It starts with aggressive marketing in Asian communities to entice customers to Encore Boston Harbor and other casinos in disproportionate numbers — three times their share of the population, according to one survey of Encore patrons. All day long, free shuttle buses pull up near Boston’s Chinatown gate, and other places where large numbers of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Korean people live, to speed residents to the casinos.
There, the casinos encourage gamblers to make self-destructive choices, not just with slot machines engineered to keep them playing, but by offering loans — sometimes enormous — that let them keep wagering when their own money runs out. And when the loans come due, the casinos collect aggressively…