New Anti-Gambling Campaign Based on Questionable Evidence
12 March 2024
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Christopher Snowdon writes for The Critic
IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon has written in The Critic criticising the Good Law Project’s new campaign against the charity GambleAware.
Christopher wrote:
“The Good Law Project has decided that GambleAware is untrustworthy and is covertly pursuing a pro-gambling agenda. It has put up a video featuring Will Prochaska to explain why.
“This tweet and the accompanying video are deeply misleading…That much is clear from what he says in the video:
“The scale and depth of gambling harm in the UK is often overlooked but it’s become extremely serious in the past few years.”
“There is no evidence for this. The rate of problem gambling is 0.3-0.4 per cent, which is as low as it’s ever been.
“You have almost 1.4 million people who are addicted to gambling.”
“As the Gambling Commission has explained ad nauseum, problem gambling does not imply addiction. Instead it indicates that a person suffers ‘negative consequences as a result of their gambling and possible loss of control’. As the Commission says, ‘we do not recognise the terminology ‘addiction rate’ and do not have any official statistics on ‘addiction rates’’.”
Read Christopher’s full piece here.
Christopher wrote:
“The Good Law Project has decided that GambleAware is untrustworthy and is covertly pursuing a pro-gambling agenda. It has put up a video featuring Will Prochaska to explain why.
“This tweet and the accompanying video are deeply misleading…That much is clear from what he says in the video:
“The scale and depth of gambling harm in the UK is often overlooked but it’s become extremely serious in the past few years.”
“There is no evidence for this. The rate of problem gambling is 0.3-0.4 per cent, which is as low as it’s ever been.
“You have almost 1.4 million people who are addicted to gambling.”
“As the Gambling Commission has explained ad nauseum, problem gambling does not imply addiction. Instead it indicates that a person suffers ‘negative consequences as a result of their gambling and possible loss of control’. As the Commission says, ‘we do not recognise the terminology ‘addiction rate’ and do not have any official statistics on ‘addiction rates’’.”
Read Christopher’s full piece here.
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