‘I lost 10 years of my life’: how UK betting giant’s unlawful marketing kept suicidal gambler hooked
Sam found himself getting sucked deeper and deeper in to betting, sometimes risking £10,000 in a day. Now a judge has ruled he was unlawfully targeted
We need to ban advertising for all addictive substances/activities. We've mostly come to terms with the fact that mixing addiction and marketing are horrible for public health when it comes to cigarettes. We need to extend that to gambling, alcohol, Marijuana, hell even sugary drinks.
Even ignoring the public health implications, it's just cruel to recovering addicts. It must suck to see advertisements of attractive people having fun drinking beer if you're a recovering alcoholic and are just trying to forget about it.
I'm opposed to prohibition as it just ends up jailing minorities and empowering the police, but just because we make something legal to consume doesn't mean we have to give it over to the market and capitalism with its perverse incentives for growth at all costs.
It sucks and this predatory behaviour should be regulated out of existence and the people behind it Luigi'd.
However, it's not very easy to have sympathy for the guy. Any time you can just walk away.
“Bro just stop being addicted” wow thanks, im cured…
So can alcoholics. So can drug users. So can obese people. So can people in abusive relationships.
Walking away is rarely as simple as it sounds, and it's typically better to have empathy and offer support rather than dismiss them.
Obesity is primarily genetic so yeah most likely a different story there.
Nonetheless I've had the rest of all those.
Hardest is probably the abusive relationship, but for me that's because I was very young and the guy was quite a bit older and a decently skilled long-distance manipulator, plus I had the alcoholism turned Xanax abuse and amph binges on the weekends stacked on top because I had daily panic attacks over fears of deportation to my fatherland where I'd end up killed because my boss tried to quiet-fire me from my internship my visa depended on in my first week since she realized she had nothing for me to actually do and the train was delayed once, so i needed drugs to just tolerate entering work after that without freaking out constantly.
I don't even drink these days, nevermind have dessert or drugs.
It's def not impossible I'm sorry to say, and to think otherwise makes you seem very immature. Especially when it comes to mental internal stuff like gambling rather than material circumstances or physical chemical imbalances caused by chemicals.
