Gambling as an addiction can have quite serious social issues. It can start with a seemingly harmless pleasure of occasionally playing a fruit machine or buying a lottery ticket and end up with the selling of the family silver to put money on a horse.
Gambling can be fun if treated in the right way. Decide before you go what you can afford to spend and stick to it, lets face it if you were going out for a burger you wouldn’t then go to the Ritz and have a 5 course meal with vintage wine.
Now it is getting ever easier to gamble. Aside from the internet where online casinos are booming, governments are increasingly relaxing the laws that govern gambling. In the UK it used to be the case where a person would have to join a casino but would not be allowed to enter the casino for 24 hours, now relaxation in the laws have stopped this and they are planning for new ‘super casinos’ to be built. In Switzerland they have overturned a law passed in 1921 that outlawed unlimited stake betting and although gambling electronically (eg via the web) is still against the law, there is no way of policing it and no prosecutions have been brought. In France there is a law against casinos but there is also a law to allow them. Problem gamblers can go to a casino and tell them not to allow them in but this doesn’t always work and this law does not apply to places that only have slot machines.
Studies in the USA have shown that gambling affects over 1 percent of the population which means over 2.5 million people have a serious gambling problem. That figure can rise to over 5 percent in specific gambling areas like Las Vegas or Jersey City. This means that there are double the numbers of gambling addicts to those who are addicted to cocaine.
Young people are particularly vulnerable to this particular vice and particularly those who abscond from school or if older, are members of the unemployed. In the UK one-armed bandits (fruit machines, slots) are found in cafes, taxi offices, bars motorway service areas etc, as well as dedicated arcades of which there is at least one on every major high street. It is those seemingly innocent machines of fun that can hook the unwary into a life of gambling.
