Proposal Targets Young Gamblers Amendment Would Raise Age Limit For Montana Gambling

A Big Timber, Mont., legislator is making another try this year to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot giving the Legislature authority to raise the legal age for gambling.

The proposal by Republican Sen. Lorents Grosfield failed to get enough votes in the 1995 Legislature to be placed on the ballot.

On Tuesday, several church-related and anti-gambling groups testified in favor of the measure in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The panel promptly endorsed the proposal 9-1, sending it to the full Senate for its consideration.

Grosfield’s Senate Bill 157 proposes a constitutional amendment allowing the Legislature or voters to set a minimum legal gambling age. The Montana Constitution now grants no such authority, so anyone who is an adult - age 18 or older - can gamble.

Grosfield said he wants to raise the gambling age to 21, both to prevent high school students from gambling and make the age coincide with the drinking age, since almost all legal gambling occurs in taverns and casinos that serve alcohol.

Statistics nationwide show that young people are more susceptible to becoming compulsive gamblers, and allowing high-school students to play video gambling machines creates peer pressure among their friends to follow suit, he said.

“It’s legal for a lot of high school kids to gamble and I don’t think that’s appropriate public policy,” Grosfield said.

Supporters maintain that keeping 18-year-olds out of bars and casinos would help alleviate discipline problems at some schools and would give young people less of a chance to become compulsive gamblers.

Opponents, including several young adults who testified, said the amendment would weaken the rights afforded 18-year-olds as adults under the Montana Constitution. “I’m here to testify in favor of adulthood and adult responsibility,” said Brian Popiel, 21, of Bozeman.

Grosfield’s measure would require approval by two-thirds of the Legislature and then be up for voter approval in 1998. The earliest the Legislature could actually act on the gambling age would be 1999.