Gambling: political expediency and the harsh reality of problem gamblers

In the past 30 years, legal gambling has proliferated. In North America 150 to 200 years ago gambling was a popular activity, though generally illegal. The essence of the activity was 'sharpers' or 'tricksters', gambling operators and in some cases players who used artifice and guile to supplement their natural skills, trying to fleece 'suckers'. The trickery involved marked cards, loaded dice, dishonest dealing, and unbalanced roulette wheels, and sometimes involved conspiracies among two or more players.

An interesting archetype was the 'chivalrous bystander', a person of supposedly high character who had expert knowledge of the gambling scene from having played the games and hence the ability to spot cheaters. These gentlemen ferretted out crooked gamblers, beating them at their own game, and restoring suckers' losses. A chastened sucker had to swear a solemn oath not to gamble any more.

Accounts of gambling in Australia suggest similarities to what I have just outlined. The games may be somewhat different (horse racing was more prominent here and two-up never took hold anywhere else that I know of), but you see the same themes.

Gambling was characterised by exploitation and corruption, and aimed at the financial ruination of innocents foolish enough to get trapped in the games. How does that scene compare with what exists today?

Early games were mostly illegal; today ours are legal. Early gambling grew organically out of the local community; today's gambling did not appear because of citizen demand but was generally imposed on the populace by governments. The beneficiaries of early games were the sharpers and tricksters, whereas today it is governments, the gambling industry and, in some instances, charities or worthy causes. The sharpers and tricksters had no compunction about taking suckers for their last dime; today the same mentality reigns but we mask our intentions by espousing "responsible gambling" and providing treatment for the unfortunates who become addicted to the activity. The sharpers and tricksters blatantly cheated to win consistently, our games are generally honest and fair. Cheating is not necessary because of the generous house edge.

When gambling excesses became too much to take in earlier times, citizen vigilante groups corrected the situation by banning the gamblers, tarring and feathering them or, in some cases, hanging them. There is nowhere near the same level of accountability for gambling operators today. The worst that can happen is losing your licence or being voted out and even these possibilities are unlikely. Fighting, chip stealing, pocket picking, and thievery characterised the ambience of earlier games. So it is today, albeit there are new criminal wrinkles such as money laundering, counterfeiting, and credit card fraud.

Women were marginally involved in frontier gambling but are heavily involved in some formats today (particularly, lotteries and pokies). Both then and now the unwary and addicted were victimised.

Early gambling was part of the cultural heritage; today's commercial gambling is driven by state and industry economic exigencies. Modern commercial gambling has been sanitised and legitimated because of the involvement of governments and publicly traded corporations. Cosmetic changes can be made to improve the image of gambling but underneath it is still what it always was.

Commercial gambling today is similar to yesteryear's frontier gambling: they are both 'hustles'. A hustler is a type of con artist, and conning involves manipulating others' impressions of reality, and especially of one's self, creating in effect, false impressions. Hustles or 'con-games' work because of the perennial willingness, if not eagerness, of people to get something for nothing. The hustler's main aim is the 'short con' - using a scheme to take the sucker for the cash he or she has on them at the time, or as much of it that the victim will part with.

Sometimes hustlers go for a 'big con' where the essential feature is 'putting the mark on the send' - getting the person to come back with a much larger sum - which may mean taking money from savings, selling investments, borrowing, even stealing. The ideal 'mark' or sucker', is the player who does not realise it is impossible to win in the long run and makes him or herself available day after day for more action. At some point the mark may realise that he or she is being taken and may retaliate by 'blowing the whistle'. In a street hustle that means threatening to call the police. The hustler attempts to 'cool out the mark', that is, console and sympathise with the victims, telling them they were unlucky, that a big win is just around the corner; in short, whatever it takes to assuage the sucker's anger.

Governments attempt to 'cool out the marks' first by saying that the money goes to good causes (even when the lion's share goes into general revenue) and by saying that gambling is only entertainment, just a harmless amusement.

Second, a common justification for promoting gambling is that "everyone wins", gambling creates jobs, pumps money back into the economy and revenues into health care, education, and cultural programmes. The truth is that there are far more losers than winners - but this is an admission that few governments are willing to make. They may grudgingly concede that excessive gambling can cause problems but they pass the buck. It is not them as monopolistic gambling promoters that are responsible for creating addiction and inciting crime - disordered individuals who cannot control their appetites are at fault.

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.

Can this situation be remedied? I am hopeful that it can but to regulate gambling properly would involve complicated tradeoffs among goals, conflict among social groups, and most of all, legislators with spines. First, governments have to recognise and be candid about the fact that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to gamble. The intricate combination of gambling formats, contexts, and player competencies produces distinctive gambling outcomes and behaviours that range from hazardous to salutary.

In my view, a salutary gambling experience is one that is beneficial to the participants and not harmful to society. It includes gambling formats that require an element of skill, are honestly run and provide fair odds; and are played by mentally capable individuals who:

• have met their personal, social, and vocational responsibilities;
• are using discretionary funds that they can afford to lose; and
• are treating the activity as a pastime and not a compulsion.

A hazardous gambling experience is one that jeopardises vulnerable individuals and endangers society at large. It includes long hours spent playing non-skilled, continuous-type games featuring predatory odds by disordered gamblers who can ill afford to lose. An obvious challenge for legislators is to recognise these differences and enact policy that facilitates salutary gambling and constrains hazardous gambling.