We turned to look at the prevalence of gambling. There are literally hundreds of studies that have been carried out around the world over many years, and this table reproduced from a book about sports gambling. This table gives a convenient summary of the prevalence of problem gambling in populations around the world. Bear in mind these studies are based on surveys, and these surveys typically are randomly selected from the population, so they are meant to be representative of a national population. They provide you with a percentage estimate of the prevalence of problem gambling. Across these countries and across these years, you can see that the average rate across countries is 2.3 percent within a range, going from as low as 0.5 of a percent to a high of 7.6 percent. It seems that this is clearly a problem that exists. It exists amongst a significant fraction of the population, but generally a relatively small fraction of the population. One thing that's quite striking from this table is that there's very little evidence that the extended problem gambling has been increasing over time. That's important because as we know, the internet and the development of technologies and to some extent, government liberalization has made gambling opportunities easier to find over the years. One of the fears is often expressed about legalizing gambling is that it will lead to a significant increase in problem gambling. If that were really true, then we should see some evidence of that trend in these data, and we don't, so that's reasonably reassuring result about the extent problem gambling. To put this in some context, then here we compare the rates of problem gambling from such studies with the prevalence of alcohol abuse and the prevalence of other substance abuse. Abuse of alcohol and other substances is actually in some ways, is rather similar to gambling when they become problems at least. If you go back to the list of markers of problem gambling and think of them in the context of alcohol, for example, then you see that there's actually quite a lot of similarities between the two ideas. The rate of problem gambling on average across all of these countries is slightly higher than the rates of the alcohol abuse, and about 50 percent higher than the rate of other substance abuse. Bearing in mind that the other substances, typically like cocaine, heroin, and so on, these substances are often tend to be illegal. Therefore, that may help to explain the lower prevalence of those problems relative to alcohol, which is a legal substance in both countries. Gambling can be a problem for other reasons other than the ones that we've identified here. Even if people who gambled do not exhibit the problems or do not exhibit the characteristics of problem gambler's. That doesn't necessarily mean that gambling is not a problem, and bear in mind that the surveys that we were referring to here are where people were self-identifying. Some people may not even recognize that they have a problem and yet still have a problem. The problems of gambling are likely to be involved with economic effects. It's possible that gambling could exacerbate any pre-existing condition, for example, alcoholism or mental illness. In many ways more likely that gambling is going to be a problem for people who have limited incomes. Gambling activities may cause economic hardship for themselves, but also this frequent concern that it may cause problems for family members, especially spouses and children. We should certainly be careful about the impacts of gambling and the way it affects people's behavior. Indeed, most governments require that a fraction of the profits that are generated by gambling go to research on problem gambling, and so it is one of the better research topics, there's no harm in that. It's good that we try to understand these phenomenon in more detail. When problem gambling is identified, it tends to be focused on a couple of particular activities. One is slot machines, where the repetitive, almost hypnotic effect of feeding money into the slot machine becomes part of the addiction, and then traditionally, betting on horses is often been associated with problem gambling. Sports in general though, betting, gambling on sports has generally only been one small part of the total experience of the fan. For example, if you bet on horses, you're not really interested in the horse itself, you're only following this activity, or almost entirely following the racing activity because you're interested in the gambling. If you bet on your soccer team or cricket team or baseball team, then the betting itself is likely to be only a small part of your consumption of the entire activity. You're actually following the players, following the team, following the games. All of these report activities to you, and so the gambling itself is unlikely to become the be-all and end-all of what you're doing. But like any form of gambling or any addict activity, it is no doubt that it can become addictive for certain individuals. This reasonable to be have concerns that if companies market heavily, it could have the potential to draw more people into problem gambling. As the data suggested earlier, that doesn't appear to have happened so far. But times can change and marketing budgets can increase, and if it's pushed very heavily, it could become more and more of a problem. Again, it's something that needs to be studied and watched. In conclusion, it is clear that problem gambling can have devastating effects both on the individual concern but also on family, friends and so on. Therefore, it's certainly something to be concerned about and to watch. We found in this a presentation that actually the incidence of problem gambling is relatively low. It's comparable to the level of problems with alcohol abuse and substance abuse. Even though that may be relatively low, it's still nonetheless remains a large number of people are affected by this and those people affected suffer significantly as a result. It's not clear how far sports gambling is associated with problem gambling. It's an area where research is still ongoing and we may know more about this in years to come. The governments have typically required that significant attention be applied to research and all activities reaching out to help people with gambling problems when gambling is legalized and that seems to be no bad thing at all.
