Gambling: political expediency and the harsh reality of problem gamblers

Third, the gambling industry has joined gambling researchers and treatment specialists in rallying around the concept of "responsible gambling", a motherhood notion that allows governments and the gambling industry to claim they are acting as good corporate citizens and permits healthcare professionals and academics who support this approach to further their treatment and research agendas by obtaining funding and grants.

While sounding reasonable on the surface, there are problems with this unholy alliance, such as the potential for compromised independence and integrity. For example, in Canada the agencies authorised to deliver problem gambling treatment and prevention programmes are affiliated with governments and in most cases funded directly from gambling revenues. Invariably, when push comes to shove these treatment agencies side with their political masters and ignore the public interest. In the same vein, the largest research grants to study gambling issues come from governments or the gambling industry - pretty much guaranteeing that the research topics will be safe and unlikely to rock any boats.

Skeptics think the responsible gambling initiative is a convenient public-relations tool for the industry because down the line it may help them fight product-liability lawsuits. They also question the industry's level of commitment to responsible gambling. If problem gambling was significantly reduced or eradicated, the industry would lose more than one third of its revenues.

For individuals, responsible gambling means knowing your limits and gambling within your means. Does it mean the same to the industry? Not really. The only limits on the industry are the few that governments impose as well as market forces.

Two principles undergirding responsible gambling programmes are 'informed consent' and 'duty of care'. The fact that gambling is a potentially damaging behaviour means that the decision to gamble should be informed; gambling providers need to tell players about odds and safe gambling practices; and not in a passive way. Australia does a better job of this than Canada.

Duty of care is a government responsibility in managing public resources and programmes. It means taking precautions to protect the safety and welfare of citizens and includes actions such as research, planning, and consultation before initiating new programmes, reducing the risk of harm, and not exploiting at-risk or vulnerable groups. Most governments are lax on duty-of-care issues where gambling is concerned. They drop gambling formats on an unsuspecting populace overnight without having consulted the people or done consumer-impact research and, of course, the most popular games are the most dangerous and most likely to afflict the vulnerable. Compare this to getting a new drug approved: the drug must go through four phases of rigorous scientific testing just to achieve a probationary status, all of which takes years.

Researchers know that many players harbour fundamental misconceptions about how pokies work, which in turn impairs self-control and causes them to act in ways that jeopardise their own, family, friends, and employers' best interests. Conveniences such as note-accepting machines and on-site ATMs expedite the road to ruin. Even though a relatively small portion of players become problem gamblers or, to continue the analogy, victims of the con, they contribute more than 40 per cent of the losses.

A constant theme in gambling-policy documents is the idea of achieving a balance between economic growth and social responsibility. This seems like a sensible objective but we are never told what a proper balance between these two divergent goals is, or if it is even achievable. By being heavily dependent on gambling revenues, governments must ultimately choose between their own and the electorate's best interests and when there is a crunch the economic imperative wins out. When mercenary motives prevail, you find borderline unethical practices such as:

• providing hard-core gambling formats that are known to induce excessive gambling and placing them in easily accessible locations;
• offering games that have unfair odds and poor payout structures;
• marketing and promoting gambling via deceptive and misleading ads, and
• allowing the demands of special-interest groups to override the public interest.

A buzzword found in nearly all gambling-policy manuals is 'integrity'. With integrity a byword of state gambling policy, you might expect an administrative structure that separates the revenue-generation operation of gambling from the regulatory side and willingness on the part of government officials to openly discuss gambling policy. These are rare occurrences where I come from.

I find government officials extremely wary about speaking publicly on gambling issues. I assume this is because it is a controversial topic and there is a good chance their arguments will be exposed as flaccid and unsound. As a result, they hide behind obfuscating publicity flacks who spew the party line. Governments are in gambling up to their eyeballs and profit immensely from the activity - but they go to great lengths to dissociate themselves from it.

According to Mary Jane Wiseman, an American academic, our difficulty in regulating gambling stems from a clash over which value is pre-eminent: freedom or virtue. Wiseman says that freedom has triumphed over virtue and, in a gambling context, this means that predation and pecuniary self-interest trump the common good. From her perspective our priorities are topsy-turvy; that is, governments are over-balanced toward the economic benefits of gambling at the expense of upholding their covenant to promote the general welfare and virtue of the people.