REGIONAL REPORT / GAMBLING FEVER : Southerners Hit the Road to Place Bets : Residents of states that don’t sanction gaming flock to those that do.

Gambling fever rages across the South, and a lot of people would like to cash in on it. But, in the meantime, driving across state lines will remain the only way to wager for many Southern gamblers.

In a continuing, intricate pattern of play, people from states with no legalized lotteries or horse and dog races dash to neighboring states that do allow such gambling.

Georgians, in droves, flock to Florida to play the state lottery and to Alabama to bet on the dogs. At the same time, Alabamians join Georgians in playing the Florida lottery, and Carolinians head north to buy lottery tickets in Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia.

Ed George, spokesman for the Florida lottery, said “the heaviest retailers” among lottery outlets are along the state border, usually at the first interstate highway exit inside Florida.

Meanwhile, officials in the non-gambling states are in an uphill scramble to legalize gambling. Legislatures and political campaigns are awash in proposals to cash in on the fever as proponents of gambling tout it as a way of funding school systems that are languishing on the bottom of the nation’s educational ladder, building prisons and paying for services that the federal government no longer funds.

Nationally, lottery sales are expected to total at least $20 billion this year in 31 states and the District of Columbia, with profits averaging 30% to 40%.

In Georgia, Lt. Gov. Zell Miller, who is running for governor, has made the lottery a conspicuous plank in his campaign, asserting that it could provide as much as $250 million to the state education budget. Miller, aware of how Georgians burn up the highways and shell out money to buy Florida tickets, “decided it was time to put that money to work for Georgia kids,” according to a campaign official.

Similarly, one official of South Carolina, with the Virginia lottery beckoning from the north and the Florida lottery calling from the south, declared that money is “pouring out” of his state.

But, plugging the leaks will not be easy. Here in Georgia, as in Mississippi and Alabama, lottery measures have died in the Legislature largely because of what William Boone, chairman of the political science department at Clark Atlanta University, calls the “adherence, at least publicly, to the Christian ethic about gambling.”

Never mind that illegal gambling “is going on all over the South,” he said. “That’s the bootlegging of gambling.”

Efforts to legalize gambling will succeed, Boone said, only if politicians can “hook up gambling to some moral good” and “gain the moral high ground,” which is what Miller is trying to do by linking the lottery to education.

But, of course, gambling opponents are loathe to give up the moral high ground.

The Rev. Emmett Henderson, executive director of the Georgia Council on Moral and Civic Concerns, has led the victorious opposition to a Georgia lottery. He says gambling is “another form of addiction. It’s just as addictive as drugs.”

People like Pruitt Woodall beg to differ. The Theodore, Ala., construction worker plays the Florida lottery, which he calls “a dream. It is a shortcut to riches . . . to get the Cadillac or whatever you want if you did hit.” Woodall added: “I’d love an Alabama lottery. It would save me the gas” burned on the trip to Pensacola, Fla.

While officials of the surrounding states debate the lottery, Florida profits from it. Rick Richardson owns six Groovin Noovin’s convenience stores in the Pensacola area, and each sells tickets. “The lottery is a stable industry for us,” he said. “The other states aren’t too crazy about it, but I’m glad Florida is getting their money.”