If there is one single thing I learned during my somewhat hazy career as an FPS student (hazy because it was often difficult to pay attention in such a dull class), it is that health class is boring, and cigarettes will kill you. Alcohol will apparently also kill you, and drugs, and eating disorders, and bad self-image, and unprotected sex. In case we forgot this very important message, we also had to sit through hours of presentations on those subjects, did projects on their effects, and it was impossible to sit through an hour of television without coming across at least one anti-drug/anti-drinking and driving PSA.
But what if I told you that there’s another addiction, an addiction that results in more suicides than drugs or drinking or any other? Where 1 in 5 of those addicted try to kill themselves, and that over half admit to consorting to illegal activity to support their addiction? I’m talking, in fact, about gambling. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that’s right, gambling, or ‘gaming’ as all those casino ads call it, is a surprisingly serious issue, one that garnishes very little attention in the touring ‘issues’ circuit. You never see presentations campaigning against gambling, or chapters in FPS textbooks dedicated to fighting off its nefarious effects, or PSAs invading your Friday night 90210 marathon (but that’s probably also because you’re watching it on the wonderfully ad-free Netflix). All in all, for something that causes so much grief among its victims, gambling has a shockingly good PR team. I mean, who wouldn’t want to visit Las Vegas, city of lights and fun and cheap replicas of famous landmarks? No one mentions the other part, the part where Vegas has the highest suicide rates in the country, and that behind the glamour and the smoke and mirrors, a hideous beast lies in wait for another semi-innocent victim to come strolling through its emerald gates.
Since apparently we need a thesis statement or something for this ‘creative writing story’, this is mine; gambling is a problem, but society doesn’t see it as a problem. This needs to change.
The causes for this are as varied as they are vast, but one thing is certain; it starts young. I remember, quite clearly, being a very small and very curious little girl walking through the Civic Centre during Old Home Week, and being stopped in my tracks by the mesmerizing sight before me. A dark tunnel, decked out in flashing, garish lights, curving just out of sight. Suddenly, all thoughts of carnival games and merry-go-rounds vanished from my mind. All I wanted was to go down that forbidden tunnel, to learn and see and experience all the wonders that lay at the end of it. “It’s a casino. It’s only for people above the age of 19,” my parents explained, but that just made me want it more. Apparently six-year-old Stephanie didn’t have much to say on the subject of common sense or logic.
This was my first childhood glimpse of the power of the casino, but certainly not my last. When I received my first Webkinz toy in grade three, an orange and white cat named Marshmallow, I immediately became obsessed. I would play it as often as I could, every day if I was allowed, and loved buying objects to decorate Marshmallow’s (as well as the rest of my growing collection of animals’) room. But to do so, I needed money, and what better way to get some quick cash than to spin the wheel of fortune and win some? Or to participate in any of the other gambling-esque features the site boasted? But of course, since this was, you know, Webkinz, it wasn’t ‘real gambling’. You always won, and you didn’t even have to pay to join in the fun. So Webkinzs was allowed to keep teaching kids how enjoyable gambling was, and even more dangerously, to teach them the misconceived idea that it was actually possible to ‘win’ at gambling, that the odds were ‘ever in your favour’.
After Webkinzs, there was my favourite game in grade four; Pokemon on my GameBoy, which despite having nothing to do with gambling or gaming or Las Vegas, still felt the need to include a casino with dozens of VLTs and none of those pesky age restrictions. And of course you can’t forget those eternally popular games of chance kids love to play, whether it be Snakes and Ladders, Monopoly Junior, or Life. While these are harmless in theory, the fact that the winner is determined completely at random is a little worrisome and very unreflective of real life. The game of Life even has its own wheel of fortune or ‘spin to win’ you can spin, as long as you’re willing to risk some of your precious money for a slim chance to win some more. So strong were these influences on me as a child that my brother and I once begged our mother to buy a two-dollar lottery ticket. To humour us, she did. Needless to say, she never saw that two dollars again.
But when you think about it, what’s wrong with some harmless gaming, right? I mean, if you understand the risks, why not? The answer is simple; because we don’t. We don’t understand the risks, we don’t understand how probability works and we don’t realize how tiny our chances of winning that jackpot really are (think lightning strike while being munched on by a shark tiny). For my national science fair project, I interviewed and tested a number of students to explore their tendencies towards gambling addiction and their level of understanding when it comes to probability and odds. When asked to answer a simple question about the chances of a coin landing heads or tails after landing tails multiple times in a row, less than 30 percent of the students answered correctly; that the odds were always 50/50 and were affected in no way whatsoever by the previous results. The same is of course true for casino games. If the odds of winning are 1 in 1000 (or you know, 1 in 29 million if we’re talking about winning the Lotto Max), the odds on your second try and your third try and your 158th try are still going to be 1 in 1000. It took me a long number of years, and a successful science fair project in the eighth grade, to finally teach me that gambling wasn’t as wonderful as it had always seemed.
As we grow up, gambling just becomes more and more imbedded into our cultural psyche. There’s the movies depicting the glamour and dazzle of the casino (Casino Royale, anyone? I mean, who’s cooler than James Bond?), Lotto Max ads with their yachts and palm trees and salty sea air that seemed so close you could almost smell it, and of course commercials for our very own Red Shores Casino presenting their hapless viewers with images succulent lobster and juicy burgers, flashing lights and laughing faces, inviting you to ‘come out and play’. It’s hard not to start imagining exactly what you’d do if you won that elusive 50 million…. Or to begin dreaming of the firm grip of the slot machine lever in your hand, the slap of the cards on that big green table, the shout of the radio announcer when he calls your winning numbers.
So at the end of the day, it’s really not all that surprising to learn that over a quarter of Canadians play the lottery every single week, or that the average Canadian spends over 500$ on gambling each year according to Stats Canada (a little tip; if you want to win the lottery, one ticket a week isn’t going to cut it. 50 a week however, will practically guarantee you a win… at least sometime in the next 5000 years, so be sure to pass on the tradition to your grandchildren.) Seriously, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid, or give birth to quadruplets than win the jackpot.
To quote Mike Orkin, a professor of statistics California State University: “Let's say you have one friend in Canada, and you put everybody in Canada's name on pieces of paper, and put them in a giant hat and draw one out at random. Then, you are 2½ times more likely to pick your one friend's name than you are to win the Powerball jackpot if you buy a single ticket.”
Despite this, people still play. Maybe because of it’s immense presence in modern society, and maybe not. But whether that’s the case or not, it’s impossible to argue that it doesn’t have a large place in society, because it does. And that’s in part, because the government wants it to. Governments love addicted gamblers, because unlike addicted smokers or alcoholics, addicted gamblers actually benefit them, often directly. In 2012, out of all revenue from gambling in BC, 9 million of it went to the federal government; 83 million dollars went to the local government; and over 1 billion went to support BC government programs including health care. That adds up to over 5% of the total government revenue in any given year, according to Stats Canada. But by doing so they are exploiting the most vulnerable and at risk households, the ones who need the help of those health care plans in the first place. Did you know that lower income households spend 3 times more (percentage wise; dollar wise it is about the same) of their total salary on gambling than middle class households do? Does spending the money on health care programs make it morally right, or should the government find a new way to make its money instead of resorting to exploitation? Either way, the government has no interest in revealing gambling for what it is, and hopes to keep it popular and keep the addicted addicted for as long as possible.
And they are addicted. Addicted in the exact same neurological way that Rob Ford or Lindsay Lohan are addicted to crack cocaine or parents say us teenagers are addicted to the internet. In fact, the Harvard School of Medicine ran tests proving that problem gamblers getting to gamble had the same type of brain activity as cocaine addicts getting their fix. The only difference is that, as mentioned before, gambling has a much better PR team (and the freaking government) to back it up, and Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey McGuire (all serious, and even addicted gamblers; serious meaning serious enough to get into legal trouble) are much sexier than the likes of Rob Ford and his drug dealer friends.
It might appear that gambling has such a good image because it isn’t really that big of a deal, but that would be lie. 80% of adults have tried gambling, but only 1% of North Americans are problem gamblers. That might not seem like many until you realize that North America has a population of 529 million, so that number just became a little more significant. When you factor in that little statistic of 1 in 15 of those people attempting to kill themselves and 1 in 2 stealing money to pay for their addiction, it suddenly becomes a pretty big epidemic. A study of hospitals in Australia found that out of all suicidal patients, nearly 20% of them were addicted gamblers.
Let’s not forget that pathological gamblers, of which there are more than 2.5 million in the US alone, are twice as likely to get divorced, rake up an average of 70000$ in debt and are twenty times more likely to commit suicide than non-gamblers. That’s a pretty big number if you ask me, and a number that warrants a little more action.
What kind of action, you ask? Step one; awareness. People need to realize it’s a problem and understand just what 1 in a million actually means. Step two; rehab programs. Some exist, more need to. And if the government is going to force millions of people into addictions, the least it could do is set up some half-decent programs to get them out of those addictions. These programs could teach people how to balance budgets as well as important practices such as self-discipline and stronger willpower. Step three; hopefully start a campaign against gambling. It could start in schools, through TV ads, through stricter government regulations, especially on the subject of children and gambling. Webkinzs, Pokemon, and their many contemporaries should not be allowed to contain casinos or anything of that sort that could encourage children into thinking gambling is a positive thing. Scarcely half a century ago, cigarettes were as common and accepted as sandals in summer. Now they’re so taboo that a film can’t even show one without automatically being rated R. I’d love to see the same thing happen to casinos. Before the 1930s, gambling was illegal throughout the US. Why couldn’t it be made illegal again by the 2030?
To sum it all up, there are many causes for gambling problems, from government support, to those ever-persistent ads and childhood influences. There are many effects to those who become addicted, from debt to divorce to illegal activity to suicide. But in the end, only one thing matters; don’t do drugs kids, but don’t gamble either. Seriously, it’s not worth it, no matter what society tries to tell you.