Gambling Watch UK confirmed that recent research, focusing on problem play and problem players rather than on problem products, was conducted by companies having a history of contracts with the gambling industry. Research conclusions were purposely complicated and muddled, resulting in lack of any corrective action and sustaining the status quo.
Form of Government-Sanctioned Gambling
Cash from Casinos Make Native Americans Poorer
For more than 25 years, the casino lobby has told the American people that casinos are the engine to help Native American tribes prosper. Now The Economist, the world’s leading international magazine, spotlights how casinos have actually made tribal members poorer.
2015 How cash from casinos makes Native Americans poorer
Study finds homeless are 9 times more likely to become gambling addicts
Researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital found evidence that link pathological gambling to an increased likelihood of homelessness.
2014 Gambling addictions are nine times more likely among homeless
Expansion of Casinos Increases the Risk of Children Becoming Addicted Gamblers Later On in Life
This study commissioned by the British Columbia Lottery Corporation shows a link between a parent’s gambling activity and their child’s attitude toward and participation in gambling.
“Youth who report that their parents have gambled in the past year have a significantly higher participation in various gambling activities than youth who report that their parents have not gambled in the past 12 months,” the paper stated.
An addictions psychiatrist Shao-Hua Lu says the expansion of casinos increases the risk of children becoming gamblers later on in life. According to Lu, the likelihood of a person developing a gambling problem as an adult is directly related to their parents’ gambling habits. “It’s no different from how increasing smoking exposure increases subsequent likelihood of smoking addiction.”
Regional casinos breed higher rates of family neglect
One of the many negative effects of the predatory marketing and addictive offerings used regional casinos is it leads ordinary citizens to commit gross acts of family neglect. Children left unattended in casino parking lots while an adult is inside gambling is a common example. This story from The Baltimore Sun reports on another form of family neglect: senior citizens being neglected by those charged with their care because of commercialized gambling.
Music and sound effects contribute to why you keep losing at slot machines
A research team at the University of Waterloo has done extensive studies of the psychology of gambling including the manipulation of music and sound effects to create the sensation that a user won even though they actually lost their money on the spin.
Widespread commercialized sports gambling leads to increases in match-fixing
This well-researched story in the New Republic highlights that sports betting should stay illegal because it leads to a marked increase in match-fixing: “An America with legal sports gambling would not be immune to match fixing. Because when market rules replace sports rules, and when gambling odds become the standard unit of measurement for the quality of a game and its players, the game itself changes: It becomes not about who wins on the field, but who wins off of it.”
2014 Quest to Legalize Sports Gambling Could Destroy Professional Athletics
A good way to wreck a local economy…bring in casinos
This story by David Frum, former advisor to President George W. Bush and current Senior Editor with Atlantic Monthly, spotlights how casinos hurt local economies: “The towns and cities that turned to gambling to escape their problems may discover that they have accepted a sucker’s bet: local economies that look worse than ever, local residents tempted into new forms of self-destructive behavior, and a dwindling flow of cash to show for it all.”
Investigation shows property tax relief for PA homeowners is a “charade”
An Associated Press analysis of state Pennsylvania Education Department data shows that, despite the meteoric rise of Pennsylvania’s gambling industry, the casinos haven’t delivered enough revenue to put a significant dent in most homeowners’ tax bills. If anything, homeowners are feeling even more of a pinch now, 10 years after gambling proponents predicted that casinos would in the words of one lawmaker -“remove the stifling
saddle of high property taxes from the backs of Pennsylvania homeowners.”
DE casinos launch online operations
The three casinos in the state of Delaware are about to put in motion the first phase of their online gambling operations, which will be run through Facebook. The first phase will include only free games but within months, these casinos hope to have up and running full-fledged casino games online, running through Facebook. Delaware is now the first state in the nation to have legal casino games online. These two articles, from the USA Today and Delaware Online, describe this development, which will allow problem gamblers to throw their money away from the comfort of their own couch and allow America’s kids to get sucked in through Facebook.
Delaware’s 3 casinos launch free online gaming
Delaware casinos’ online gambling will be run through Facebook