Apr. 9, 2003 - SHREVEPORT, La. -- Something unexpected happened on the way to writing this column: I changed my mind. 

Last weekend I went to this city on the Texas border to write a column about why casino gambling makes sense for Massachusetts and Boston in particular. (My short argument: We need the dough.) I picked Shreveport because Harrah's Entertainment said its $275 million casino and a racetrack it is now redeveloping not far away is the model for what it would like to build at Suffolk Downs, the East Boston racetrack, if the Legislature goes for expanded gambling. 

And indeed what I found were two cities, Shreveport and Bossier City, that found new life in riverboat casinos after the oil and gas bust of the 1980s left the economy flat. Today, casino gambling is one of the largest industries, employing more than 10,000 people in the five "boats" along the muddy Red River. Harrah's Shreveport casino alone paid $44.5 million in state and local taxes in 2001. And the players, about two-thirds of them from Texas, love it: At midnight on Friday you couldn't find a slot machine; shouting players were three-deep at the mini-Baccarat tables. The place was jumping. 

Then, the next morning, I started talking to the suckers . . . I mean the players. 

Take Ruth Harper and Mazzie Anderson; they couldn't come from more different worlds. One is white, expensively dressed, and a very rich widow. The other is black, hobbles around on a single crutch, and gets paid by the hour at a day-care center in tiny Benton, not far from here. 

But they do have one thing in common: They are regulars at Harrah's. 

Anderson sticks mainly to the 25- and 50-cent slots; Harper has an inch-thick stack of crisp new C-notes that she pumps into the $100 slots at an astonishing pace. 

"I tell everybody you have to be totally insane to play these," says Harper, 68, who drives over with her sister once or twice a month from Mineral Wells, Texas. Sometimes she scores big: Last November she hit for $90,000. But on any given weekend she says she is willing to lose as much as $20,000 to $30,000. Harrah's appreciates her business; the machine she plays carries an engraved plaque that reads "Ruth's #1 machine." 

Anderson, 57, isn't looking nearly so elegant on Saturday morning after spending 12 hours overnight in Harrah's. The bill: $500. She and her friends come down to "the boats" as much as twice a week. Friday night was not a good night. "I don't even know what I lost," says Anderson's friend on the bench next to her. 

The glitz of Friday night had given way to the light of Saturday morning. And a little like the guy who works behind the McDonald's counter but would never eat the food, the closer I got to gambling, the more unappealing the whole thing looked. 

Massachusetts, like many states, is looking at a huge budget gap. We, of course, want everything at once: We don't want to cut services, but we don't want to raise taxes, either. Magic bullets always look better than hard choices at moments like these. 

One thing we know is that gambling leads to more gambling. The Massachusetts lottery started with a single weekly drawing, then went to two a week, added Megabucks, instant games, and Keno. No state in the nation spends more on the lottery than Massachusetts: per capita spending here is $614 compared to $249 in Georgia, the number two state. 

Louisiana now has nearly 20 casinos in all, including three Native American casinos. Will we be able to stop at one or two or three? 

Dan Turner, who has been writing about gambling for years as a columnist and editorial writer for The Times in Shreveport, says the casinos have brought jobs and the fears about higher crime rates have not materialized. But he says that if he could turn back the clock and vote again on whether to allow casinos in his state, he would vote no. 

On the other hand, he could not vote to dump the casinos now, either. It is too late to go back, he says. Louisiana is hooked. 

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