Using vice to promote tourism and build an economy is not a new idea. Las Vegas pioneered it, and in the 80's and 90's hard-luck towns like Atlantic City, Evansville and Biloxi followed suit. Indian tribes have used the special status of their reservations to build casinos and lure people and dollars to reservations in the hopes of reversing years of economic misery.
The State of West Virginia itself runs a thriving gambling and liquor operation and hauls in a hefty profit. You can engage in legal gambling in most bars in the Mountain State, passing a pleasant evening drinking beer, eating chicken wings, and blowing your money on Keno. Gambling in a bar is twice the vice, and it works great. Why you can even go to the dog track and bet on horse races all over the U.S., and get stinking drunk too. All the while filling the coffers of our cash-poor state government.
Unfortunately, we West Virginians haven't fully committed to vice as a source of revenue, and so we get to sit back and watch while other towns in the U.S. build casinos and lure tourists, while we while away the hours in front of a "gray machine" at our favorite convenience store.
I propose that we legalize every vice we possibly can without conflicting with federal law. One-upmanship is the name of the game, and I say let Huntington become the sin capital of the U.S. I envision opulent pleasure palaces filled with gaming tables, bars and brothels offering the most beautiful, barely-legal women available anywhere in the world. I see the runways of Tri-State Airport filled to the brim with jets ferrying oil-rich OPEC chieftains in to town for weekends of glorious, unimaginable sin. Fair Huntington will reap the benefits, because we can tax these services at an unbelievably high rate and people will pay. For the less fortunate, why, we could just add a convenience store on to one of Cabell County's many strip joints and - voila! - a pleasure palace for the working man. All the smokes, Milwaukee's Best and chubby chicks you can stand, and at a fair price. Since all that illegal stuff already goes on anyway, why not let it fund municipal improvements? If we did that, I bet even Bill Clinton would buy office space on the Superblock.
So I say to Huntingon - Let's get some of that back-alley hooker and convenience store gambling money and put it to work rebuilding the streets and playgrounds. Sin is in. Make it work for you.
Colin Cline
Princeton
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