I thought some on the list might find this article of interest.
Bob in San Antonio
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This morning's issue of *Salon* includes an article: "Gambling with
science; Determined to defeat lawsuits over addiction, the casino
industry is funding research at a Harvard-affiliated lab" by Eliza Strickland.
Here are some excerpts:
[begin excerpts]
With the ugly specter of gambling addiction, of ruined lives and
families, hanging over their heads, gaming advocates will bolster their
cases with research from the National Center for Responsible Gaming
(NCRG), a nonprofit group, associated with Harvard University, that
funds most of the scientific research on gambling addiction.
The research will show that only a few unfortunate souls -- those
predisposed to addiction -- will get into trouble, while everyone else
can gamble for entertainment with no ill effects. The center's studies
were exhibited last fall in Boston, where lawmakers wrestled over
bringing three casinos to Massachusetts. They will also be on display
in the coming year, as lawmakers across the country consider legalized
gambling and new casinos, with literally billions of dollars hanging in
the balance.
But there's a serious kink in the studies: The NCRG is a wing of the
casinos' main trade group, the American Gaming Association, which has
committed a total of $22 million to the center. To ethicists and casino
critics, that relationship is a cautionary tale of science getting too
close to industry.
While NCRG leaders say they fund independent science, it's not a
coincidence that the science aligns so well with the interests of the
casinos.
<snip>
The plan he proposed owed a debt to the tobacco industry executives who
had spectacularly lost public support just a few years before, when they
raised their hands before a 1994 congressional committee and testified
that nicotine was not addictive. "Our industry cannot afford to make the
mistake made by the tobacco industry," Fahrenkopf said. He told his
colleagues that the gaming industry must not only admit that gambling
addiction existed, but also lead the discussion of its origins, symptoms
and social impacts.
To investigate those origins, the American Gaming Association created
the NCRG, and the casinos keep it flush with money. This past September,
the NCRG announced $7.6 million in new funding commitments for the next
five years, including $2 million from Harrah's, $2 million from MGM
Mirage and $1 million from International Game Technology, the largest
slot machine manufacturer in the world. Its board of directors includes
executives from MGM Mirage, Harrah's and the casino company Boyd Gaming
Corp., as well as Judy Patterson, executive director of the American
Gaming Association.
Four years into the NCRG's existence, it established a spinoff
organization, the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and
Related Disorders.... Today, the institute is housed at the Harvard-
affiliated Cambridge Health Alliance.
Christine Reilly, executive director of the institute, says she's heard
all the complaints about the institute's funding and supposed conflict
of interest. She explains that the institute's contract with the NCRG
stipulates that the industry can't interfere with decisions.
<snip>
While the institute funds research on the social determinants of
gambling addiction, it focuses on genetic and neurochemical causes.
<snip>
To Reilly, this kind of research undermines the point raised in the
Canadian court case that video poker machines are addictive. "Things are
not addictive, they're just not," she says.
<snip>
Neurologist Dagher cautions against jumping to such conclusions. It's
far too soon to say that some people are programmed at birth to respond
to gambling with addiction-inducing rushes of dopamine. "People always
think if we find an abnormality in the brain, it must be something
inborn," he says. "But the brain is very plastic. If you see an
abnormality, it's probably a combination of something inborn and a
response to environmental factors. And the dopamine system is
tremendously affected by life experiences, especially stress."
If the casino industry can defend itself against gambling addiction by
pointing to neurobiology, it might also be argued that it has learned
how to profit from addiction. Natasha Dow Schull, a cultural
anthropologist and assistant professor at MIT, and a prominent critic of
the gaming industry, points out that casinos are booming thanks in large
part to increasingly sophisticated and highly addictive slot machines
and video poker machines. These machines are the gaming industry's cash
cow -- they occupy more than 75 percent of casino floors -- and one of
the most efficient systems that humans have ever devised for delivering
a dopamine rush to your brain while extracting money from your wallet.
Schull has studied the interface between slot machines and the players
who throng to them. As she explains, the old one-armed bandits are gone:
Players were wasting too much time pulling the lever. Now push-button
and touch-screen games are the rule, where a hardcore customer playing
at top speed can play a game every five seconds. When you consider the
slot machine makers, says Schull, "It's clear their ideal customer is
the addict. They have a term, 'player extinction,' which means you lose
all your money. They're talking about this as a goal!"
Schull has also tracked the work of the NCRG since its founding in 1996.
In her forthcoming book, "Machine Life: Control and Compulsion in Las
Vegas," she dives into the experience of gambling addicts, and argues
that the industry acted deliberately to defuse the threat it poses by
funding science that casts them in an unflattering light.
"The NCRG is committed to the idea that most 'normal' people aren't at
risk of developing a gambling problem," says Schull. "They're trying to
show that all addicts share a common pathway, which involved the reward
system of the brain. This really helps the industry because the idea is,
if these people were not to gamble, they would find something else to be
addicted to. They come into the world with the brain disposition of an
addict, so you can't blame casinos."
Schull says the industry has successfully defined the terms of gambling
addiction; it's telling that we speak about problem gamblers, she says,
but not problem machines, problem environments, or problem business
practices. Currently, Schull is working in the young field of
"neuroeconomics." She says that brain scans and genetics studies are
producing fascinating data, but can't fully explain the complicated
problem of gambling addiction. "Doing this research, I've become a
behaviorist in a weird way," she says. "I've come around to thinking
that if you put any rat in a cage, under the right circumstances, you
can addict it. Some of us have greater liability than others, but that
doesn't mean that it's not on a continuum."
<snip>
However, critics say that the industry's embrace of the 1 percent
statistic hides the full brunt of gambling addiction. "The industry's
ability to downplay the social costs has been a continual frustration,"
says Henry Lesieur, a psychologist at the Rhode Island Hospital's
gambling treatment program. "As if one suicide isn't too many, or as if
divorces mean very little." Lesieur says he also sees plenty of
tragedies among the 2 to 3 percent of adults who qualify as "problem
gamblers," meaning they don't have enough symptoms to qualify as
pathological gamblers.
Lesieur originally sat on an advisory board for the NCRG, but resigned
in 1997 over concerns about the industry's influence over the research.
Lesieur says that by conservative estimates, 30 percent of the profits
from gambling machines come from problem gamblers. Yet NCRG and the
institute have avoided such sensitive topics. "You don't see any
research into the addictive nature of different games, and why people
who play video machines seem to get addicted faster," Lesieur says. The
gambling addicts who play the machines exclusively bottom out very
quickly -- typically, within a year of beginning their habit, he says.
<snip>
Regardless, Blumenthal adds, the studies are inherently compromised as a
result of being funded by the casino industry. "My opinion is that it's
unwise to accept those grants. No matter how scrupulous the
investigators are, they're always open to suspicion. And if you have
results that are positive to the industry, it looks even more dubious."
[end excerpts]
The complete article is online at:
<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/16/gambling_science/print.html>.