Gambling as a harmful commodity industry
In public health fields, much attention has recently been focused on developing the concept of the Commercial Determinants of Health (CDoH).
This concept has been defined in a variety of ways, but is mainly concerned with the way in which commercial organisations, corporate entities pursuing maximisation of profits, produce and market commodities that have effects on the health and wellbeing of populations. These effects are often negative, as with tobacco; or they can be positive, as with some products of pharmaceutical and medical science.
Much recent attention has been directed towards products deriving from harmful commodity industries. These include businesses producing significant negative externalities (costs that are inflicted on others), of which a fast growing and highly lucrative example is gambling.
The harms associated with gambling are increasingly well documented.
The business of gambling has grown rapidly in recent years, and is now available in 70% of the world’s nations. A recent estimate suggests that about 450 million people globally experience harm from gambling, of whom 80 million experience significant gambling disorder.
The harms associated with gambling are increasingly well documented. They include loss of assets (often those of family members who do not gamble), along with entrenchment and exacerbation of socio-economic disadvantage, increased rates of intimate partner violence, increased rates of crime, both violent and against property, family breakdown, separation, divorce, neglect of children, and intergenerational ‘addiction’ and trauma, ill health, physiological and mental, legal consequences, including costs to the criminal justice system and imprisonment, and suicide and suicidality. Gambling harms are not trivial.
Multiple elements constitute an instituted array materializing the focus of the CDoH. By utilizing these, gambling businesses have rapidly expanded, and increased revenue. Some elements relate to the technical developments that facilitate delivery of increasingly ‘efficient’ (that is, highly addictive) gambling products, that have significant impacts on their users. In this category are high frequency, high stakes products such as electronic gambling machines (EGMs), and online versions of casino games and EGMs.
These products are increasingly known to be associated with highly elevated risks of harm but are generally poorly regulated. How such arrangements have been achieved by gambling businesses resembles the ways in which tobacco manufacturers were able to continue marketing their highly harmful products for many years, avoiding effective regulation.
Corporate Political Activity, or CPA, as developed by the tobacco industry, has been adopted with great enthusiasm.
Although this array is always evolving, we can identify many of its components.
Corporate Political Activity, or CPA, as developed by the tobacco industry, has been adopted with great enthusiasm. It is key to the ability of harmful commodity industries to manipulate legal frameworks and regulatory systems to their advantage.
These elements include political donations, buying access to the time and attention of decision makers, and permitting relentless lobbying, and a raft of ‘soft power’ techniques such as invitations to major sporting events, accompanied by generous hospitality. Sitting in a corporate box at a football final, the business representative (who may often be a former politician or political staff member) becomes an understanding friend to a busy and harassed politician. Naturally, when relevant issues arise, the politician now knows someone he can call for friendly advice.
As important as these elements are, perhaps the most important element of gambling’s persuasive array has been the careful cultivation of an ecosystem, or network, of organizations and entities that are themselves addicted to revenue derived from the core activity of gambling.
A complex ecosystem protecting profits
The creation of an effective ecosystem by a harmful commodity business is a major asset for its continued survival and prosperity. It reinforces political influence and can make it impossible to shift policy in the direction of harm prevention.
Gambling is increasingly associated with sport. Gambling companies sponsor sporting clubs, buy advertising time on broadcast and social media, often closely associated with sporting activities, and thus provide significant revenue to media. In the case of broadcast media, this revenue is often seen as essential to continued viability. In the case of social media, it bolsters profits significantly.
However, the flow of revenue to other entities in the ecosystem is of similar importance. Apart from media interests and large sporting leagues, gambling businesses provide important revenue to software and hardware industries, financial institutions who provide the means to collect and deliver transactions, as well as providing capital. This includes many pension funds.
Gambling also cultivates community organizations and other good causes, such as ‘grass roots’ sporting clubs, along with the cottage industries of content developers that surround the media. The investment in these entities need not be great. All of them can rapidly develop dependence on even a modest proportion of gambling revenues.
This cultivated network of extended vested interests can be very influential.
The effect of this is to create a readily aroused activist network that can be relied upon to voice loud opposition to any proposal that might reduce the revenue flow from gambling operations to them.
This cultivated network of extended vested interests can be very influential. Few politicians want to be seen as cutting off the ‘lifeblood’ of a sporting, cultural or charitable institution (big or small). Fewer still want to make enemies of the media.
Further, we can’t underestimate the power that a new or increased source of tax revenues may have on government decisions. Even relatively modest flows of revenue into a Treasury can become difficult to refuse. Threatening that revenue to save a ‘handful’ of irresponsible gamblers (as the industry describes them) becomes a difficult ask.
Gambling businesses are also happy to fund researchers who can be relied upon to produce results – ‘evidence’ – that suits their interests. When dressed up in a particular paradigm, such as ‘responsible gambling’, it can provide endless diversions from other fields of inquiry.
Gambling ‘addiction’ as exploitation
‘Responsible gambling’, an industry invention, persuades people that the cause of harmful gambling resides in the bad decisions of flawed individuals – not the remorselessly marketed and highly addictive products that gambling businesses provide. ‘Responsible gambling’ has been very successful at diverting attention towards flawed individuals, stigmatizing and shaming them into silence. Given the paucity of research funding, some researchers are prepared to take industry money and participate in this grand diversion. Because of ethical concerns, this situation is slowly changing for the better; but it remains a powerful tool of commercial interests.
‘Responsible gambling’ has been very successful at diverting attention towards flawed individuals, stigmatizing and shaming them into silence.
By urging their customers to ‘gamble responsibly,’ and publicly deploring those who don’t, a smokescreen of apparent concern is laid. However, the super profitability of gambling companies mostly depends on an ‘addiction surplus’. Addicted gamblers contribute the lion’s share of revenue to most high intensity gambling products. Without them, these businesses face ruin.
In fact, the practices of gambling operators encourage ‘irresponsible’ gambling. Their marketing and promotion convey excitement and fun. These can be highly appealing to those experiencing difficulties in life. Their products also engage affective characteristics, upending decision-making, delivering loss of ‘executive function’, the deliberately designed consequence of engaging with high speed, high stakes gambling products. Gamblers call this ‘the zone’. In the zone, rational decisions are suspended. This deep immersion often provides escape from the vicissitudes of life, but at significant cost.
And it’s clear that gambling businesses target people who are disadvantaged, in one way or another. Globally, gambling opportunities proliferate, and are most lucrative, when aimed at those experiencing disadvantage. And the affective elements of gambling products, providing temporary relief from one’s troubles, complete the circle.
We might perceive gambling ‘addiction’ as a carefully developed element in the array of commercial gambling interests.
Engaging with commercial gambling will make any existing situation worse. Thus, the cycle of disadvantage and the pursuit of positive affect are a form of capital from which gambling organizations derive significant profits. Exploitation of affect in all its forms is sufficient to ensure that many people’s lives, and those of their families and communities, are ruined. There is no shortage of negative affect – pain – in contemporary society. Gambling doubles down on this.
We might perceive gambling ‘addiction’ as a carefully developed element in the array of commercial gambling interests. It reflexively redoubles the disadvantage and distress that draws people to seek relief using gambling products, readily available and offering a reliable (if ruinous) remedy to the ever-increasing distress that gambling also delivers. Huge profits, thoughtfully distributed amongst gambling’s ecosystem, build a bulwark against reform, and ensure the continued distress of those already deeply disadvantaged.
Charles Livingstone is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, at Monash University, Australia. He is visiting Finland to improve co-operation in the regulation of gambling with colleagues at the University of Helsinki.