The urge to scratch

Tales from the dépanneur lotto counter

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

From his nondescript dépanneur on the western outskirts of St-Henri, Joe sells $500 worth of lottery scratch cards a day. Big sellers are Bingo and Mots cachés. Slower sellers are the glowing gold Roue de Fortune and the $5 ticket Richesse Instantanée. The Mega Millions, at $25, barely sells at all.

Five hundred dollars a day pouring in from the residents of one of the most economically depressed districts on the island. Five hundred dollars to one dépanneur alone. And the new tickets keep coming. "Every month they change it, make something new. Last month it was Poker; this month, Lucky 7," says Joe. He makes five per cent profit off the sales, some $25 a day.

Why do people spend so much money on them? Answers vary according to the dépanneur owner. There is the obvious: "People want to change their situation," says Georges at Dépanneur 7 Jours. "They think they're going to win." And the not so obvious: "People with no jobs do this," says Chow at Dépanneur Lalonde. "They have nothing to do, they do this."

Old people are especially faithful buyers of scratch lottery cards. "Even in snow and rain they'll come in for their ticket," says Chow. Claudette, at the Dépanneur Laurion, concurs. "They're on pensions. They don't go out. They have nothing, so they scratch."

Ticket to insanity

There are dépanneur owners who state baldly that some scratch lottery buyers are insane. "It's very sick. It's crazy. It's such a waste," says Christian at the Dépanneur Proprio in Pointe St-Charles. "I have people come in here and buy five or six the same day. They come back with a winning ticket, then buy three more with the money, don't win anything and then come back and buy some more anyway. It's amazing." He says a lot of tickets are sold on the first of the month when welfare cheques come, or the 20th when family allowances are received. He sells $3,000 in tickets every week.

You get to recognize the ones who come in compulsively for scratch cards, says another dep owner who prefers to remain unidentified. She sold about $100 a day in tickets to one man for a while. He's now imposed a ban on himself from entering the store for a month. "We'll see how it goes," the owner shrugs.

Lorraine Lebeau, executive director of Gambling Help and Referral, says most of the people calling the organization are seeking help for a video poker addiction, but the number of calls from disturbed scratch lottery buyers, while still small, is rising. This year, according to Lebeau, there were 110 requests for help in dealing with a scratch lottery problem, up from 26 the year before. And Lebeau says a lot of people don't even realize compulsive scratch card buying is gambling.

"When people call, it's for varying degrees of emergency. There are some who are just beginning to realize that they're putting a lot of money into this. And at the other end, we've got people who are in fact broke and even have legal consequences of their playing."

Gambling Help and Referral workers' job is to calm a caller down if he or she is upset or suicidal, and then refer them to a support group or treatment centre. There is currently a two- to three-month waiting list for places in gambling treatment centres.

How do people get into these messes in the first place? Claudette of the Dépanneur Laurion in explains her $2,000 to $3,000 in weekly scratch tickets sales this way: "Some people around here live just on hope. Except you have to pay for hope."