The Machine Zone’s background understanding of approaches to reducing gambling harms.
We believe totally in the legal freedoms to drink, smoke tobacco, vape, gamble and eat whatever you like.
Measured as quantity, the biggest impacts on mortatlity and preventible ill health are from alcohol, tobacco, poor diet, and consumption of drugs which are often highly toxic or deadly in their unregulated distribution. Lifestyle choices include these factors and any health consequences must be treated effectively, in a timely manner and without judgement, funded by taxpayers.
The large majority of people who suffer from gambling harms are those near the gambler – family, partners, friends, and in a more abstract way, as with other harms like these by taxpayers. Gambling harms occur on a spectrum of severity, the most severe associated with addiction; as with alcohol and drugs, the harms which do not show up in headline figures can be experienced severely too. For instance, the number of deaths directly attributed to alcohol is much less than those where alcohol is a key contributing factor. With gambling, individuals and families may function week to week within a background of financial strains, conflict strains, relationship precarity, employment and education issues, and so on. Put this way, gambling related harms occur at higher rates than suggested by surveying the most extreme harms.
Lifestyle choices have always involved potential negative consequences. These can be mitigated if only slightly by public health oriented actions from within governments. In the case of gambling harms we believe that there should be some curtailment of industry marketing and sponsorship strategies, and restrictions placed upon some gambling products. We do not believe such measures restrict people’s freedom to gamble.
We support a compulsory levy on industry profits towards research, education and treatment; however we see this as one step forward. While within some sections of political representation, third sector organisations and among statutory health and education professionals there is growing awareness of gambling harms and calls for address, there needs to be much greater awareness and commitment to active strategies of address. This would require further funding, especially to stimulate professional and citizen awareness at local levels, and to repeat what Greater Manchester councils have done in backing user-led lived and living experience support and advocacy organisations
Reducing health harms cannot be remotely considered as equivalent to stopping health harms related to consumer freedom of choice. Nor should that freedom be threatened. While a certain CEO of a gambling industry council referred to ‘Sunday school prohibitionists’ and others repeatedly refer to the ‘anti-gambling brigade’, such tabloid quality jibes are very far from sober calls for practicable stratgeies to reduce harms without removing freedom of choice. As individual freedoms are constrained by law so are business freedoms. Business by its nature seeks to expand profit as a priority and will maintain the freedom to do so. Large businesses seek to increase profits by expanding markets, getting more customers.
Often industries will employ expert methods to promote the idea that they are leading the agenda in reducing the harms they create, such as by funding education programmes or support charities. This shouldn’t obscure critiques of such industry initiatives, nor relatively modest calls to adjust needs towards the health of the nation and away from the current priority given to the freedom of industries that can damage health.
The Machine Zone 