It made me think how deeply embedded casual gambling like this is in our society's fabric; a pound on the lottery here, a fiver on the Grand National there. Nothing wrong with it, a harmless flutter and a bit of fun. Like me, you might even win (occasionally). But how harmless is it?
Coming by chance across a survey on adolescent attitudes towards gambling from Tacade's International Gaming Research Unit at Nottingham Trent University I wonder what messages we are sending our young people. Adolescent gambling is a problem in the UK, it states, and is related to other delinquent behaviours. Studies consistently highlight a figure of up to six per cent of pathological gamblers among adolescent fruit machine gamblers - up to three times higher than that identified in adult populations. Young people are clearly more vulnerable to the negative consequences of gambling than adults.
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