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a source for latest news, developments and reputable documentation and research on gambling. You'll find many helpful resources and links for anti-gambling advocates.

7/14/2008: Embedding Social Responsibility

Imagine a casino throwing out a player who is gambling too much. It happens.
And when thrown out the player might never be able to enter a casino anywhere in the country again.

As public officials legalize casinos they should assure that social responsibility pervades the new gambling scene. Concern for troubled gamblers should be part of the regulatory process.
But whereas some jurisdictions pay reluctant lip service to such concerns others have shown policy leadership that could serve as a model.

In an article in International Gaming and Wagering Business Embedding Social Responsibility, William N. Thompson professor in the Department of Public Administration of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, points out the policy leadership Switzerland has developed.

Soon after the first casinos opened in 2002, management came together and created the Schweizer Casino Verband (Casino Association of Switzerland), which has worked to coordinate problem gambling programs and help program directors unify their approaches.

They now collectively call their programs the “Swiss Social Concept”.

Players at Swiss casinos must identify themselves when they enter. They must produce a passport, resident permit or Swiss driver’s license to enter. These are checked against a data base of people who either are banned from entering or have playing restrictions (such as employees and shareholders). If they have no ID they cannot enter. If they are on a banned list they are asked to leave. All reception areas display informational brochures on problem gambling available in German, French and Italian. These describe problem gambling and its effects and include a checklist of symptoms. They provide a phone number to a 24-hour hot line and a Web site indicating how to get help.

Within each casino the Social Concept is administrated by a special committee that works with front-line employees and an outside specialist, typically a psychologist. Staff training is conducted by addictions professionals. Orientation for new employees includes four hours on problem gambling. After 90 days on the job employees attend a two-day seminar dealing with processes for observing players. They watch videos and become involved in role-playing. They are also trained to use written forms for observing troubled play. Supervisors and administrators attend a longer, four-day seminar which concentrates on communications with guests and co-workers. All employees attend annual refresher courses.

Thompson has taught and written extensively on politics, government policy and gaming and gaming regulation.

His article describes a different approach to the OLG’s The Winner’s Circle, which uses data from a gambler’s profile.
Rather that milk a players addiction, Thompson advocates a real attempt to treat the problem.
The question?
Can OLG afford to do this in spite of high losses and suicides?

7/11/2008: Dificille Letter to Ottawa Citizen Slots profit too low

Two Ottawa area councillors want to see more profits from slot machines in their local area:

Alta Vista Councillor Peter Hume and Barrhaven Councillor Jan Harder think the province should be turning more gambling profits from slot machines over to the city. The city gets about three per cent of the take from machines at Rideau Carleton Raceway, while the two councillors say the city should be getting 10 per cent of the take.

Toronto and Ottawa municipal councillors want the same.

Letter to the editor: Ottawa Citizen

Stop and think a minute
This is not slots profit, 3 million dollars is that small part of 100 million dollars from the area slots,
giving back a small portion of community money.
Your own money.
Add to that, a similar amount for pari-mutual betting,
Add to that another maybe 100 million for lottery,
Add to that another maybe 100 million for Bingo and Nevada tickets etc.

To ask for 10 million, is maybe asking for 2 % of the money OLG siphons from the community.
As much as a half billion dollars is diverted from the Ottawa business community,
Probably for Toronto, as much as 3 billion dollars.

Perhaps a new term should be coined for OLG.
— G difficile — gambling gaming.

P. S. Don’t forget to factor in what crosses the river to Hull.
OLG diverts about 200,000 plus jobs into what?
Certainly not into community business where it belongs.
Perhaps, no doubt, SARS would be cheaper to have than OLG.
At least SARS is honest.
Difficile means difficult, G could be government, gambling, gaming.
C difficile is hard to get rid of, the G word is equally difficile.

6/23/2008: The Slot

Slot.

What an ugly 4 letter word.
In the dictionary the next word is sloth, and then comes slothful.
But we are here to talk about slots.

Sittman and Pitt of Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. developed a gambling machine in 1891 which was a precursor to the modern slot machine. It contained five drums holding a total of 50 card faces and was based on poker. This machine proved extremely popular and soon many bars in the city had one or more of the machines bar-side. Players would insert a nickel and pull a lever, which would spin the drums and the cards they held, the player hoping for a good poker hand.

There was no direct payout mechanism, so a pair of kings might get the player a free beer, whereas a royal flush could pay out cigars or drinks, the prizes wholly dependent on what was on offer at the local establishment. To make the odds better for the house, two cards were typically removed from the deck the ten of spades and the jack of hearts which cut the odds of winning a royal flush by half. The drums could also be re-arranged to further reduce a player’s chance of winning.

The first one-armed bandit was invented in 1887 by Charles Fey of San Francisco U.S.A, who devised a much simpler automatic mechanism. due to the vast number of possible wins with the original poker card based game, it proved practically impossible to come up with a way to make a machine capable of making an automatic pay-out for all possible winning combinations. Charles Fey devised a machine with three spinning reels containing a total of five symbols – horseshoes, diamonds, spades, hearts and a Liberty Bell which also gave the machine its name. By replacing ten cards with five symbols and using three reels instead of five drums, the complexity of reading a win was considerably reduced, allowing Fey to devise an effective automatic payout mechanism. Three bells in a row produced the biggest payoff, ten nickels. Liberty Bell was a huge success and spawned a thriving mechanical gaming device industry. Even when the use of these gambling devices was banned in his home state after a few years, Fey still couldn’t keep up with demand for the game elsewhere.

Another early machine gave out winnings in the form of fruit flavored chewing gums with pictures of the flavors as symbols on the reels. The popular cherry and melon symbols derive from this machine. The BAR symbol now common in slot machines was derived from an early logo of the Bell Fruit Gum Company. In 1964, Bally developed the first fully electromechanical slot machine called Money Honey. The new electromechanical approach allowed Money Honey to be the first slot machine with a bottomless hopper and automatic payout, of up to 500 coins, without the help of an attendant.
The first video slot machine to offer a second-screen bonus round was Reel ‘Em In developed by W M S Industries Co. in 1996.

In 2007 a class action suit was brought against The Atlantic Lottery Corporation, by Ches Crosbie Barristers on behalf of the Piercy family and all residents of Newfoundland and Labrador.

earlier Gambling Watch Global coverage

Read the Affidavit of Kevin Harrigan, PhD; University of Waterloo in Ontario.
Harrigan explains the insides of a modern slot machine.

In the early 50s, B F Skinner, a psychologist testing animals for a process called intermittent rewarding made this statement: ”pigeon, rat, or human, all can become addicted to this process.”

This is the process used by slot machine.
There are also standard 3 - 5 reel slot machines, of various types.
These are the typical one-armed bandits.
The one armed bandits proved to be very popular, read addictive.
This was the initial cocaine effect.

Much later came the term which soon became a label; the crack cocaine of gambling.
Slots, VLTs, are the equivalent of designer drugs and very effective.

Addiction comes as the result of all the added special effects, lights, music, even theme music and bells to signal everyone around that this slot machine paid out.

A moderate slot in one of Ontario’s smaller race tracks will earn 300 dollars per day.
A slot at a place such as Woodbine, will earn over $600 per day.
For the owner, not the player, btw.

There are some 24,000 slots in Ontario.
24,000 x $600.00 = 14 million/day = 5 +/- billion yearly.
Machines have no union for their owners to deal with.
Yes the gambling industry does provide some 7,000 jobs in the province, but it wastes some 100,000 plus job expenditures that bypass small businesses.
If, as we are told, small business is the economic engine for provinces such as Ontario, how can we have a government starve this engine by spending millions of dollars promoting gambling and ignoring the social cost?

Worse still in 2004, a report saying there were some 450,000 addicted gamblers in Ontario.
Is this duty of care to turn a tax paying citizen into a criminal or a a service needy citizen.

Probe into addictive gambling slot machines launched in the UK.

6/19/2008: Gambling Watch Canada

Good News

Data and address contacts are intact after a computer crash and we should have the Canada newsletter back shortly.

As for gamblingwatchglobal we are looking at with 3 pending lawsuits in 3 provinces, with close to 2/3rds of our population up in arms.

The lawsuits in Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec and Ontario deal with VLT’s, self-exclusion and addiction treatment.

Ontario has 3 race track slots on strike, and OLG is lamenting.
Strange, no one is happy that these communities get 100 cents on the dollar for business
instead of the 2% handout back from the large number of whole dollars syphoned out by the OLG.

What would happen if all gambling was shut down and that 10 billion dollars in Ontario went back to the business community locally and stayed in Ontario ?
The law suits we are covering are all about cash flow crash flow.

6/16/2008: Status of Newfoundland and Labrador Class Action Piercey/Atlantic Lottery Corporation

In 2007 a class action suit was brought against The Atlantic Lottery Corporation. Ches Crosby Barristers:

The class action has been brought by the Piercey family on behalf of all residents of Newfoundland and Labrador who have gambled on VLTs. The Plaintiffs say that Atlantic Lotto knows or ought to know that VLTs are inherently deceptive, inherently addictive, and inherently dangerous when used as intended, but has embarked on a “responsible gaming strategy” with messages to consumers which place the onus of responsibility for control and the resulting harm from loss of control on consumers. The purpose of this message strategy is to blame consumers for problem gambling and divert attention from the fact that problem gambling is a natural result of design features of the VLT.

The Plaintiffs say that VLTs do not comply with consumer protection law, specifically the Trade Practices Act of Newfoundland and Labrador. The class action seeks relief in the nature of an aggregate monetary award and such other relief that the court considers appropriate.

Full text of the statement of claim

News coverage:

CBC - VLT suicides’ families want machines banned June 27, 2005

6/16/2008: Status of Class Action suit against Lotto-Quebec

Gambling with Science - Salon

Jean Brochu was a respectable attorney in Quebec with a wife and two kids. That was before he first punched the button on a video slot machine in 2000. Within 15 months, Brochu says he was losing $500 a day to the machines. He plunged headlong into debt, and lost his car and his house. He stole $50,000 from his union, and was consequently disbarred for three months. He claims that in several dark moments he contemplated suicide. He also says it was all the fault of those slot machines.

Now Brochu is the lead plaintiff in a massive class action lawsuit against Loto-Quebec, the government agency that runs all forms of gambling in the province. Brochu’s lawyer, Roger Garneau, says he filed the suit on behalf of the estimated 119,000 gambling addicts in Quebec province. Garneau says the slot machines dragged these citizens into addiction. “They have been conceived and constructed for trapping the mind,” he says. The suit asks for almost $700 million in damages.

…On the other side, lawyers for Loto-Quebec will base their argument on what also might seem a far-fetched notion: Casinos and slot machines aren’t the culprits — genetics and brain chemistry are. In essence, they’ll argue that the fault, dear gambler, lies not in our Stardust casinos, but in ourselves. In doing so, the industry will set up a rock-solid defense against troubling lawsuits and arm pro-casino legislators with scientific data.

Brochu c. Societe des loteries du Québec: from Elkind & Lipton Law Firm Toronto

In May 2002, a Quebec court authorized Canada’s first class-action lawsuit over problem gambling. The Quebec Superior Court ruled that a case against Loto-Québec, the provincial gaming corporation, may proceed to trial as a class action. The case, Brochu c. Societe des loteries du Québec, [2002] J.Q. No. 1062 (QL) is spearheaded by Jean Brochu, a disbarred lawyer, who claims he lost tens of thousands of dollars playing VLTs and stole $50,000 to cover his debts. The Quebec Court conferred upon the applicant Brochu, the status of representative to bring a class action on behalf of a group of individuals described as:
“All persons who, since June 1993, have become pathological gamblers through using video lottery machines supplied and maintained by the respondent in bars, beer parlors and other public places.”

On behalf of these individuals, estimated to be 119,000 in number, Brochu seeks $700 million in damages.

The Court identified the following legal issues to be dealt with collectively:

1. each member of the group is a pathological gambler and is thus suffering from an illness;
2. each member of the group suffers from this illness as a result of the respondent’s (Loto-Québec) fault;
3. each member of the group has the right to damages which must be quantified;
4. as regards the civil liability of the respondent;
a. Does the respondent have the obligation to warn users of the risks of VLT’s?
b. If so, has the respondent fulfilled this obligation?

The defendant in the above-named action is Loto-Québec. It is seeking to add 3 manufacturers of gaming equipment as intervenors in the case, as Loto-Québec’s position is that it does not make the equipment but merely houses it. It is seeking indemnification from the manufacturers of the gaming equipment.

The VLT game known as “Red Hot 7” has created this hotbed of legal issues.

Some very interesting questions stem from this lawsuit: What responsibility does the government have? Does the government have a prima facie duty of care towards users of its own service? (the customer or participant is undeniably a gambler). The government here is the sole legal provider of this service or activity, and it enforces its own enacted laws making it illegal for others to be providers. (The government even advertises the exclusive availability of its various forms of gambling to the general public).

Are there any valid policy reasons or considerations which justify a denial of liability? An important factor to consider in this context is that there are no other legal safeguards in place which address the problem of compulsive gambling.

The Brochu lawsuit will likely prompt similar cases in other provinces.

Before the Brochu lawsuit was commenced, problem gambling had received significant attention in Canada. Treatment and prevention programs were firmly in place in many provinces. As early as 1999, the provinces, combined, spent over $28 million on problem gambling treatment programs, clearly not disclaiming responsibility toward problem gamblers.

6/16/2008: Australians March against pokies

This Silent Scream March in Australia is being held to protest VLT’s and the lack of resources for problem gamblers.

Problem gamblers, counsellors, clinicians, researchers, activists and members of the public, your anonymity is assured!

No Pokies Senator Nick Xenophon, and Fairfield City Councillor Thang Ngo will be joining us on the day.
Come and meet them.

World Vision CEO Tim Costello, NSW Greens MLC Lee Rhiannon and Family First
Senator Steve Fielding have been invited and (schedules permitting) will join us on the day and speak with the marchers.

Thank you for helping make this day, one the government will be unable to ignore!

When: Sunday August 24th, 2008
Where: Tumbalong Park, Darling Harbour, Sydney
Gather: 10:30 am
March begins at 11:30

Contact: nellgwyn55 (at) bigpond (dot) com

6/15/2008: Ontario Superior Court of Justice - Peter Aubrey Dennis & Zubin Philroze Noble/ Ontario Lottery Corporation

Statement of Claim Filed June 9, 2008

Full Text

News stories:
Toronto Sun: Betting on a Lawsuit
Niagara Falls Review: Gamblers file OLGC lawsuit
Torontoist: A Different Score For Problem Gamblers?
National Post: Lottery group failed to protect problem gamblers, lawsuit alleges
The Toronto Star: (April 2007) Casinos not taking chances in courts

Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation: Wikipedia

6/14/2008: No newsletter this week

A $3.5-billion class action lawsuit has been launched on behalf of thousands
of addicted gamblers who say they asked to be barred from Ontario’s casinos,
but were still allowed in.

The suit was filed against the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation on
Tuesday in Toronto, claiming that the corporation did not do enough for
those who signed up for “self-exclusion,” a program that allows people to
have themselves banned from casinos so that they can curb their ruinous
gambling habits.

One of the law firms that has filed the statement of claim is Adair Morse. The 51 page claim was filed in The Ontario Superior Court of Justice Monday, June 9, 2008.

More information on this class action suit and where you can register here.

What a week !
Gambling watch computer has a major glitch, so no newsletter this week.
A Toronto Law Firm has launched a class action law suit against OLG. 3.5 b dollars.
3,500,000,000 I think is the number.
Ten thousand signed in to particate, and we are told there are close to 500,000 addicted gamblers in Ontario.
The point is addicted gamblers registered to have themselves excluded, and
they were allowed,nay; encouraged, to continue gambling. Little wonder.
Close to half of gambling dollars are the losses of maybe 5 % of gamblers.
Gambling revenues are already down at many Canadian operations, and if as few as 10 to 20% of gamblers stop gambling, what then? Not to mention gas at $ 1.50 to $2.00 per litre.
Hopefully our newsletter will be back next week!

5/1/2008: Manufacturing uncertainty

Re: Gambling Figures Out of Line, April 22, by Bill Rutsey.

Mr. Rutsey, the CEO of the Canadian Gaming Association, endeavours to obfuscate discussion of the impact of problem gambling. As the industry lobbyist, it is clearly his job to produce calming words to convince the province and the public that all that can be done is being done, and that no further action need be considered.

This approach has been labelled “manufacturing uncertainty,” by David Michaels in a 2005 article in the American Journal of Public Health (Vol. 95 No. S1) [.pdf] who states: “Opponents of public health and environmental regulations often try to “manufacture uncertainty” by questioning scientific evidence on which regulations are based.

Though most identified with the tobacco industry, this strategy has been used by producers of other hazardous products. Its proponents use the label “junk science” to ridicule research that threatens powerful interests.

Mr. Rutsey’s disingenuous use of selective quotes, his inaccurate comparison of two studies and his selective application of criteria are the work not of a scientist seeking the truth, but of an industry lobbyist endeavouring to generate a smokescreen. I am reminded of the tobacco industry’s now infamous credo in relation to the “research” it funded in the U.S.: “Our product is doubt.”

The Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre is an arms-length agency created by the province to fund credible research into the causes of and effective responses to problem gambling. This structure reflects the intention of government to support research in a way that best meets public interests. Oversight is provided by an independent board of directors with impeccable credentials and a commitment to scientific investigation.

ROBERT SIMPSON
Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre
Guelph

Gambling figures out of line Bill Rutsey Canadian Gaming Association The Windsor Star April 22, 2008

Manufacturing Uncertainity: Contested Science and the Protection of the Public’s Health and Environment David Michaels, PhD, MPH, and Celeste Monforton, MPH Supplement 1, 2005, Vol 95, No. S1 American Journal of Public Health (html)

Robert:

You can’t realize what a great boost your letter in The Windsor Star is. How fascinating to met that today The London Free Press has a story about a school janitor who misdirected 250 thousand dollars. After five years he will begin a two year prison term. It will take 31 years to repay his gambling debt.

I wonder if Mr. Rutsey will tell us who pays for this.

This is the most potent letter from a high profile specialist I’ve seen regarding the damage inflicted by the social landmine of gambling. Thank you.

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