Online Gambling Does Not Increase Addiction : Dispatches from the Culture Wars

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Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

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Online Gambling Does Not Increase Addiction

Posted on: March 28, 2008 9:16 AM, by Ed Brayton

Here's a Youtube video of Howard Shaffer, director of the Division of Addiction at the Harvard School of Medicine, discussing recent research that shows that addiction to gambling has actually gone down while the availability of gambling, especially online, has skyrocketed. Video below the fold:

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OK, is there something wrong with me? I'm not morally opposed to gambling, just like I'm not morally opposed to cashing your paycheck and using the cash as toilet paper.

It's just that I find gambling so damn boring! Poker, boring. Blackjack, boring. Even those oh-so-clever slot machines, purposefully designed to hypnotize me, and give just frequent enough rewards to keep me playing until Armageddon--boring.

Then again, I actually like to watch fishing shows on Saturday morning TV, so clearly my bore-o-meter is out of whack.

Posted by: James Hanley | March 28, 2008 2:50 PM

OK, is there something wrong with me? I'm not morally opposed to gambling, just like I'm not morally opposed to cashing your paycheck and using the cash as toilet paper.

Then again, I actually like to watch fishing shows on Saturday morning TV, so clearly my bore-o-meter is out of whack.

Posted by: James Hanley | March 28, 2008 2:50 PM

To each their own. I love poker, but loathe most other forms of gambling. (I applaud whoever coined the phrase, "The lottery is a tax on people who don't understand mathematics.")

As for fishing shows, man, what is wrong with you? Don't you know those things are addictive and lead to anti-social behavior?

Posted by: Michael Suttkus, II | March 28, 2008 5:30 PM

Larry Niven suggested in some of his short stories that, given a readily available, difficult or impossible to ban addictive "substance" (I use that term loosely - the example cited was electrical stimulation of the brain's pleasure center), the potential addicts would tend to eliminate themselves from society, thus from the gene pool.

Obviously, there hasn't been time for the rest of us to outbreed the gambling addicts into non-existence...but is it possible that most of them caught the first wave of Internet gambling, hit bottom, and either sought help or simply dropped out due to poverty before the start of the study?

More likely to my mind, though, is that those vulnerable to gambling addiction were already gambling. Prior to Internet poker or whatever, it wasn't difficult to find a place to gamble - merely more risky and likely illegal, neither of which would stop an addict.

Posted by: BobApril | March 29, 2008 5:24 AM

Sorry about the double post. I'm addicted to hitting the post button.

Posted by: James Hanley | March 29, 2008 4:44 PM