Las Vegas gambler sues after losing $500,000 while drunk: Is Nevada law vague on drunkenness?

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A gambler
Gambler
The case of Mr Mark Johnston who is suing the Las Vegas Casino for allowing him to lose $500,000 in gambling while he was drunk will worry many casino owners. Mr Johnston incurred the debt while playing casino in Las Vegas. He is refusing to settle this debt on the ground that he was drunk and could have not gambled with the money had he been sober. This case will be centred on the Nevada law regarding gambling activities and drunkenness.

The Nevada law prohibits casino owners and workers from allowing people to engage in gambling activities whilst drunk. The assumption is that drunk people cannot control their faculties and behaviour. This lack of control means that drunks can gamble away with all their wealth if they are not stopped.

Before they are prevented from engaging in gambling activities, however, casino owners must first satisfy themselves that people are drunk. The Nevada law does not provide any mechanism for distinguishing between a sober and a drunk person. It only describes a drunk person as one who cannot control his or her behaviour.

This description of the drunk by the Nevada law is not sufficient for casino owners to differentiate between drunks and sober customers. Different people have different levels of alcohol tolerance. For habitual drinkers the level of alcohol tolerance is very high. That is, regular alcohol consumers must consume large amount of the beverage before showing signs of drunkenness. Thus, they can appear calm and sober even though they are drunk, making it difficult to stop them from playing casino.

For non-habitual drinkers, however, the level of alcohol tolerance is low. Just with a few pints of beer these people will go crazy on the streets. Casino owners can easily identify these people and stop them from participating in gambling activities. However, alcohol and gambling seem to go together. This means that the vast majority of people engaging in casino activities will be habitual drinkers. If casino owners are to apply the Nevada law, only few of these people will be eligible to play casino. The consequence will be great firstly to casino businesses which will lose many customers, and secondly to the authorities that rely a lot on revenues from casino taxations.

A further problem of the Nevada law regarding gambling and drunkenness is that the law is one sided. It prohibits casino businesses from providing services to drunks but does not permit the businesses to withhold payments for winners suspected of being drunk. A counter argument is that a drunk person cannot paly casino. It follows from this that if a drunk person cannot play casino, he or she cannot win it.

Even though the Nevada law were to provide for the denial of payments to gambling winners suspected of being drunk while playing, casino owners may still run into the risk of legal actions. A gambling whose payment is denied because of the suspicion that he or she is drunk will take the casino business to court. The casino business will justify the payment seizure by proving to the court that the client was drunk prior to winning the games. This will be very difficult to prove as the gambler will rely on the defence that he or she was sober whilst playing the games.

Besides, any casino owner who reports that a gambler was drunk while playing games could also run into trouble with the authorities. The business will be accused of allowing the drunk to paly casino in violation of the Nevada law. The penalties for this offence will be far more than any benefits the business may stand to gain by withholding the gambler’s pay-out.

In this current case, it is not Las Vegas that has reported its drunk customer to the authority. Instead, it is the customer who had reported himself to the authority. We will wait and see the direction the judgment will go.

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