Do you feel lucky? Do you? Almost everyone’s gambled at some point in his life, laying down money on everything from lottery tickets to Vegas poker tables. The thrill of chasing that elusive jackpot has turned gambling into a multi-billion-dollar industry, but there’s a personal risk that comes with every wager. With nearly 500 casinos currently open for business in the U.S. has legalized gambling gone too far?
Anything that people enjoy can be done to excess, and gambling does not seem any harder to resist than other pleasurable activities that remain perfectly legal. According to a survey reported in the October 2006 American Journal of Psychiatry, about 6 percent of shoppers experience “compulsive buying.” Data from the federal government indicate that the rate of alcohol abuse or dependence among past-year drinkers is something like 13 percent. By comparison, a 2007 government-sponsored survey in the U.K. found that the prevalence of “problem gambling” among people who had placed bets in the previous year was 1.3 percent. In a 2007 study sponsored by the Austrian gambling business bwin.com and reported in the Journal of Gambling Studies, researchers at Harvard Medical School examined the gambling patterns of more than 40,000 online sports bettors for eight months and found that less than 1 percent qualified as “heavily involved bettors” with large losses.
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