One million self-imposed bans for gambling addicts

E veryone knows that gambling is a rampant industry, because it’s an easy way to make money (and also to lose it, but no one looks at that). The past few years, though, have seen a great number of people voluntarily weening themselves off the addicting and sometimes harmful business, thanks to all the campaigning and awareness programs going on. The self-exclusion from online gambling sites increased from 30,000 in 2013 to 1,00,000 a year back. The number has gone up even more now. Here is how. According to The Gambling Commission, each gambler banned himself (or herself, you never know) from an average of two operators! Self-exclusion from online gambling is one of the only ways to de-addict from the gambling problem, but it doesn’t solve the problem fully. It’s easy to keep track of records and the people visiting a gambling website, but there are shops for gambling everywhere, and since everything is through paper in shops, keeping track is nearly impossible. It’s a good thing that gambling addicts are making an effort to curb their addiction but the problem is, who’s to stop them from going to the nearest shop and rekindling the addiction offline? Also, Matt Zarb-Cousin, a spokesperson for The Campaign of Fairer Gambling feels that self-exclusion isn’t an effective solution to the gambling problem, because he believes it should be tackled at the root: the addiction should not happen in the first place. The only solution for this, according to him, is decreasing the maximum stakes in a bet. Another concern is that only a portion of the gambling addicts are self-excluding. The online gambling industry is, of course, suffering because of all this self-exclusion because a major portion of their income comes from addicts. They try to make it out to be "clean gambling", or "only entertainment", but it’s not. Maybe self-exclusion isn’t a complete solution, but in my opinion, it’s certainly a step in the right direction.