Gambling Expert Weighs In on UK

An article recently released on the website The Times Online reported that a specialist adviser on pathological gambling at the Royal College of Psychiatrics, Dr. Emmanuel Moran, opposes a new proposed increase in the level of prize money that can be awarded to the fruit machines in the United Kingdom. Dr. Moran opines that the fruit machines are the some of the more additive forms of gambling. He thinks it is a sort of gate way into gambling more frequently and may lead to excessive online casino play, for example. He thinks that the fruit machine is a ‘learning device’ that hooks people. Online casinos are often a place people turn to in order to attempt winning the money back in which they lost on the fruit machines.

Dr. Moran is not against gambling. He is an expert on the behavioral issues that lead to gambling addiction. He understands the level of addiction people have when they cannot stop playing at online casinos. He believes that a public policy needs to be instated in order for moderate gambling to take place in both land based and online casino websites. He then went on to bring up the United Kingdom’s Gambling Act which was passed in order to help rid the United Kingdom of problem gambling. He says that the attempts of the online casino and land based casino industries to try raising the prize amounts for the fruit machines does not fall in the favor of getting rid of gambling addiction problems in the UK.

The online casino regulations in the United Kingdom are pretty relaxed in comparison to the United States. Dr. Moran has been very critical of the Gambling Commission and said in the article: "I think the Gambling Commission has not been as tough as it ought to be. It is generally recognized that the success or otherwise of the Gambling Act is very much determined by the Commission's approach. This is illustrated by the commission's reaction to the [UK gambling] prevalence study, which determined the levels of gambling in Britain. That showed that fixed-odds betting terminals, spread betting, betting exchanges and online gambling have a high incidence of producing problem gambling.” He then finished with, "The Commission's reaction, however, was that one could not draw any conclusions about “causality” from this. It has adopted the view that unless the evidence of harm is utterly obvious, it is going to turn a blind eye. It has not shown itself to be the kind of watchdog that it ought to be."