By Matthew Vaz

With recreational marijuana crossing over to legalization in New York State, there is authentic optimism that the new system of regulation will be of benefit to the communities that have long been targeted by discriminatory policing. According to the new law, the pursuit of equity will be overseen by a Cannabis Control Board appointed by the Governor and the Legislature, with the authority to grant or deny licenses to participate in the industry, in a manner that “prioritizes social and economic equity” and “reflects the demographics of the state.”[1] While these developments are encouraging, New York’s history with transforming illicit activity into budgetary salvation gives reason for caution. The largest endeavor of this kind was the tortured legalization of numbers gambling by the New York State Lottery, a historical process which featured many of the same themes of race, exclusion, and budget crisis.

The illegal numbers game involved guessing a three-digit number between 000 and 999, and was first popularized in Harlem during the 1920s. This clandestine gambling form paid out at $600 for a one dollar bet. With its many runners and clerical functionaries, the numbers game was among the largest employers in Harlem and the industry featured many black entrepreneurs who in turn financed legitimate businesses, political campaigns, and philanthropic endeavors. For the many black women who worked in the city’s illicit gambling economy, the numbers provided the possibility for economic autonomy.[2] The game spread to other communities and became broadly popular among New York’s working class. By the early 1970s, about a quarter of New York adults played illegal numbers, with the heaviest activity being in Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where numbers traditions ran strong. For many poor and working-class New Yorkers, the cheap bets and reasonable odds of the numbers game held out the possibility of turning small change into a useful sum of money. All of the major cities of the Northeast, from Washington DC, to Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, Detroit, and Cleveland featured a similar dynamic. In Chicago, Black gamblers played “policy” a predecessor and close cousin to the numbers game. Yet the scene mirrored the gambling picture in New York, with thousands of street level workers, men and women, scribbling down bets, as many thousands more wagered with excitement on their lucky numbers, drawn from children’s birthdays, baseball scores, passing license plates, and symbolic associations from their dreams.

As the game buzzed throughout the city’s streets, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) waged a war on gambling. From the end of the Second World War gambling violations were the city’s second largest arrest category, until finally being surpassed by narcotics arrests in 1966. In many respects the war on gambling carried forward the abuses of policing alcohol during prohibition while it also prefigured the war on drugs, as it was a regime of discriminatory policing centered on an illicit habit. During these years, New York City did not track arrests by race, but Black elected officials complained vociferously that their constituents were being targeted for a harmless pastime. In cities that did report arrest statistics by race, the record of the era was egregious. For example, in 1958, police in Chicago arrested 8,514 Black gamblers compared to 1,281 white gamblers. That same year, in Detroit police arrested 1,793 Black gamblers compared to only 161 white gamblers, while in Cleveland police arrested 2,278 Black gamblers compared to a mere 193 white gamblers.[3] These arrests typically followed warrantless searches, while this harassment campaign doubled as the front end of a vast shakedown and bribery system that pervaded big city police departments in the Northern United States. The bribery system was extensive, and came to be known as “the pad.” In order to operate, gamblers paid set rates to area police. Those operating outside of the pad risked jail, and frequent and unpredictable raids. While gambling arrests were a mainstay of police activity at midcentury, gambling bribes were also a supplement to police salaries.

Director of the National Urban League Vernon E. Jordan

Yet, despite the decades of police pressure, the illegal numbers game remained a vast system of employment for the urban poor in the early 1970s.[4] With money flowing through the illegal game and with the police expending resources chasing both gamblers and bribe envelopes, state legislatures began to explore public lotteries as an alternative system. As state lotteries eyed the customer base of the illegal urban game, Black elected representatives, from Harold Washington in Chicago to Charles Rangel in New York, promoted legislation to create community-controlled numbers games.[5] In a 1974 editorial titled “Legalize the Numbers,” Director of the National Urban League Vernon E. Jordan wrote, “A numbers operation could be successfully run by a public benefits corporation employing many of the present numbers runners, and plowing profits back into the community.”[6] The effort fused the language of community control and black entrepreneurship, with no exploration of the tension between left-oriented visions of government jobs programs and capitalistic goals of private business formation. Yet, broadly, the Black leadership involved saw the potential to focus the flow of gambling resources for use within the Black community, with optimistic assumptions that there would be plenty of money to support politics, business, and social services. Meanwhile, member of state legislatures, representing suburban constituencies were more narrowly focused on defraying the tax burden, as they went about supplanting illegal operations.

Hoping to stave off a state takeover of the game, thousands of illegal numbers workers protested at the office of New York Governor Hugh Carey, demanding amnesty for past crimes and the ability to continue selling numbers.[7] Meanwhile, some Black and Puerto Rican state legislators warned that dislocated numbers runners, many with long rap sheets precluding them from legitimate employment, would likely flow into other forms of crime activity. State Assemblyman George Miller, representing Harlem, pleaded with his colleagues, “There are in my community, as well as in some other minority communities, a lot of people employed in this business, and I suspect that if this bills should pass, many of those people will be out of employment … We have enough unemployment in my community as it is.”[8] Yet state legislatures of the 1970s and early 1980s were more interested in defraying taxes on suburban home owners than they were in promoting employment in poor areas. In 1980, the New York State lottery joined the other lotteries of the Northeast and began selling an exact replica of the numbers game, with no attempt to include the people who had borne the brunt of forty years of constant arrest and harassmen

Among the important lessons of the transition of numbers gambling from outlaw practice to legal budget mechanism is that so much of this controversial history has been forgotten. At present the state’s gambling regulations are tweaked and altered with little or no social and political controversy, save for the jockeying of lobbyists. It is entirely possible that, forty years down the line, issues of equity, restitution, and cautious concern for public health as it relates to marijuana could be a distant memory, as different governors and different legislative leaders fill the cannabis control board with people to their liking. Further, legal state gambling did not simply accommodate existing demand, rather it created new demand, and introduced old numbers bettors to new habits such as multimillion dollar jackpot games and scratch tickets. The institutional behavior of the New York State Lottery and the practices of the corporate gambling services sector can be actively characterized by aggressive advertising and the pursuit of endless product innovation. Will the same pattern be allowed to prevail with recreational marijuana?

Finally, the history of the lottery demonstrates the inherent dilemma involved in attempting to remake a mild social problem into a funding stream for the state budget. When gambling dips down, the state lottery explores all avenues for its full revival. Which is to say, when free adults decide to stop gambling, the state government, as a budgetary necessity, acts to draw them back in against their own interests and wishes. If we come to learn that marijuana has significant adverse health impacts on our society, will we be able to reverse course and minimize use? Or will an entrenched set of business interests, coupled with the pressure of the budget, demand that we carry on with our habits. Marijuana legalization in New York is a genuine opportunity to rectify glaring injustices and the legalization of gambling, and its subsequent shunting of the poor communities of color that dominated the industry, can serve as a historical example of the consequences of ignoring those injustices. To be sure, governance of the new industry will require more than just the passage of a law. It will require ongoing democratic vigilance and engagement.

Matthew Vaz is an Assistant Professor of History at the City College of New York, CUNY. He is the author of Running the Numbers: Race, Police and the History of Urban Gambling, from the University of Chicago Press. His Work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, and Modern American History.

[1] “Cannabis Law,” Bill no. A01248, New York State Assembly, January 7, 2021.

[2] For further exploration of women workers in the gambling economy see LaShawn Harris, Sex Workers, Psychics and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

[3] See Chicago Police Department, Annual Report, 1958; Detroit Police Department Annual Report, 1958; Cleveland Police Department, Annual Report, 1958.

[4] John Darnton, “Crime Found to be Potent Economic Force in Bedford Stuyvesant,” New York Times, October 3, 1971.

[5] Thomas A. Johnson, “Legality is Urged for Numbers Play,” New York Times, December 18, 1966; Illinois House of Representatives, Policy Numbers Game Study Committee, “Report and Recommendations to the Legislature,” June, 1975.

[6] Vernon Jordan, “Legalize the Numbers,” Cleveland Call & Post, March 9, 1974.

[7] “Albany Discovers the Numbers,” New York Amsterdam News, April 5, 1980.

[8] Matthew Vaz, Running the Numbers: Race, Police and the History of Urban Gambling (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020) 147-151.

The History of Gambling and the Future of Marijuana