Are casinos fuelling an epidemic of gambling addiction? Don’t bet on it
Good.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure the super-casino will be utterly ghastly from an aesthetic point of view. Apparently, it will feature a full-size replica of the White House in Washington which will be used as “a banqueting facility” and to host wedding receptions. Yuck!
But a threat to Western civilisation? Hardly. Currently, of course, casinos are illegal in the Republic. Gambling law, much of which dates back to the 1950s, imposes significant blocks on what was once considered a dodgy pastime, as if even a glimpse a green velvet table would propel us all towards a life of poker-fuelled debt. Today, however, gambling has become more socially acceptable.
Still, there will be those saying that Ireland faces an epidemic of gambling addiction and that lives will be ruined as dead-eyed punters lured by the promise of big-money prizes become hooked, mesmerised.
But isn’t there something unpleasantly patronising about such hysteria? It reminds me of the self-righteous woman who complained to Dr Johnson that the poor spent their money on drink and gambling. To which Johnson replied, “And what else should they spend it on?”
The idea of wealthy buffoons ruining themselves at the baccarat table used to be seen as a bit of a laugh. There was a time when the gaming table was even seen as a place of sophistication and style: the original James Bond film, Dr No, begins with Bond at the roulette table. Yet put an ill-educated 19-year-old behind a one-armed bandit in a small-town shopping arcade and suddenly we have a serious social problem, a public health crisis even.
Gambling (like shopping or using mobile phones) is today increasingly talked about as an addiction, akin to that of hard drugs. “Addicted” individuals are seen as unable to control what they are doing, and so need protection from temptation.
That kind of language seems based on the idea that people can’t help themselves when in fact they can. Defining every compulsive experience as a kind of illness ends up convincing people that there is little they can do to overcome their difficulties. It makes everything into an accident. It says, “Oh you have a certain propensity and that is why you do what you do”. There is even talk — mainly in America — of a “gambling gene” that makes some people become hooked on the slots or the horses. This disease model of addiction discourages people from facing up to the uncomfortable truths of why they spend too much time on slot machines or have 15 drinks instead of three.
So people who scoff too much chocolate aren’t just being greedy or comfort-eating to avoid something else — they apparently have a medical addiction triggered, supposedly, by the “love chemical” phenylethylamine found in chocolate. And Michael Douglas and Bill Clinton are (or were) not just allegedly serial womanisers or cheats who could stop sleeping around if they really wanted to; they are just a poor, innocent “sex addicts” who could not (or cannot) control their urges.
We should have little time for the idea that every gambler is a short step from becoming a problem gambler, and that these problem gamblers are somehow zombies on a path to self-destruction.
If you talk to alcoholics now they will say they can’t overcome it, that they have to live with their “disease” forever because they can’t control their behaviour and need to be pitied. But, with the exception of a handful of obsessives, people gamble as a hobby, not a lifestyle. Gambling is something that the majority of people do on occasions in their free time, for a thrill and for a laugh — rather than something that dominates every aspect of their lives. It is a pastime, not a disease.
Most people who gamble know the deal: and they are perfectly capable of deciding when to raise — and when to quit. The lotto, far more effectively than any sermonising cleric or earnest addiction therapist, has taught us the absurdity of thinking that we can beat the odds. We are wise to the pointlessness of a flutter.
As a general rule, convincing people that they are zombies unable to resist temptation and powerless to influence events in their lives is not a good way of going about things. And telling problem gamblers that they are sick or diseased is likely only to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most of them will use their own volition to get a life.
A lot of people drink alcohol and only a few of them become addicted — and quite a lot of people gamble and not too many of them become addicted. Worrying endlessly about the creation of more incurable gambling addicts because super casinos are opening is like fretting about more alcoholics every time a new bar opens on your street. We don’t have to give in to our vices.
True, some people become problem gamblers. These people may find the arrival of a casino on the road from Cork to Dublin a temptation too far. Yet equally there are those who cannot cope with the temptations of alcohol, fast cars or young children in bathing costumes. To attempt to prohibit things on the basis that it will save a section of the population from succumbing to their weaknesses is no way to run a country.
As for whether the companies owning casinos wish to encourage uncontrolled spending, they make their money from a small percentage of each pot.
So if you lose your money, you can no longer be their customer. And besides, when you lose your money you don’t lose it to the casino, but to the other players. In the poker company’s eyes, the ideal situation is that no one loses or wins very much — they just want you to keep playing for as long as possible.
In my experience, serious gamblers tend to be very rich. They can afford to fund their fun. The rest of us are not fool enough anymore to throw the deeds to our property on the gaming table.
Critics should look to Macau, the gambling capital of Asia. At the grossest casino of them all, gondolas drift through faux-Venetian canals. Family restaurants and play areas are juxtaposed with every sort of shop. The casino takes up only a third of the space. Fruit machines cover a quarter of the floor. Most people seemed more interested in the Disneyland spectacle than in throwing away their life-savings on the baccarat table.
I saw no drunks, no broken men or women, no one even discernibly penniless. Macau’s casinos are fantasies of design and all-age-group activities, with every conceivable eaterie thrown in, too. Not very different from a themed shopping mall.
In a free society, people are at liberty to gamble, much as they are at liberty to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes and engage in other practices which, if indulged to excess, can have terrible consequences.
The Government’s responsibility is to provide a framework of regulation — and then stand well back and collect all those nice taxes.
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