an oxymoron to talk about lottery "winners" at all. The New York Post recently reported: "About once a month on average, a hapless millionaire winner of one of the 37 state lotteries goes bust and files for bankruptcy, experts say. That's the rags-to-rags fate of about one-third of all winners(37)."

INDIAN CASINO GAMBLING

This letter would not be complete without focusing momentarily on the fastest-growing segment of the entire gambling industry -- casinos operated by Indian tribes. There are nearly 300 tribal gambling operations scattered across the country(38), earning an estimated $7 billion in annual revenues(39). Many Americans are reluctant to criticize any aspect of these casinos, because of the disadvantaged status of many Indian tribes. Yet there are some disturbing facts that are crucial to understanding this phenomenon.

According to Forbes magazine, "Except for a few hundred people, many of whom boast only a trace of Indian blood, most American Indians haven't gained a penny 1/8from casinos 3/8(40)." The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that unemployment among Indians in that state remains above 50 percent, about the same as before the state's 17 Indian-owned casinos arrived(41). Among some tribes in South Dakota, unemployment has actually increased since the opening of casinos(42)!

A few Indian casinos are enormously lucrative, like the billion-dollar-a- year Foxwoods run by the tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe in Connecticut. With only 550 members, that's nearly $2 million in annual revenues for each Pequot(43)! The profitability of such casinos has sent thousands of Americans scurrying through their ancestral records looking for any trace of Indian blood. The Associated Press reports that "being Indian has never been so popular," noting that the number of people identifying themselves as Indians has tripled since 1970. The Mashantucket tribe receives 50 calls per month from wanna-be Pequots; some can't even pronounce the tribe's name(44). None of the current Pequot tribal members reportedly have more than one-eighth Pequot blood(45).

In many cases, Indian tribes are nothing but a front for Las Vegas gambling interests looking to enter new markets, knowing they can pocket up to 40 percent of Indian casino profits via "management contracts(46)." One city in Illinois tried a unique approach. It hired a Nevada company to recruit an entire Indian tribe in order to open a land-based casino(47).

The rationale behind Indian casinos is that they enable tribes to gain economic self-sufficiency. Yet even tribes that have struck it rich with casinos continue to receive hefty federal subsidies. How's this for outrageous exploitation of the taxpayer? The Pequots, sitting on a billion dollars in revenues per year, were granted $1.5 million in low-income housing assistance in 1996. The Tulalip Indians in Washington State (estimated annual casino revenues of $30 million(48)) used federal low-income housing grants to build themselves $300,000 luxury homes. A tribe in Minnesota refused to dip into its casino-generated $30-million bank account to fix a school with a leaky roof and insulation bulging out of gashes in the wall, preferring to wait several years until the federal government could make the repairs. Yet there is no initiative in Washington to review the support given to these and other wealthy tribes. Why not, we wonder.

Like their Las Vegas counterparts, Indian casinos have quickly become major players in Washington. Tribes spent at least $5 million lobbying Congress and the White House in 1997(50). California tribes poured some $70 million -- which they earned from operating casinos illegally -- into a successful referendum legalizing casinos, then coughed up another $4 million to gambling-friendly politicians last year. The new governor, Gray Davis, raked in more than $750,000. "It's blown the doors off everything we've ever seen in the state," said a spokesman for retiring Gov. Pete Wilson(51).

Indian casinos have a couple of key advantages over commercial operations. Because tribes are sovereign nations, they pay no federal or state taxes. When a tribe gets into the gambling business, neighboring communities are usually left to foot the bill for the increased crime, traffic and other headaches that accompany casinos. Indian casinos in general also face much less stringent regulation.

It is clear that, just as lotteries and commercial casinos exploit the most vulnerable, Indian gambling advocates are laying a trap for many of their own tribal members. The high rate of alcohol and drug abuse on Indian reservations is well-documented. New studies now show that gambling addiction rates are at least twice as high among Indians compared to the rest of the population(52).

INTERNET GAMBLING

There is much more to be said, but perhaps I've already told you more than you wanted to know about gambling. Let me close, then, with a final word of warning about the Internet. Although Internet gambling is technically illegal, there are dozens of sites in operation which allow you to bet from the comfort of your own living room. Experts tell us that gambling addiction is related to several factors, chief among these being access to gambling and the speed of the games. Internet gambling is a lethal combination of these factors. Further, what's to keep a youngster from getting a hold of Mom or Dad's credit card and literally betting the house from his or her bedroom?

For a while, Las Vegas and the corporate casino interests vigorously opposed Internet gambling, fearful of increased competition as well as potential scandals that could damage their own credibility. Suddenly, however, we are seeing a major shift. Casino Journal magazine recently "urge 1/8d 3/8 America's major gaming companies to become actively involved in promoting and sponsoring

Internet gaming activities" largely because of the vast potential for increased profits(53). As I wrote in January, the gambling industry seems to get what it wants in Congress these days. An Internet gambling ban proposed by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) did not pass the House last fall(54). It isn't difficult to guess why not. Don't be surprised if your Congressman soon starts singing the praises of Internet gambling while his or her re-election campaign gets a generous boost from the gamblers. Money is the mother's milk for politicians, and few of them -- Democrats or Republicans -- are willing to criticize or vote against the industry that provides it. Focus on the Family will keep you informed of those who get the big bucks, and then try to link those contributions with voting records. The connection is usually striking.

As I close, let me respond to a small but potent amount of criticism coming from constituents who have asked why I've bothered to serve on the Commission, and why I would waste the time of my readers by talking about gambling. The question staggers me. Let me return to the comments I made at the beginning of this letter. If the implications for families and their children are viewed as inconsequential, given the factual information coming to light, what more can I say?

Sometimes it seems as though people don't get upset about much of anything today. Richard Cohen, a liberal journalist who assured us in 1996 that character didn't matter(55), is now expressing astonishment at the apathy of the American people. He commented that this society "finds nothing immoral" -- not even the recent allegations of rape perpetrated by Bill Clinton when he was attorney general of Arkansas. That story appeared on the front page of the Washington Post! "Page one!" wrote Cohen, who then asked in disbelief, "Do you want to know what happened next? Nothing(56)."

That disengagement typifies where we are as a nation. "Just leave me alone," appears to be the mantra. Accordingly, when it comes to the curse of gambling and its implications for future generations, I fear that apathy is the prevailing attitude. I'm told that when a new gambling initiative is proposed in a state or a local community, pastors and churches (with some notable exceptions) are usually silent and uninvolved during the debate. It is as though the entire culture has forgotten why previous generations considered gambling to be a terrible curse, and why they fought to outlaw it. But now, it has become just another form of entertainment for fun-loving folks. This is why I serve, and this is why I write. 

Blessings to you all. Your financial assistance is needed at this time when the "spring slump" becomes a problem. Thank you for standing with us year after year.

Sincerely,
James C. Dobson, Ph.D
President

ENDNOTES

1. Matthew J. Carlson and Thomas L. Moore, "Adolescent Gambling in Oregon: A Report to the Oregon Gambling Addiction Treatment Foundation," Oregon Gambling Addiction Treatment Foundation, December 1, 1998; Lynn S. Wallisch, "Gambling in Texas: 1995 Surveys of Adults and Adolescent Gambling Behavior," Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, August 1996, p. 97.
2. Howard J. Shaffer, "The Emergence of Youthful Addiction: The Prevalence of Underage Lottery Use and the Impact of Gambling," Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, January 13, 1994, p. 9.
3. Scott Harshbarger, Attorney General, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, "Kids and Keno Are a Bad Bet: A report on the Sale of Keno Tickets to Minors in Massachusetts," October 1996, p. 1.
4. James Westphal, Jill Rush, Lee Stevens, Ron Horswell, and Lera Johnson, "Final Report Statewide Baseline Survey Pathological Gambling and Substance Abuse Louisiana Adolescents (6th Through 12th Grades) School Year 96-97," Department of Psychiatry, Louisiana State University Medical Center, April 27, 1998, p. 14.
5. Howard J. Shaffer, "The Emergence of Youthful Addiction: The Prevalence of Underage Lottery Use and the Impact of Gambling," Massachusetts Council on Compulsive Gambling, January 13, 1994, p. 12.
6. James R. Westphal, "Adolescent Gambling Behavior," Louisiana State University Medical Center-Shreveport, presented to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, Las Vegas, Nevada, November 11, 1998.
7. Tim Layden, "Bettor Education," Sports Illustrated, April 3, 1995, p. 69.
8. Michael E. Cross and Ann G. Vollano, "The Extent and Nature of Gambling Among College Student Athletes," University of Michigan Athletic Department, January 1999, executive summary.
9. Andrew Quinn, "Studies Find Many Teens Hooked on Gambling," Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1998; Howard J. Shaffer and Matthew N. Hall, "Estimating the Prevalence of Adolescent Gambling Disorders: A Quantitative Synthesis and Guide Toward Standard Gambling Nomenclature," Journal of Gambling Studies, Summer 1996, p. 193.
10. James Varney, "Class Conflict," New Orleans Times-Picayune, December 14, 1997, p. B1; Leslie Zganjar, "State, Industry Trying to Reach Agreement on Donation Restrictions," Associated Press, December 1, 1998.
11. Chuck Gardner, "Training the Next Generation of Gamblers," Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 31, 1998.
12. Henry Lesieur, Testimony Before the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, Atlantic City, N.J., January 22, 1998.
13. "1997 Gross Revenues (Consumer Spending) by State," International Gaming Wagering Business, August 1998, p. 13.
14. David M. Halbfinger and Daniel Golden, "The Lottery's Poor Choice of Location," Boston Globe, February 12, 1997, p. A1.
15. David Warsh, "A Rising Gorge," Boston Globe, March 4, 1997, p. D1.
16. Daniel Golden and David M. Halbfinger, "Lottery Becomes Mighty Engine," Boston Globe, February 9, 1997, p. A1, and "Lottery Addiction Rises, and Lives Fall," Boston Globe, February 11, 1997, p. A1; Fred Bayles, "Lottery is Part of Life in the Bay State," Associated Press, July 31, 1984.
17. Jeff Mapes, "Gambling on Addiction," The Oregonian, March 9, 1997, p. 1A.
18. R.D. Carr, J.E. Buchkoski, L. Kofoed, and T.J. Morgan, "'Video Lottery' and Treatment for PathologicalGambling: A Natural Experiment in South Dakota," South Dakota Journal of Medicine, January 1996, p. 31.
19. Mike Allen, "For $250 Million, Convenience Stores Beat Day at Beach," New York Times, July 27, 1998.
20. Charles T. Clotfelter and Philip J. Cook, Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 92.
21. Ira Chinoy and Charles Babington, "Low-Income Players Feed Lottery Cash Cow," Washington Post, May 3, 1998, p. A1.
22. David M. Halbfinger and Daniel Golden, "The Lottery's Poor Choice of Locations," Boston Globe, February 12, 1997, p. A1.
23. Donald Deere and James Dyer, "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Economic Impact of the Texas Lottery on Demographic Groups," Texas AM University, February 18, 1994.
24. Genevieve Anton, "Money Bet on a Miracle," Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, August 25, 1996, p. A1.
25. Charles Walston, "Has the Gamble Paid Off?" Atlanta Journal and Constitution, June 26, 1994, p. D1.
26. Marsha Davis, Gary Henry, and Thad Hall, "Evaluation of the HOPE Scholarship Program," Executive Summary, Georgia Council for School Performance, 1995; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1997 (117th edition), Washington, DC, 1997.
27. Charles T. Clotfelter and Philip J. Cook, Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 203.
28. Robert Goodman, "The Lottery Mystique: Why Work at All?" Newsday, June 28, 1991, p. 59.
29. Michael J. Sandel, "The Hard Questions: Bad Bet," New Republic, March 10,1997, p. 27.
30. Patricia A. McQueen, "Investing in Tomorrow," International Gaming Wagering Business, January 1998, p. 48.
31. Ann Carnahan, "Lottery Analyzing Players' Brains," Rocky Mountain News, July 8, 1997, p. 5A.
32. Charles Babington and Ira Chinoy, "Lotteries Lure Players with Slick Marketing," Washington Post, May 4, 1998, p. A1.
33. Ellen Perlman, "Lotto's Little Luxuries," Governing Magazine, December 1996, p. 18.
34. Robyn Gearey, "The Numbers Game," The New Republic, May 19, 1997, p. 20.
35. Jon Lender, "State Lottery Officials Apologize for Racy Ad," Hartford Courant, January 25, 1996, p. A3.
36. Robyn Gearey, "The Numbers Game," The New Republic, May 19, 1997, p. 20.
37. Paul Tharp, "Lottery Raises Issues of Cents and Sensibilities," New York Post, November 14, 1997.
38. "Native American Gaming," Research brief from the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, available at
http:/www.ngisc.gov/research/nagaming.html
39. "Trends in Gross Revenues (Consumer Spending), 1982-1997," International Gaming Wagering Business, August 1998, p. 11.
40. William G. Flanagan with James Samuelson, "The New Buffalo-But Who Got the Meat?" Forbes, September 8, 1997, p. 148.
41. Pat Doyle, "The Casino Payoff: Tribes Struggling with Unemployment," Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 2, 1997, p. 1A.
42. Michael Ridgeway, "Gambling Ventures Haven't Been Cure-All for Century of Poverty, Indians Say," (Sioux Falls, S.D) Argus Leader, July 12, 1997, p. 1.
43. Lyn Bixby, "Preserving the Pequot Past," Hartford Courant, July 30, 1998, p. A1.
44. David Foster, "Who's a Real Indian? Seeking Self-Definition, Tribes Find Conflict," Associated Press, January 27, 1997.
45. Gene Sloan, "Gamble Pays Off with New Pequot Museum," USA Today, August 7, 1998.
46. Tracey A. Reeves, "Gaming Companies Are Cozying Up to Tribes," Philadelphia Inquirer, March 16, 1997.
47. Alex Rodriguez, "Long Odds for Romeoville Casino Bid," Chicago Sun- Times, December 22, 1996.
48. "New Kalispel Casino Could Gross $28.8 Million Yearly," Seattle Post- Intelligencer, September 28, 1998, p. B2.
49. Sean Paige, "Gambling on the Future," Insight, December 22, 1997, p. 8; Pat Doyle, "The Casino Payoff: Tribal Spending Priorities Spark Debate," Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 3, 1998.
50. Philip Brasher, "Tribes Who Can Afford It Spend Millions on Lobbying," Associated Press, July 19, 1998.
51. Virginia Ellis, "Tribes Emerge as Powerful Players in State Politics," Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1998.
52. "Pathological Gambling Among American Indians," The WAGER, Massachusetts Council On Compulsive Gambling and Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions, August 20, 1996; Steve Moore, "Indians Said More Prone to Gambling Addiction," (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise, February 28, 1994, p. A1; "Pathological Gambling Prevalence Among Indigenous Peoples," The WAGER, October 14, 1997, Harvard Medical School Division on Addictions.
53. J. Mark Reifer, "If You Can't Beat Them, Join Them (Then Beat Them)," Casino Journal, December 1998, p. 6.
54. "Congress Adjourns, Gambling Matters Left Unfinished," Associated Press, October 22, 1998.
55. Richard Cohen, "Character-Issue Fatigue," The Washington Post, October 29, 1996, p. A17.
56. Richard Cohen, "The Untouchables," The Washington Post, February 23, 1999, p. A19.

Thursday, October 06, 2005

Gambling goes global, so does fraud - Casino Tropez

Gambling goes global

All bets are on

Sep 30th 2004 | LAS VEGAS
From The Economist print edition

As it becomes steadily more respectable, the gambling industry is trying to become a thriving global business

Alamy

AMERICA did not invent gambling: but with its casinos, rightly celebrated for their ever more gloriously grotesque architectural excesses, it perfected an especially effective way of separating willing consumers from their cash. After a decade of spectacular financial growth, the industry there is trying to consolidate. And not content with dominating gambling in their home market, America's biggest firms are already planning to export their methods around the world.

Helping them is gambling's new-found respectability, as well as governments' increasing interest in deregulating businesses that have typically been tightly controlled. But the big American companies also face a threat. Internet gambling has been growing with astonishing speed, even though it remains illegal for American consumers. This is a double-edged sword for the big firms. The ban on internet betting at home protects their profits in so far as American consumers can be stopped from betting in cyberspace. But far better protection would come from offering the service and using their superior brands to mop up even more business. And unless they can grab a share of the cyber-betting outside America, their expansion might fail to produce the spectacular returns on which they are counting.

The global capital of gambling is Las Vegas and a visit there reveals how the industry has evolved. These days fruit machines and roulette tables seem almost like an after-thought. Tourists take their pick of attractions—from strolls through ersatz versions of ancient Rome, medieval England or old New York—in the form of massive themed hotels. Luxury-goods shops abound. Some casinos get less than half of their revenues directly from betting.

Gambling has been Las Vegas's money-spinner since Bugsy Siegel built the first casino in the 1940s. An attempt in the 1990s to attract vacationing families by installing rollercoasters, crèches and Disneyland-style attractions failed badly. Now, Las Vegas pitches itself to adults. The latest draw is the "ultralounge", a bid to revive the lounge-lizard culture of the 1960s.

After September 11th, the city was badly hit by a drop in tourism. But it rebounded strongly, capturing a growing share of America's tourism and convention trade. And it increasingly offers high, as well as low, culture. The Bellagio's art gallery, just steps from the slot machines, is currently showing Monet paintings from Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. The Guggenheim Museum has an annexe at the Venetian. Steven Wynn, who built the Mirage and Bellagio hotels, is likely to hang his Picassos and Modiglianis in a new development due to open next spring.

Las Vegas achieved iconic status by offering a mild taste of naughtiness in a country that often lacks it. The slogan for a new ad campaign sums it up: "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." Money certainly stays. Casino gambling provided nearly $800m in tax payments to the state of Nevada last year.

Other states have followed Nevada's lead: gambling in America has more than doubled over the past decade. Turnover in casinos grew from $11.2 billion in 1993 to $27 billion last year. Turnover from all forms of gambling reached almost $73 billion last year (see chart 1).

Recently gambling has even taken on a sense of cool, as poker tournaments featuring Hollywood stars have been some of the highest-rated programmes on cable television. In August, WPT Enterprises, which runs the World Poker Tour, successfully floated on the NASDAQ stockmarket.

But bigger companies control the industry. A recent brace of mergers will, if antitrust regulators allow, create two giants. In early June MGM Mirage—itself the product of a merger in 2000 between Kirk Kirkorian's MGM Grand and Mr Wynn's Mirage Resorts—bid for Mandalay Resort Group, a rival. Together, the two firms control nearly half the hotel rooms in Las Vegas. In July Harrah's Entertainment, a casino chain catering more for the mass market, made a bid for Caesars Entertainment. The latter has one of the best-known brands in the industry, but has been lumbered with debt taken on to finance a long-overdue overhaul of its ageing Las Vegas resort, Caesars Palace.

If regulators give the nod, both of the two big firms will have powerful capital bases from which to expand in Las Vegas and beyond. On September 27th Caesars and Harrah's announced that they had each sold two of their casinos for a total of $1.24 billion. The deal was part of their efforts to convince regulators to approve their merger.

Casinos can be found in most countries, but the mass-market variety was pioneered in America. Contemporary attitudes towards gambling were set in the 1960s when the state of New Hampshire launched a lottery and brought in far more money than anyone had predicted. Today, 39 American states run lotteries, while 34 allow casinos. Only Hawaii and Utah ban gambling altogether. Moreover, states are still trying to join the party. The District of Columbia, the nation's capital, is considering allowing slot machines, and Pennsylvania wants to put them at its racecourses. California has just entered into a "compact", or treaty, with a native-American tribe near San Francisco to take a cut of what is likely to become one of the country's biggest casinos. Its projected $100m a year in taxes will help plug the state's yawning deficit.

The pips are squeaking

Success for gambling in America has bred challenges. The first is that several of the states that so welcomed casino operators are now squeezing them through higher taxes. That has been increasingly true as the states have begun to face up to big fiscal deficits created in recent years. In Illinois, top-rate taxes on casino profits now run at 70%. Michigan recently increased its tax rate from 18% to 24%.

The second threat is of saturation. Most Americans who want to gamble in a modern casino can do so within just a few hours' drive from home. The North American market is "mature", reckons MGM Mirage, and Las Vegas is a case in point—analysts have long worried about over-supply there.

With higher taxes and a saturated home market, it is small wonder that American operators are looking hungrily at opportunities overseas. They are encouraged by the fact that other countries are preparing to follow America's lead. Britain is making some of the biggest strides towards freer gambling. It has already liberalised its betting laws by reducing taxes on sports and horse-racing wagers. It is also in the process of finalising a bill to allow Las Vegas-style casino resorts in its big cities. And the country also wants to become home to fast-growing internet-gambling companies, now typically based offshore.

In Asia, Macau is inviting foreign competition for its dreary, locally owned casinos, and has already given licences to three Las Vegas companies. Mr Wynn is planning one. Sheldon Adelson, founder of Las Vegas Sands, whose Venetian Resort offers as good an imitation of the Bridge of Sighs as one is likely to find in America, opened Sands Macau earlier this year. More gambling licences are likely to be issued in future. And other Asian countries, from Singapore to Japan, are looking to emulate Macau.

Why are so many governments loosening the laws that have long constrained one of the world's oldest businesses? Gambling is an especially attractive service to tax. There is huge demand for it, and punters are mostly insensitive to price. Except for the small number truly addicted to gambling, people gamble voluntarily, but pay taxes only unwillingly. Introducing new forms of gambling—allowing, say, a lottery where sports betting is available—can often increase the overall demand for both types of punts.

Indeed, although casinos are the most visible part of the gambling industry, they are not the most important. Globally, gambling operating revenues—broadly the amount staked (minus the winnings returned to punters in the case of casino games and machines)—were $433 billion last year according to Global Betting and Gaming Consultants. Lotteries, which are mostly state sponsored, are the biggest single sector. Wagering on horse racing is close behind, although growing weakly. However, for gambling businesses, the trick is to follow punters into new markets that can grow. The biggest growth rates are in casino-style betting outside America and, increasingly, in cyberspace.

A baize patchwork

Gambling is also a big business in Europe, but there it is fragmented and disorganised, characterised mainly by a few fruit machines in bars and amusement arcades. Monaco is an upmarket haven for rich punters. France has 160 "casinos", but these are mostly small clubs away from the big cities. Europe's biggest casino is now in Estoril, Portugal. Each year Europe's gamblers place bets equivalent to 5% of the continent's GDP, almost one-third of which stays in the industry's pockets.

Britain's casino business is small. In London, most casinos are "clubs" attached to hotels. Punters must wait 24 hours before becoming a member. The poshest places, such as Aspinall's and the Ritz, are said to depend on a few rich foreigners for most of their turnover.

If its long-anticipated gambling bill becomes law next year, as seems likely, Britain's gambling industry will be shaken up. Plans for casinos in places such as Blackpool, a faded Victorian-era resort, as well as in city centres from Birmingham to Glasgow, are already afoot. London's Millennium Dome has been mooted as the site of a casino to be built by Sol Kerzner, founder of South Africa's Sun City.

But the bonanza in Britain may not be as big as some hope. The government has pulled back from a full-scale free-for-all. It wants to limit the number of big-win slot machines—thanks to the terrible odds that they offer, these provide fat profits to operators. The government has two worries. The first is that such slot machines are highly addictive. The second is that their widespread introduction in new casinos would threaten the businesses of existing smaller operators, which rely on machines that have limited payouts. Despite the government's hesitations, MGM Mirage thinks that around 10% of its global profits could come from Britain by the end of the decade, up from almost nothing today.

Other European gambling Meccas are preparing to compete. Monaco has discussed the possibility of building a new (offshore) casino resort with Mr Wynn. Casinos in Nice have spruced themselves up. Their willingness to do so is not entirely unconnected to a factor that is affecting the entire industry and that threatens America's long-term dominance: the rise of internet gambling.

More bets than butts?

Arguably, only the pornography business is as well-suited to cyberspace as gambling. There are already around 1,500 gambling websites, offering everything from casino games, sports betting and punts on America's presidential election. Up from $1 billion in 1999, the turnover of internet gambling is poised to rise to $10 billion by the end of this decade, according to a recent report sponsored by the British government. Leighton Vaughan Williams, director of the Betting Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University, says that governments have realised that maintaining domestic prohibitions on gambling only loses tax revenues as consumers use internet services based elsewhere.

A new type of online gambling, betting exchanges, has done especially well. Unlike traditional bookmakers, which bear the risk of balancing their own odds to earn a profit, these companies, led by Britain's Betfair, match gambles between two individuals, thus keeping none of the risk themselves. But their success has created controversy. Punters on betting exchanges have the ability to "lay" odds, which allows them to profit from a losing horse or football team. Recently, British police rounded up dozens of suspects in a race-fixing investigation. Ironically, the transaction trail provided by websites is a help to those trying to catch fraudsters.

The biggest challenge to the online gambling business is that it is still illegal in America, even though Americans already bet millions of dollars in cyberspace. Online betting firms have based themselves offshore, in places as far-flung as Antigua, Gibraltar and Costa Rica. The American government tries to interfere by sending out regulatory feelers to such places. Recently, however, Antigua won a WTO case by arguing that America's law interfered with the Caribbean island's freedom to trade. Britain has a declared goal of becoming one of the leading locations for internet-gambling businesses, using low gambling-tax rates and effective regulation as lures for site operators. One online bookmaker, betonsports, recently listed its shares in London.

Another technology that has quickly made a mark allows gambling via video screens. New machines make mechanical one-armed bandits seem old hat, but that has spurred innovation. International Game Technology, one of the biggest makers of the threatened machines, is crafting new ways to keep the coins coming in. Slot machines increasingly offer access to huge jackpot pools spread over a whole country. The firm develops new themes, working in much the same way as a film studio.

In Europe, where machines in smaller entertainment centres are common, video gambling is a challenge. Eduardo Antoja, of Euromat, a fruit-machine trade association, says that video games have made young people less attracted to traditional casino machines. He says that the industry will begin to offer more multi-player games and social games to fend off the threat faced by a big wave of new casinos. The European Union is trying to harmonise its laws, but that will take years.

Land-based gambling has more to worry about than just the internet. Sky, a British satellite-television provider, saw a huge increase to 12m in the bets placed through its interactive handsets during its 2002-03 financial year and is relying on betting to help make up for the slowdown of its main business. Mobile phones are likely to be the next new vehicle for betting. 3G services will allow casino-gambling games with attractive graphics and colour. Before too long, almost everyone will be able to have a taste of Las Vegas at the press of a button.

Or will they? As outlets multiply, so do concerns about the negative effects of easy access to gambling. The internet has stoked anxieties that children will be targeted. According to GamCare (a British "responsible gambling" organisation), only seven of 37 gambling websites recently tested stopped a 16-year-old from registering online. Thanks to the increasing availability of debit cards to children as young as 11, vetting the age of online punters is obviously not easy.

The spread of traditional land-based casinos also inevitably causes controversy. There is some evidence that rates of suicide, bankruptcy and domestic violence all rise when casinos arrive in a city. However, a study in 1999 by an American commission set up to assess the impact of gambling found little evidence of any rise in these social ills when casino gambling is legalised. One reason is that it is hard to separate the impact of other factors, such as the state of the economy.

Alamy Lucky for some

A harder perception to fight is that casinos, like lotteries, exploit the poor. In recent years they have been launched most often in the poorer bits of America. In the 1990s the fading rust-belt cities just south of Chicago brought in riverboats to create jobs that offset some of those lost by the ailing steel industry. To an extent that has worked: new jobs have certainly come. However, it is hard to tell how many people end up paying their wages back in the form of gambling losses.

Not so cheap thrills

Perhaps the biggest controversy attaches to "rapid-play" machines that give punters the chance to chase their losses, often using credit cards to rack up surprising debts in a matter of minutes. Australia has one of the highest rates of problem gamblers in the world, at around 2.2% of the adult population. That is due in part to a proliferation of gambling in pubs and social clubs, with a heavy emphasis on rapid-play fruit machines. Other countries are likely to try to limit the machines' spread.

But America's gambling industry is not exactly quaking in its boots. Years of learning how to defend itself at home have turned it into a formidable lobbying force. It points out, for example, that just over 1% of the adult population in any country will be prone to gambling addiction. It has donated millions to addiction clinics and other causes.

The effort has been so successful that the industry has largely shed its once dodgy reputation. But can it repeat its domestic success as it goes global? Deregulation favours it, as do the casino companies' obvious business skills. However, competition and a proliferation of outlets will drive down returns. How the big companies respond to that will decide their future more than anything else. In the short term, they will concentrate on establishing themselves and their brands using terrestrial casino outlets beyond America. But in time, further consolidation involving the internet seems inevitable. The question is how long new entrants have before the next shake-up begins. Odds, anyone?

Never Play at Casinotropez.com - it's scam scam scam

Rogue casinos to avoid: Casinotropez, Racetrackcasino and Cityclubcasino.



Wednesday, October 05, 2005

$1.5m scam 'fuelled gambling habit' of VIP member at Casinotropez.com, Cityclubcasino.com and Racetrackcasino.com

$1.5m scam 'fuelled gambling habit'


Yi Wang: facing fraud charges.

Yi Wang: facing fraud charges.
Photo: Wayne Taylor

A GAMBLING addiction corrupted an alleged con-woman into an investment fraud that cost a Chinese businessman $1.5 million, a jury heard yesterday.

The County Court was told Yi Wang, 53, of Preston, was VIP member at Casinotropez.com, Cityclubcasino.com and Racetrackcasino.com sites owned by Imperial E-club who turned over $12 million in 61 days after the alleged fraud in 2003.

Crown prosecutor Mark Gibson said Wang used a fake Australian government guarantee to seduce the businessman into investing in a South Gippsland dairy farm and a West Melbourne property.

It is alleged that in June 2003, Wang told businessman Zhan Qing Zhang the two properties were solid investments and inflated their selling prices. She said she had invested $350,000 in the properties, Mr Gibson said. He alleged she forged documents to back up her story.

Mr Gibson alleged Wang's motive was gambling and her average bet was $13,000.

Wang has pleaded not guilty to 13 charges, including obtaining property by deception, making false documents and using false documents.

Mr Gibson said Mr Zhang wired $1.5 million into accounts nominated by Wang.

He said Mr Zhang, who met Wang through a mutual friend in Sydney, became anxious because she had not sent him any legal documents and came to Melbourne to investigate.

Wang allegedly set up a meeting with Mr Zhang and a real estate agent for a tour of a dairy farm at Fish Creek in South Gippsland. Mr Gibson said the agent thought he was selling the farm to Mr Zhang, and Mr Zhang believed he had bought the farm.

Because Mr Zhang did not speak English, Wang allegedly adapted the conversation between the two men. "The accused translated to perpetuate these false ideas in a way calculated, the Crown says, to conceal to each side, each party, the true position," Mr Gibson said.

On August 16, 2003, soon after the inspection, Mr Zhang got an English interpreter and Wang's alleged actions were revealed.

Mr Gibson said Wang urged Mr Zhang not to tell authorities, saying she would repay his deposit.

The trial, before Judge Leo Hart, continues.

Just to get the word out, Casino Tropez is a crock of sh*t

Just to get the word out, Casino Tropez is a crock of sh*t.  They offer a
100% deposit bonus.  The problem is, you have to put your inital buyin PLUS
the bonus on it in play 8 times before you can cash out period.  So if you
deposit 100, get the 100 bonus, you can't withdraw a dime until you've
wagered a total of 1600 at their tables.

Jeff

Sunday, October 02, 2005

Casino Warning - Never play at Casinotropez

Casino Warnings - Never play at Casinotropez, Racetrackcasino and Cityclubcasino.
They perform unethical business pratice toward their players. They belong to this shadow company:

Imperial E-Club Limited
6 Temple Street, St. Johns, N/A 0000 Antigua

Friday, September 30, 2005

DO NOT TRUST CASINO TROPEZ

I have a different issue with them but I also would advise people NOT to play here. They are practicing very deceptive marketing and their support is not their own, but is Playtech operated support that can't do anything more for you then say "that's the way things are, live with it." I don't call that support. I could careless about a Free $10 offer. I mean, if I want to playI can deposit and play like I do all the time. If I wanted a free $10 THAT bad, trust me, I could ask any number of the casinos I do deposit at regularly and not have a problem finding several that would say yes. Because I am a good depositing player and loyal to the casinos I do play.

Well, yesterday someone showed me a Free $10 to new players at Casino Tropez. Knowing that their sister casino Del Rio offers exclsuive Free $10 offers to specific advertisers that is not valid unless through the approved affiliate, I knew this could be the same here. So I checked carefully the URL to see what advertisers domain I was on. The url started with http://www.casinotropez.com

That by the way IS Casino Tropez's correct url. So I assumed (big mistake) that since this was their main domain and the offer was hosted on their site..it was valid. WRONG! They would not honor it. They told me that it was not their site but looked just like their site. They also told me that many people did get the $10 this way. But continued that this was not their site and it was only valid through approved advertisers, even though it looks like their site, it was not. The support person I spoke to was named Anthony. He said that they have no control over this. Which I then told him that is not true and they do have control over this. Not only was it on their domain, which it is. But even if it wasn't, if they get complaints and an affiliate has an offer up that they shouldn't, the affiliate manager should contact that affiliate and ask them to please remove it and not allow them to continue making money by new sign ups they're getting using a deceptive marketing tactic. And if the affiliate doesn't comply, his/her affiliate account should be closed. In my opinion, if they know someone has a Free offer up that is not approved or valid and their getting complaints about it and are aware of it, but do nothing, but allow it to continue........ that's the same as condoning this. His answer to that was that they have complained about this themselves.

See, the person I spoke to was actually employed by Playtech, Playtech support. Playtech offers support to many of the Playtech Casinos so they don't have to provide that themselves. They don't have to hire and maintains a full staff of support, when they can have Playtech do it for them for whatever fee. Cheaper maybe for some, and less headaches maybe, but the quality cannot be so good. In my opinion, given the facts that the offer was on the casinotropez.com domain, to say this was not their site was a bold faced lie. And in my opinion if they have an offer on their site anywhere, they should honor it, period. There's nothing that ticks me off more than to be lied to and treated as if I'm that stupid. How can you trust a casino that lies to you like that? How can you trust a casino when what you find on their website they won't honor and will lie and say it's not theirs but just looks like theirs and say such stupid things? You can't know what part of their website is valid and what's not. So if it says the wagering requirements are blah blah blah... just think.. you might then find out that they don't want to honor that either and tell you that THAT's not their website either, but just looks like theirs. What kind of stupid way of handling things is that? Just so you see what I'm talking about, here's the links:

http://www.casinotropez.com/*/ex1/pop_ex1.html

http://www.casinotropez.com/*/ex1/

Look at the two links. Notice they both start with http://www.casinotropez.com.

Support did confirm with me both on the telephone and chat that http://www.casinotropez.com/ IS their site. But Anthony in chat said that the links above are NOT theirs, it only looks like theirs. Hmmm.. same domain name and it IS theirs and it ISN'T theirs. They HAVE control over one but they DO NOT have control over the other. Maybe it's their domain on just certain days of the weeks like odd days or even days. Does he think I'm a complete idiot? Apparently.

Ok, I know their affiliate program, Casino Pays offers mirror sites in zip format, you can download from within the program. I don't care for that myself. But the links above are live pages that are extentions from their main domain. The support person flat out lied. Just like when you go to their website and then click on promotions, it will go to http://www.casinotropez.com/promotions.html The /promotions.html part is how it always is and does not take you off of their site, it's just another page on their site. Same as the links above. So why do they do this and they lie to players afterwards? DON'T PLAY THERE AND SUPPORT THESE DECEPTIVE MARKETING TACTICS!!!

To top it all off, one of he last things this support person Anthony said to me during my 2nd chat with him, was: "Obviously you're not a very serious gambler or you wouldn't be making such a big deal about a free $10.00." That comment took me over the top. Mind you, this was way beyond a free $10 at this point. I was had not asked him even a 2nd time for that. That was just a low blow to try and put this on me when he had no good answer for the offer and why they weren't honoring it. The matter was then and is now about "DECEPTIVE MARKETING" and being lied to about it not being their site and all the rest of the stupid things I was told. It's about being reputable or not reputable and about being trustworth or not. And the bottom line is, Casino Tropez is absolutely NOT trustworthy. That became clear very fast.

I tried to call the affiliate side today. I wanted to talk to them and be fair about things before I made any type of negative postings. I rarely, and I mean almost NEVER post anything negative about any casino. I try to always resolve things directly and don't believe in bashing casinos or trashing them really. But this situation was just WRONG. And I don't mean that I didn't get the $10. If he would have said it's an expired offer and the web designer has been out and has not been able to take it off yet, or something to those lines.. I would have said "No Problem". But to be lied to and then insulted with the comment about me not being a very serious gambler since I'm making such an issue, is not acceptable. The lie takes all trust out the door with it.

I called the toll free number on the affiliate site and could not get through. I got some recording. I called support to see if there was another number or if there was someone they could transfer me to, after being on hold for a good 5 minutes or more, and being asked my name, account number, etc, I was told there is no other number and to email them. Which I have done. Now I'll wait to see what their reply is about whether or not http://www.casinotropez.com does not mean that anything after that IS theirs or at the very least they DO have control over it.

DO NOT TRUST CASINO TROPEZ

Casino Tropez - Deceitful marketing practices, does not pay!

"Where You Are The Star!" - Secure Online Casino with over 60 free ... - this is the beginning of slogan of Casinotropez.com. Below is the reality


I just posted myself in that string because of Casino Tropez deceptive marketing practices that they approve and allow, not to mention the way Casino Tropez speaks to players and treats them as if they're just stupid, insulting them. That was the experience I just had when interacting with Casino Tropez yesterday for the first time.

It was a very unsettling feeling to be lied to and insulted from a casino like with Casino Tropez. And when seeing that some parts of Casino Tropez very own website Casino Tropez will cop to and say they'll honor but other parts Tropez Casino willl lie and say is not theirs (but no explanation), and that even though it looks like theirs, and is on Tropez Casino's domain, it's not theirs and Tropez Casino knows nothing and can't do anything about it, wont' honor it either. That is a lie and Casino Tropez most certainly can do something about it. Casino Tropez can remove it since it's on their domain and / or if it's an affiliate in addition, Tropez Casino can close the affiliates account if it's not supposed to be up. But Casino Tropez doesn't do either and takes no responsibility and denying that their able to do either of those things... repeatedly saying that it's not them.

These people are an absolute joke and I would not trust my money at Casino Tropez or any of their sister casinos. It's sad to see such a place operate this way because it gives all Playtech Casinos a bad name. Who can you trust? Which ones are honest? Are any honest?

I believe most of them are good, without a doubt. But just like RTG, if you get casinos under the same software that are showing rogue like traits, it reflects on them all making you doubt any you come to for the first time. How can a player know which ones are good and bad for sure? If you have to spend so much time checking them out to find out if their reputable first, why not just go to Microsoft where you know they'll honor any promos on their site and you know they'll probably honor any off their site within reason, and will always be paid and so on according to terms. They follow their terms and if you do, there is no problems. Not the case at Tropez.


I recommend that you stay away from Casino Tropez and the group of casinos that Casino Tropez belongs with which includes Del Rio, cityclubcasino.com and racetrackcasino.com.

~Daera


Imperial E-club Financing Genetically Modified Coca

The war on Colombia's drug lords is losing ground to an herbicide-resistant supershrub. Is it a freak of nature - or a genetically modified secret weapon?

I've got 23 ziplock bags filled with coca leaves laid out on the rickety table in front of me. It's been seven hours since the leaves were picked, and they're already secreting the raw alkaloid that gives cocaine its kick. The smell is pungently woody, but that may just be the mold growing on the walls of this dingy hotel room in the southern Colombian jungle. Somewhere down the hall, a woman is moaning with increasing urgency. I've barricaded the door in case the paramilitaries arrive.

I drop half a milliliter of water into a plastic test tube and mash a piece of a leaf inside. As the water tints green, I notice that my hands are shaking. I haven't slept for two days, and the Marxist guerrillas have this town encircled. But what's really making me nervous is the green liquid in the tube.

Over the past three years, rumors of a new strain of coca have circulated in the Colombian military. The new plant, samples of which are spread out on this table, goes by different names: supercoca, la millonaria. Here in the southern region it's known as Boliviana negra. The most impressive characteristic is not that it produces more leaves - though it does - but that it is resistant to glyphosate. The herbicide, known by its brand name, Roundup, is the key ingredient in the US-financed, billion-dollar aerial coca fumigation campaign that is a cornerstone of America's war on drugs.

One possible explanation: The farmers of the region may have used selective breeding to develop a hardier strain of coca. If a plant happened to demonstrate herbicide resistance, it would be more widely cultivated, and clippings would be either sold or, in many cases, given away or even stolen by other farmers. Such a peer-to-peer network could, over time, result in a coca crop that can withstand large-scale aerial spraying campaigns.

But experts in herbicide resistance suspect that there is another, more intriguing possibility: The coca plant may have been genetically modified in a lab. The technology is fairly trivial. In 1996, Monsanto commercialized its patented Roundup Ready soybean - a genetically modified plant impervious to glyphosate. The innovation ushered in an era of hyperefficient soybean production: Farmers were able to spray entire fields, killing all the weeds and leaving behind a thriving soybean crop. The arrival of Roundup Ready coca would have a similar effect - except that in this case, it would be the US doing the weed killing for the drug lords.

Whether its resistance came from selective breeding or genetic modification, the new strain poses a significant foreign-policy challenge to the US. How Washington responds depends on how the plant became glyphosate resistant. That's why I'm here in the jungle - to test for the new coca. I've brought along a mobile kit used to detect the presence of the Roundup Ready gene in soybean samples. If the tests are inconclusive, my backup plan is to smuggle the leaves to Colombia's capital, Bogotá, and have their DNA sequenced in a lab.

In my hotel room, I put the swizzle stick-sized test strip into the tube filled with mashed Boliviana negra. The green water snakes up the strip. If the midsection turns red, I'll know that the drug lords have genetically engineered the plant and beaten the US at its own game. If it doesn't, it'll mean that Colombia's farmers have outwitted 21st-century technology with an agricultural technique that's been around for 10,000 years.

I first learned about the possibility of herbicide-resistant cocaine eight weeks before I arrived in South America. I was having a quiet Sunday brunch at home in California with a few friends and their Colombian guest. It was a beautiful day; we sat on the deck and chatted about upcoming vacation plans over waffles and grapefruit juice.

The conversation changed when the guest began talking about how he'd spent three years working in the military intelligence branch of the Colombian army, which has been waging a civil war against the guerrillas for four decades. His main assignment was to prevent insurgents from importing weapons and military technology.

After the US helped the Colombian military dismantle the Medellín and Cali cocaine cartels in the '90s, the guerrillas moved in and took over much of the drug trade. By the late '90s, rebels controlled more than a third of the country and had the financial clout to intensify the war and protect their newfound position as narcotraffickers. It's an extremely lucrative business. The coke habit in the US alone was worth $35 billion in 2000 - about $10 billion more than Microsoft brought in that year.

But the most intriguing development he mentioned was regular reports of Roundup Ready coca. "We started to hear about this plant three years ago," he said. "We understood then that the spraying was not killing it, but nobody wants to talk about it because it might put an end to American aid money."

US aid to Colombia totaled more than $750 million last year and has been flooding in since 2000, when Congress approved the Clinton administration's Plan Colombia, a regional anti-narcotics package. About 20 percent of the money was devoted to maintaining a fleet of crop dusters and support planes that make almost daily sorties over the Colombian countryside. (The rest of the money went to economic support, military aid, and police training.) The crop dusters fly high, out of artillery range, until they reach a designated coca field, and then descend to spray the plants with a coating of Roundup. The concept is simple: Kill the coca and there will be no cocaine.

The day after our brunch, I looked up the Herbicide Resistance Action Committee and spoke with Ian Heap, the committee's chair. Heap is a global herbicide watchdog. If a farmer in Thailand notes that a certain weed is surviving repeated herbicide applications, local scientists will collect a sample and ship it to Corvallis, Oregon, where Heap runs a private laboratory. He is funded primarily by herbicide manufacturers who want to know how effective their products are. I figured he would know something about the reported resistance in coca. "So they've finally done it," he said with a breezy Australian accent. "I've been waiting for a call like this for a long time."

Heap explained that few people knew how to genetically manipulate plants until the early '90s. Then suddenly, even undergraduates were learning the techniques. At the same time, scientific papers were published that identified CP4, a gene responsible for glyphosate resistance. By the late '90s, it's easy to imagine the narcos hiring one unscrupulous scientist to tinker with coca. "Cocaine dealers have a lot of money to do the convincing," Heap said. "Genetically modifying the coca plant is the most obvious defense against fumigation. If I were a drug lord, it's what I would do."

Heap suspects that the US government might keep such a development quiet. The herbicide would still be effective against older, more widely planted coca strains, and, for a while at least, Colombia's eradication campaign would continue to show impressive results. But eventually, as the modified strain spread, coca cultivation would rise again, and spraying would have no effect. In the interim, farmers growing the new strain would get free weeding. "It's critical for the war on drugs that this gets independently checked out," Heap concluded. "But I'm sure as hell not going down there."

To get another view, I called Jonathan Gressel, one of the world's foremost experts on herbicide resistance and a professor of plant science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "The only surprise is that the drug mafia didn't do it sooner," Gressel said when I told him about reports of glyphosate-resistant coca. "Privately, my colleagues and I have been predicting this for years."

Another way to explain the reported resistance, he said, was that over time the plants developed it naturally after repeated exposure. But in the case of coca, he estimated that it would take 20 years of constant spraying before a naturally resistant strain of the plant would establish itself. It was possible that farmers beat the odds and got lucky in the four years of intensive spraying. "But the most reasonable explanation," Gressel told me, "is that the illicit narcotics world has genetically engineered the coca plant to be resistant to glyphosate."

The only way to know for sure was to find the plant and test it.

The early evening air at the El Dorado Airport in Bogotá is thin and rain-scrubbed fresh. Outside, at the curb along the arrivals exit, throngs of people silently hold signs with names on them, but in the murky light it's hard to see. I file quickly past, heading for a line of taxis, until one sign makes me stop. It has my name on it.

Three days earlier, I'd placed a call to a Colombian geneticist. I explained that I was going to be arriving in Colombia in a few days and would like to talk to him about possible alterations to coca DNA. He cut the conversation short and asked for my flight information, saying he would meet me at the airport. I told him that wasn't necessary, figuring I'd call him when I got settled in my hotel.

Now he steps out of the shadows and introduces himself. "In Colombia, it is always better to talk in person," he says. He is a bookish, bespectacled man and seems distracted. "I'll drive you into town and we can talk."

We head for the city's central district in his old, messy car. The streets are narrow, and some of the once-grand stuccoed buildings are graffitied over with guerrilla slogans. He's either nervous or doesn't know how to drive, because he keeps stalling at stop signs. The flak-jacketed police that stand on almost every corner swivel their automatic rifles toward us as we lurch past.

We come to a stop in a historic section of Bogotá, and the scientist leads me into an empty, cavelike bar. He chooses a table in the farthest corner. A soccer game plays on a small TV by the entrance. We get two beers, and the scientist waits for the barkeep to go back to the other end of the bar.

"I would prefer it if you don't mention that we met," he begins.

He then asks me what I know. I tell him I'm just trying to figure out if this resistant strain exists, and if so, how it came into being. The scientist pauses.

"Nine years ago," he says, "a friend came to me. He told me that the traffickers wanted someone to modify the DNA. They wanted a glyphosate-resistant plant. The offer was 10 billion pesos. About $10 million."

"That's a lot of money," I say. "Did you do it?"

He smiles wanly. "No, I did not do it. I didn't want to invite that trouble into my life. These are not people you want to know. They are not good people. And if this fumigation benefits only them, I think that should be known."

He takes a sip of his beer. "So listen to me. If you can get me samples of the plant, I will extract the DNA and tell you if they have gotten inside the genetic code. If there are no signs of manipulation, then we will know that the farmers have done it on their own."

We look at each other for a second. It crosses my mind that he might be working for traffickers and will simply destroy the samples and lie about having done tests. If the local kingpins have created a Roundup Ready coca plant, they have a real interest in keeping that quiet. After all, they would be getting a guarantee that farmers will have no choice but to grow their new plant. The scientist's eagerness to help me and his surprising appearance at the airport make me consider this possibility.

But my guess is that he's genuinely curious to know the answer himself. I decide to trust him. I stick out my hand and we shake. Five minutes later, we leave the bar separately.

The next morning, I board a DeHavilland twin-engine plane for the two-hour flight into Putumayo province, the country's main coca-growing region. Colombia produces two-thirds of the world's cocaine, and most of it has historically come from this southern jungle. Over the past decade, tens of thousands of spraying missions have been flown here. US and Colombian officials insist that 92 percent of the plants sprayed in the region last year have now died. As a result, they say, the guerrillas have been weakened and will soon have to negotiate a surrender.

But the guerrillas aren't ready to be counted out yet. Just before we board the plane, they announce a paro armado - an armed shutdown of the southern region. If anybody travels, they will likely be shot. It's meant to be a show of force, a sign the guerrillas can still go on the offensive whenever they choose.

Our pilots don't think much of it. Puerto Asís, the region's capital, is heavily guarded by the military. Two years ago, the guerrillas laid siege to the town for nine months - everything had to be airlifted in, and the pilots became accustomed to running the blockade. Now, with the rebels pushed back into the jungle, our pilots calmly throttle up, and 90 minutes later we bounce to a stop on a jungle tarmac. A phalanx of heavily armed soldiers guards the perimeter, and two men with sawed-off shotguns stand beside a cagelike room that serves as the arrivals lounge.

The soldiers don't hassle me; one of them unlocks the far side of the cage and lets me out onto a partially paved road. A group of men across the street stop talking and watch me until a stocky man with a lazy eye introduces himself as Campo, the driver I had arranged in Bogotá. We get into his bright-red Toyota pickup, and before accelerating out of town he touches a picture of the Virgin Mary glued to a shiny blank CD dangling from the rearview mirror. On the map at the Bogotá airport, Puerto Asís was the last dot at the end of the last road. I watch the town fade behind us as we enter the jungle.

We drive for an hour before we come across the first evidence of violence. An oil pipeline alongside the road has been bombed, and flaming black sludge oozes out of a twisted metal pipe, sending swirling cumulus clouds of smoke half a mile above the forest. The grass below sizzles loudly. Campo keeps the car in the middle of the road. The guerrillas may have booby-trapped the far side with mines - better to stay closer to the flames, which sting my face like a sunburn.

Our destination, La Hormiga, is a jungle outpost of 15,000. It was carved out of the forest 40 years ago to house oil workers but in the '80s was transformed into a coca-farming boomtown. As we crest a ridge, the town appears below, bounded by a sharply defined line of trees that tower over ramshackle two-story cinder block and concrete buildings.

As we drive down the main drag, I see that one of those shoddy roofs covers a faux marble-floored, air-conditioned shopping palace selling imitation Versace jeans. A lady in red hot pants and a halter top window-shops pulling a pet lamb on a pink leash. A casino with rows of slot machines stands next to a dentist's office that doubles as a jewelry shop. Over the din from a half-dozen roadside discos, a man with a 3-foot-long megaphone meanders down the middle of the road reading the local news - an amplified town crier.

I spend a sleepless night at the inappropriately named 5-Stars Hotel and rise early to meet Miguel Lucero (aka Don Miguel), the local leader of the National Association of Peasant Land Users, a large farmers union. Don Miguel is a short, quiet man with a distinguished, furrowed face. Before he became a peasant leader he farmed coca, and he knows the region's farms well. I ask him if he has heard of Roundup-resistant coca.

"Yes," he says simply. "It is called Boliviana negra."

"Can you show me some?"

"Yes."

"Right now?"

"Yes."

We are hiking through the jungle. The path is narrow, overgrown, and muddy. The knee-high rubber boots I just bought keep getting stuck in the muck, and I have to pull them out with my hands. Don Miguel walks fast and confidently. He has assured me that we are well within the government-controlled territory. The guerrillas, he says, haven't been here during daylight hours for at least a couple of years.

We come to a makeshift bridge. Two slender tree trunks are suspended over a flooding river the color of milky tea. Thin steel cables run above them to give you something to hold on to. Miguel says that the land on the far side belongs to a coca farmer who now grows Boliviana negra. "Everybody is planting negra now," he says and steps catlike over the bridge.

I follow, trying not to slip into the river 5 feet below. After climbing a small incline, we come upon an arresting sight: 300 yards of devastation. An entire slope of hillside vegetation has disappeared. There's only brown-gray dirt, a half-dead tree, and withered coca plants, which I recognize from photographs. "Peruviana blanca," Don Miguel says, pointing at the dead plants. "Not resistant. This slope was sprayed last year."

We hike up the ridge, and suddenly there are healthy coca plants stretching to the horizon. On one side of an imaginary line, devastation. On the other, billowing, neck-high coca plants dotting hillsides that are denuded of all other vegetation. "Boliviana negra," Don Miguel says, pointing at the large bushes. "They were sprayed as well."

Over a lunch of pounded chicken and french fries back in La Hormiga, Don Miguel tells me that Boliviana negra appeared in the region three years ago and is now spreading rapidly across the countryside - just as the herbicide experts told me it might. The new strain is disseminated via cuttings; farmers cut off stems and sell them. Some farmers, looking to make more money, travel with their cuttings and peddle them around the region. And once a farmer grows a new plant, he can sell his own cuttings. It's file-swapping brought to the jungle - a highly efficient decentralized distribution chain.

Don Miguel doesn't know where the strain originated. He has heard rumors of a group of mysterious agronomists who develop better coca plants for the traffickers, but he doesn't know where they are or anything about them.

He does have a clear sense of how the new plant is affecting his region. At first, he says, the aerial spraying was successful, but now, with the arrival of Boliviana negra, it's affecting only those who are growing lawful crops. "The truth is that the fumigation drives us to the one thing that will survive - and that is Boliviana negra," he says. "Not bananas, not yucca, not maize."

The Colombian and US governments want farmers to grow legal crops, he explains, and in the past have paid them to eradicate coca. But though American embassy officials insist that the spraying campaign is more than 99 percent accurate, Don Miguel says that almost all the farmers he knows and represents report that legal crops are sprayed as well. He says that his own tree farm was sprayed, pushing him to the edge of bankruptcy. If Boliviana negra will guarantee income for farmers, Don Miguel says, they will grow it and have less incentive to discuss eradication with the government.

Not to mention the financial benefits. One hectare of land in Putumayo will produce $100 of corn. The same plot will produce $1,000 of coca. Plus you don't have to transport the coca - the guerrillas will come to your farm and collect it. So why would anyone grow corn? "Because if you grow coca," Don Miguel says, "you deal with the guerrillas or the paramilitaries or both, and they kill whenever they want."

Don Miguel has another fear. He doesn't believe that the US will tolerate the existence of glyphosate-resistant coca. When the authorities find out that farmers are growing the new coca, he fears it will be only a matter of time before they switch to a new herbicide.

He has reason for concern. Last summer, documents show, anti-narcotics officials at the US embassy in Bogotá quietly approached Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, and asked him if he'd consider switching from Roundup to Fusarium oxysporum, a plant-killing fungus classified as a mycoherbicide. Some species are known to attack coca; in the early '90s, a natural Fusarium outbreak decimated the Peruvian coca crop.

But Fusarium is not a chemical - it's a fungus, and it can live on in the soil. A proposal to consider using it in Florida in 1999 was rejected after the head of the state's Department of Environmental Protection found that it was "difficult, if not impossible, to control [Fusarium's] spread" and that the "mutated fungi can cause disease in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn, and vines." A switch to Fusarium would, at the least, be an escalation in the herbicide war and a tacit acknowledgment of glyphosate's failure. It could also turn out to be the A-bomb of herbicides.

Still, according to a letter sent from the State Department to Colombia's US ambassador, Uribe was "ready to learn more." The letter, dated October 3, 2003, laid out steps for moving this plan forward, but when I spoke to officials at the embassy, they vehemently denied they are considering a herbicide switch. They stated that they are thrilled with the success of Roundup.

Don Miguel admits that on one level, the spraying has been highly effective. Almost all the old strains of coca have been eradicated. What's left are small plots of Boliviana negra, but these have become more productive, in part because the spraying has killed all the other plants competing for nutrients.

US officials point to the eradication results of the past three years and argue that the plant could not possibly be resistant. A high-ranking US anti-narcotics official who declined to be identified told me that she had never heard of Boliviana negra, la millonaria, or any Roundup Ready coca plant. Another American official began our conversation by saying, "So you're here to talk about the nonexistent glyphosate-resistant coca?" And then, more forcefully, "These campesinos have zero education. They can't be trusted to know whether a plant is resistant to glyphosate." Nonetheless, I was assured that a helicopter would be dispatched to Putumayo to search for samples. Even amid increasing reports of resistant superstrains, officials have yet to find any evidence of them.

Perhaps they haven't been to La Hormiga. Everyone I talk to here knows about the resistant plant. Three hours after leaving the coca fields, I attend a meeting of two dozen heads of local farmer cooperatives - they represent more than 5,000 farmers in Putumayo - and they nod knowingly when asked about the new breed. "Nobody listens to us because they think we are dumb farmers," says one man. "The Americans are arrogant. They don't talk to the people who live here. We are the ones who are sprayed. We are the ones who live with the plants."

That evening, I meet Fabio Paz, the energetic mayor of La Hormiga, at his simple concrete house. Paz is 32 and excited to be mayor, despite the fact that in the past three years guerrillas have assassinated more than 30 mayors. He wears jeans and a baggy shirt and does not look like an important man. But two plainclothes guards stand outside while we talk, and his armor-plated SUV is parked in front of the window, presumably to deflect any gunfire or bomb blasts.

"Boliviana negra is like goaaaal for the coca farmers," the mayor shouts, jumping to his feet and yelling "goal" like a crazed Latin American soccer announcer. "Maybe the narcos bought someone off at Monsanto. There would be poetic justice in that."

Paz doesn't know where the strain came from, though he assumes Bolivia, because of the name. He also believes that once refined, it produces a different high than older strains. Either way, he says, farmers are now planting only Boliviana negra: "You can't give away the other types of coca now."

When I tell him that I am having trouble getting more than a handful of negra samples because of the guerrilla clampdown, he calls in Chucky, one of his bodyguards. Chucky is short and baby-faced, with an emotionless gaze and a handgun tucked in the waistband of his jeans. The mayor tells me that his name isn't really Chucky; they just started calling him that after they saw Child's Play, the horror movie about a child's doll possessed by a serial killer named Chucky. Paz pronounces it "Shooky."

"Chucky can collect samples for you," Paz offers.

Chucky stares at me blankly and nods. I ask if he can identify the strain, and he nods again. Chucky, the mayor explains, was a coca leaf picker before he became a bodyguard.

Twenty hours later, Chucky knocks on my hotel room door. From under his shirt, he pulls out a stack of ziplock bags filled with coca leaves. "Boliviana negra," he says and points at some of the leaves that have yellow blotches on them. He says those were sprayed a couple of weeks ago. In some cases, he says, the leaves fall off and then regrow after spraying. In other plants, the leaves stay on. This is an important piece of information. A genetically modified plant would be impervious to glyphosate.

It takes me a few minutes to arrange a mobile laboratory on the simple wooden table in my room. When placed in water with macerated soybean and canola, a chemical in the plastic test strip will bond with CP4 ESPS, a protein produced by the Roundup Ready gene. If the protein is present, the chemical turns a section of the strip red.

The problem is, the strips were made specifically to test soybean and canola, not coca. I would rather not travel to Bogotá with a backpack full of coca leaves, but after a series of the tests fail to detect the gene, I realize I have no choice.

By the time I get back to the airport in Puerto Asís, the leaves are giving off a pungent odor of broken twigs even though they're wrapped in a combination of dirty socks and ziplock bags at the bottom of my backpack. Security at the airstrip is almost nonexistent. A stout, mustachioed woman in olive-green fatigues rifles through my bag. No x-rays, metal detector, or even a pat-down. But at the last minute, she demands that my bag be placed in the hold underneath the plane to better balance the plane's weight.

I am nervous about landing in Bogotá and dealing with internal customs agents. But before we reach the capital, the plane stops in a city called Neiva to pick up more passengers. While we're sitting on the runway, the hold is opened and a group of soldiers with a German shepherd approaches. A wave of nausea hits me.

The dog puts two paws up on a trolley carrying the new passengers' luggage. It sniffs around and then drops back down. I watch with terror as the soldiers stand around chatting for a few minutes. I imagine scenes from Midnight Express, where the dumb American drug smuggler wastes away in a Turkish prison. I promise myself that if I make it out of this, I'll never smuggle anything again. The dog casually sniffs the wheels of the trolley, and then the group turns and walks away. The hold is closed and we take off again.

We land in Bogotá. There are no internal customs officers at the arrivals terminal. I catch a cab and sink into the backseat. The ride into town is blissful.

The next morning, I take a taxi to the laboratory of the scientist I met on my first night in Colombia. The leaves spent the night jammed among tiny bottles of Chivas Regal in my hotel minibar, and some have turned black. But the scientist assures me that this is not a problem. He smells them and his eyebrows go up. "Very good," he says and locks the door to the lab. It will take him a month to complete the tests.

Four weeks later, the scientist sends me an email saying that he has completed the DNA analysis and found no evidence of modification. He tested specifically for the presence of CP4 - a telltale indicator of the Roundup Ready modification - as well as for the cauliflower mosaic virus, the gene most commonly used to insert foreign DNA into a plant. It is still possible that the plant has been genetically modified using other genes, but not likely. Discovering new methods of engineering glyphosate resistance would require the best scientific minds and years of organized research. And given that there is already a published methodology, there would be little reason to duplicate the effort.

Which points back to selective breeding. The implication is that the farmers' decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope to be. When one plant somewhere in the country demonstrated tolerance to glyphosate, cuttings were made and passed on to dealers and farmers, who could sell them quickly to farmers hoping to withstand the spraying. The best of the next generation was once again used for cuttings and distributed.

This technique - applied over four years - is now the most likely explanation for the arrival of Boliviana negra. By spraying so much territory, the US significantly increased the odds of generating beneficial mutations. There are numerous species of coca, further increasing the diversity of possible mutations. And in the Amazonian region, nature is particularly adaptive and resilient.

"I thought it was unlikely," says Gressel, the plant scientist at the Weizmann Institute. "But farmers aren't dumb. They obviously spotted a lucky mutation and propagated the hell out of it."

The effects of this are far-reaching for American policymakers: A new herbicide would work only for a limited time against such a simple but effective ad hoc network. The coca-growing community is clearly primed to take advantage of any mutations.

A genetic laboratory is not as nimble. A lab is limited by research that is publicly available. In the case of Fusarium, the coca-killing fungus and likely successor to glyphosate, there is no body of work discussing genetically induced resistance. If the government switched to Fusarium, a scientist would have to perform groundbreaking genetic research to fashion a Fusarium-resistant coca plant.

The reality is that a smoothly functioning selective-breeding system is a greater threat to US antidrug efforts. Certainly government agents can switch to Fusarium and enjoy some short-term results. But after a few years - during which legal crops could be devastated - a new strain of Fusarium-resistant coca would likely emerge, one just as robust as the glyphosate-resistant strain.

The drug war in Colombia presupposes that it's eventually possible to destroy cocaine at its source. But the facts on the ground suggest this is no longer possible. In this war, it's hard to beat technology developed 10,000 years ago.