Safety council takes aim at problem gambling

By GLORIA GALLOWAY, Tuesday, December 14, 2004 - Page A16, Globe and Mail

It was 3 a.m. on the day after Boxing Day when a distraught man drove away from Montreal's Hippodrome casino and placed a call that may have saved his life.

"He told me that his intention was to crash his car on Highway 20 on the way home. He was going to kill himself," said Sol Boxenbaum of Viva Consulting, a Montreal non-profit firm that treats problem gamblers and provides 24-hour crisis response. "Of course, he's not crashing into nothing. He's crashing into oncoming traffic."

That desperate and dangerous situation is the reason the Canada Safety Council called on federal and provincial governments yesterday to take action aiming to reduce deaths and injuries that result from problem gambling.

"These people gamble until the wee hours of the morning, they drink and then they drive home," said Emile Therien, president of the council.

In addition, statistics suggest nearly 400 Canadians intentionally kill themselves each year because of their gambling habit. The actual number of suicide deaths is likely much higher, because only those who leave a note, or whose families come forward to talk about the problem, are included in the count.

"For every suicide that we know of, there's probably four or five that we don't," Mr. Boxenbaum said. "Because of the stigma around it, most people will not admit that there was a gambling problem in their family."

And because the families of people who commit suicide have difficultly claiming benefits, the deaths are often disguised as accidents -- as it would have been with the man from Montreal who was talked out of his plan by Mr. Boxenbaum.

"This wouldn't have shown up as a suicide because his goal was to provide insurance funds for his family, so it's made to look like an accident," Mr. Boxenbaum said.

Gambling, which provides windfall revenues to the provinces, is expanding every year, but no national program is in place to govern the industry, Mr. Therien said. His group has paid close attention to problems experienced in provinces with video lottery terminals, which experts say are far more addictive than betting on horses, cards or lotteries.

The safety council made four recommendations yesterday to reduce gambling addiction.

First, it may be time to end 24-hour casinos. "People are in those operations until they drop dead," Mr. Therien said, adding fatigued drivers can be a hazard on the road.

Second, advertising that glamorizes gambling should be aired only during adult programs, be counterbalanced with ads about the dangers of gambling and possibly be banned altogether.

The third recommendation states that the operation of VLTs should be slowed and the machines should tell players how much they have lost. And fourth, problem players and those who are worried about their gambling should be issued smart cards, Mr. Therien said. "If you're gambling too much, they would just cut you off."

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