When WILL we rein in gambling sharks with blood on their hands?
In shattering interviews, DOMINIC LAWSON spoke to families whose sons took their lives over addiction to online gambling. So ...
OveR the past few years, I have written a multitude of columns for the Mail about the pernicious growth of the gambling culture in the UK.
This social disaster stems from the Blair Government’s decision to allow the nation’s bookmakers to infest our High Streets with fixed- odds betting terminals ( a sort of turbocharged electronic roulette) and gambling firms to advertise on television.
I warned that this rapidly growing industry is most pernicious when it uses football to hook teenagers into a gambling habit.
That is what’s happening right now, with almost every World Cup game broadcast on ITv punctuated with ads luring the nation’s youth into what seems a harmless diversion, yet which can lead to debt, despair and desolation.
But I understated it. I should have added that self-destruction can be the result, too. And self-destruction of the most literal and brutal sort — suicide.
After my most recent article — about a 13-year-old who had run up gambling debts of £80,000 on a series of his father’s credit cards — I was contacted by a group of parents whose sons had killed themselves. Their boys had done so because they could no longer cope with the feeling that online gambling firms had taken over their minds — their very autonomy as individuals.
All of them were intelligent and successful, with a wide circle of friends. Their addiction, unlike that of the drug user or alcoholic, had no visible manifestation — which makes it all the more insidious, all the more difficult for parents and friends to recognise when it had reached the point of no return.
I learned this — and much more that is almost unbearable — when I met Liz Ritchie, Judith Bruney, Francesca Green and Josephine Holloway.
LIz
and Charles Ritchie’s son Jack killed himself last November at the age of 24. Liz is now 62 and Charles 63: she was, until recently, a consultant psychotherapist with the NHS in Sheffield, while Charles retired in 2016 from his job as head of higher education research for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
With such a family background in public service, it was not surprising that Jack, having got a 2:1 degree in history, volunteered for work in Kenya (helping budding entrepreneurs) and then moved to vietnam to teach english.
He had many friends and was popular with his pupils. But none of them could stop him, on November 22, from throwing himself off a rooftop in Hanoi.
Liz is a highly articulate and controlled woman. But she is not able to contain her grief when describing to me how the emergency services found Jack struggling for his final breaths, his ribs piercing his lungs.
‘How did this bright, middleclass boy end up dying in a squalid alley in Hanoi?’ she cries. ‘He was fine, he was great. But he was groomed by the gambling companies. These are ordinary children targeted by British firms. The idea that we allow these companies to target children’s mental health to the point that they’re poisoned, to the point that they want to kill themselves . . . words fail me.’
Jack began gambling when he was 17, a pupil at Sheffield’s Abbeydale Grange secondary school. There was a bookies’ nearby and Jack, along with his mates, faked an adult ID to play on its addictive fixed-odds betting machines, known as the ‘crack cocaine of gambling’ because players can win or lose up to £100 every 20 seconds.
Jack’s parents tell me he would gamble with his dinner money, sometimes going hungry as a result. He also gambled away money he’d been left by his grandmother.
By the time Charles and Liz discovered what was going on, their schoolboy son was losing around £1,000 a month.
At this point, they persuaded Jack to ‘exclude himself’ from all the local bookies. Liz tells me: ‘We thought that was the end of the matter. Naively, having explored treatment options focused on addiction, we thought Jack was cured.’
But they didn’t reckon on the way online firms can target anyone in their home, at any time: ‘He would receive inducements and invitations from gambling firms and began betting again in January 2013,’ says Liz.
Charles adds: ‘They would target Jack with emails, as well as adverts on Facebook. Once you have played online, there’s an account set up, so the company has all the details [email and text] that it needs.
‘They can use the GPS facility on mobiles to offer you a bet based on where you are — for example, they might know you are at an Arsenal v Spurs football match and will offer you a bet on that game.’
So, although there are no British fixed- odds betting machines (or, indeed, Premiership football) to be had on the streets of Hanoi, the online gaming industry — dominated by British companies — could get into Jack’s mind wherever he went. And he was finding it increasingly difficult to escape.
The online gambling firms have perfected psychological techniques to keep the user transfixed — ‘hooks that drive habitual use’, according to Professor Mark Griffiths, one of Britain’s leading authorities on addiction, who has made a particular study of the online gaming industry.
On November 19 last year, the Ritchies received an email from Jack: ‘I’m having a bit of a bad time at the moment and feel I need to come home.’
Without hesitating, Liz offered to arrange flights for Jack back to the UK and sensed that his anxiety was gambling-related. He confessed that he had lost