IT'S only when you have been in Atlantic City for a while that you notice something odd. There are almost no children on the beach or on the bustling 60 foot wide boardwalk with its souvenir stalls and fudge shops.
Nor are there many very young people to be found in the dozen huge casino hotels which make up the strip in Atlantic City - Shoboat, Resorts International, the Sands, The Claridge, Bally's Park Place, Caesar's, Trump Plaza, the Taj Mahal, Trop World, Bally's Grand, Harrah's Marina and Trump Castle.
This gambling mecca in New Jersey is the most visited spot on the eastern seaboard, and the aim of the casino owners is to attract only grown ups with cash and credit cards.
There are no clocks inside the cavernous gaming halls, nor windows, so time becomes meaningless. There is constant noise as thousands of electronic slot machines click and squeal and spew coins into metal trays.
It used to be that you had to travel to Atlantic City or Las Vegas to indulge the gambling habit, but such scenes are duplicated now in casinos in 27 American states, most of them built in the last five years. America in the 1990s has been caught up in a phenomenal gambling craze. Casinos today provide jobs for one million people and make 40 billion in profits.
It started on native American reservations. Over 140 tribes in 26 states have built casinos since Congress passed a gaming act ink 1988. Gambling is the economic engine taking Indian tribes into the 21st century, said Mr Michael Brown, chief executive officer of Foxwoods, the largest casino on the North American continent.
Foxwoods is run by the 350 member Pequot tribe in the cedar forests of Massachusetts. It draws 50,000 visitors daily, employs 11,000 workers in a region hit by defence industry downsizing, and pays more in taxes - $137 million - than any other state industry.
State governments began changing their laws to cash in on the casino bonanza. Only two years ago, Harrah's casinos predicted that 95 per cent of Americans would live near a casino by 1999. But in the last two years, no new state has legalised gambling; America is taking a closer look at its casino culture and what it does to communities.
Most Americans (89 per cent) approve of gambling, but a shoestring anti gambling movement has grown up and is making headway with legal challenges against new casinos. It is led by a 55 year old Methodist minister from a Mississippi town, the Rev Tom Grey, who accuses the gambling moguls of making their money from the poor and middle classes.
Grey's supporters maintain that communities which welcome casinos as economic saviours almost always find that inflated expectations turn into broken promises, as found by Robert Goodman when researching a book on gambling called The Luck Business.
Small neighbourhood businesses suffer. Casinos provide cheap meals to keep customers from straying, and locals blow their spare cash in slot machines rather than neighbourhood cafes or shops.
Visitors often just drive across elevated highways over ghettos of poverty to get to casino car parks, as happens in Atlantic City. Here the number of neighbourhood restaurants dropped from 243 to 146 in the first 10 years after casinos were legalised in 1977, although the number of city centre restaurants soared.
US News recently did a computer analysis of 55 counties where casinos were established between 1990 and 1992 and found little to suggest they created significant economic expansion. An Illinois commission got similar results. It found that most gambling is done by local people, so existing money is just moved around. Las Vegas flourishes simply because it is a tourist destination.
Gambling provides states with $1.4 billion in annual taxes. But for every dollar gained, two or three go on increased police patrols and the treatment of addicts, according to one academic study. In Iowa another survey found addiction increased from 1.7 to 5.4 per cent of the population in the four years after a riverboat casino opened.
These figures mean a high cost in broken families and bankruptcy. The crime rate in towns with casinos also jumped by 5 per cent, while crime round the country fell by 2 per cent, US News found.
Inside the casinos, on the other hand, a secret police culture flourishes. The Taj Mahal in Atlantic City employs 309 surveillance agents to watch gamblers and attendants through video cameras hidden in 534 glass bubbles among the chandeliers, to stops thieves creaming anything off a cash flow of some $80 billion a year. Security guards have absolute authority, and can eject people for winning consistently, or for their looks.
Congress is expected to set up a national commission soon to study the impact of casinos on America. This has the support of President Clinton and the Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole, and of social conservatives like the Christian Coalition.
But no one is betting Washington will shut the industry down. Between January 1993 and October 1995, casino executives contributed $3.1 million to the Democratic and Republican parties.
Which by any standards looks like a safe wager.