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5/5/2010: Gaming industry’s dark side carries heavy toll
Legislature’s committee on addictions warned of the high social cost it’s taking on Ontarians
It’s one of your more eye-popping numbers in the avalanche of annual reports churned out at Queen’s Park.
Since 1975, crows the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., gambling has generated more than $28 billion for provincial coffers and funded countless good works.
As always, however, there’s another side to the story. And the Legislature’s select committee on mental health and addictions recently heard it.
About 63 per cent of Ontarians participate in gambling, said Judith Glynn, director of the Problem Gambling Research Centre. The most popular form is lottery tickets. And about 23 per cent visit casinos or play slot machines.
About 4 per cent of players develop moderate to severe gambling problems.
And that’s the story she was at the committee to tell.
Financial difficulty is obviously the first of the negative consequences problem gamblers experience, she said. Conflict in relationships also inevitably arises. There are consequences at work and school and, not infrequently, a resort to crime.
Results of other research, she reported, “is quite startling.”
Twenty per cent of problem gamblers will attempt suicide.
Gambling addiction, like all addiction, is a complex interaction of biological, psychological and social factors, Glynn said.
The neurobiology of addicts often reveals the pleasure centre in the brain to be bigger and the inhibitory sensor to be smaller than in the unaddicted.
“So not only are they getting more bang out of the activity, but they have less of a stop signal that is going on and telling them to slow down.”
Cognitively, problem gamblers have an illusion of control, Glynn said.
“They overestimate their chances of winning, they overestimate the level of skill involved and
they overestimate their control over the outcome.”
bill clark