Powerballmania has come and gone once again, and in the aftermath, a dozen plant workers of modest means will share millions of dollars in prize money.

Unfortunately, the Powerball story doesn’t conclude with this particular happy ending. For the growing numbers of Americans addicted to gambling, it will be just another reason for believing that they, too, can win big provided they spend more on lotteries and at casinos.

For more than 25 years, I have worked at Rescue Missions, using the power of Christian faith to help addicts stop their destructive lifestyles. The toll that addiction can take on a human being is fearsome, whether that addiction involves drugs, alcohol or gambling. That’s why the Powerball mania and its results have been so disheartening. For weeks, it seemed, one could not watch a newscast without seeing a story about how some lucky person was destined to become rich.

Most of this coverage focused solely on the riches to be had - the boats, fast cars and homes the winner would buy with his new-found wealth. The larger reality of state-approved gambling is considerably different. It includes addiction, despair and ruined lives, husbands who have lost life savings (at the Sunshine Mission in St. Louis), wives forced to sell engagement rings to pay for their husbands’ gambling debts (at the Peoria, Ill., Rescue Mission) and general family breakdown (nationwide).

Gambling partisans - not to mention some members of the media who report in dazzling superlatives - have turned a blind eye to the damage that gambling causes.

Moreover, those long lines of people waiting to buy Powerball tickets that Americans saw on their television sets did not form in Bel Air, Calif., Bloomfield. Hills, Mich., Shaker Heights or Potomac, Md. More often than not, those lines were in America’s inner cities. The people waiting in line are the ones least able to afford the luxury of throwing away money on 100 million-to-one pipe dreams.

Our surveys of homeless men and women confirm this point. Nearly one in five at our missions cite gambling as a cause of their homelessness. More depressing, nearly two in five still gamble or play the lottery occasionally.

These findings are consistent with other dispassionate studies. Take South Carolina, which is in the midst of a bitter public debate over legalized video poker. A University of South Carolina survey this year of people playing video slots concludes that as many as one in five show signs of dependency.

For even the most cynical observer, the message is clear: Gambling destroys lives. State lotteries and casino gambling are creating a new generation of homeless addicts coming to rescue missions in need of our help. Gambling, particularly lotteries and casinos, has spread like a brush fire across America during the past decade. State and local officials have seen it as a painless way of raising money  - never mind that it comes from those least able to afford it.

Democrats, who traditionally have talked loudest about helping the poor, remain strangely silent. Republicans, who like to speak of traditional values, also decline to take a stand. The commendable exceptions - such people as Sen. John Ashcroft, a Republican of Missouri, and Reps. Frank Wolf, a Republican of Virginia, and John LaFalce, a Democrat of New York - unfortunately are few.

We in America’s rescue missions don’t ask much from government, but we would at least request this much: that it not make our work more difficult by promoting lotteries and cutting sweetheart deals with corporate gambling executives that will foster addiction, family breakup and homelessness.

McMillen is president of the International Union of Gospel and executive director of the Water Street Rescue Mission in Lancaster, Pa. (Washington Post)