The government are tabooing smoking and binge drinking but why let the gambling industry advertise.???

Question

Are they still profiting from the addictions of the poor.

Answer 1

This (UK) Government will say anything to keep the populace happy.

If they hear whinges and murmours they will adapt them as policy, if they believe it is what the people want.

Trouble is, they never think anything through!

Consider this. They are planning on hiking up the cost of alchohol, because they say, it will stop binge drinking amongst youngsters, and reduce crime! Most young binge drinkers are not criminals.

Ok so they are drinking under age, but they get drunk, throw up and fall over. So what? They don't hurt anyone apart from themselves.

There are a minority of young binge drinkers who get drunk, then stab someone!

So, why not double the tax on knives?  By the governments own ideology, that would wipe out knife crime!

Answer 2

US anti-smoking n***s have succeeded in taking away the rights of many in several states.  There is a bogus law limiting online gambling, as well.  Someone has to stand up for our rights!

Answer 3

Could it be anything to do with the tax revenues vs. public perception of the three "addictions" in question?

Smoking related diseases are a huge killer in the UK and a massive burden on NHS resources. HM Gov could not be seen therefore to be actively pushing the tools of such death and misery.

Alcohol abuse also accounts for many thousands of deaths a year in the UK so the same ethos applies here, too.

Gambling addicts do not tend to die slow painful deaths in NHS wards as a direct result of their wagering habit so there is a far smaller stigma attached to them and their activities.

Like anything else with this nanny state, if they think they can get away with it, they will. Public perception of gambling and casinos is at worst that it's a tax on stupid people, not a killer and major drain on the country's finances.

Personally, I wish we'd stop being told what we can and can't do with our own money in our own time.

I've included a relevant article below.

Answer 4

Bob - you hit the nail on the head. If ever there was a case for government to step in and protect people from themselves - gambling is it. Government footdragging on the smoking issue, retarded by fear of how millions in lost revenue could ever otherwise be recovered (no, I didn't say government was actually retarded - but I will defend to the death your right to that opinion) is in some awful way, remarkable - since the Englander Richard Doll's celebrated report firmly linking smoking with lung cancer was published as far back as 1950 (yes!). 'There is absolutely no evidence smoking is harmful to heath' should be chiselled into the forehead of each and every politician in office since, who could have taken action earlier, much, much earlier than was the case, but didn't.

Both the smoking and drinking issues of health and prematurely extinguished lives are a major concern to all intelligent, life-loving people. But drinking, together with gambling, provides potential for a more pernicious human tragedy - lives ruined financially, family cohesion shattered, psychological scarring. In the days of the communist U.S.S.R., giant steps were taken towards curbing the harm done to industrial production by a burgeoning epidemic of excessive drinking. As in the west, profit and prestige, rather than public health and well-being, was the greater inducement to change.  

I have wandered around a casino, observing expressionless, zombie-like hominids in frozen stance with eyes glazed (them not me), row upon row of them facing row upon row of raucous, gaudy, flashing slot machines - the players seeming to be in another world, their bodies here but themselves not, denied even that flimsies of gamblers excuses, 'social interaction' - it is more of an eerily robotic interaction. Yes, something is badly out of kilter here Bob. It's scarey.

Just show Joe Average an inviting, downward-sloping rocky path with the merest glint of something for nothing at the bottom, and he will go for it. Government sponsorship of some forms of gambling should not be taken as a definitive recommendation of the indulgence. Government has never been averse to profit by sleaze though.  

Decadence, profligacy and loss of direction have always hastened the end of empires. They are still doing so.

I guess we should be wondering what we can do about it, how we can temper the demand. In my birthplace they tried out the idea of hiding an explosive device in every slot-machine, programming it to detonate at some undetermined future instant, and widely advertising the fact. Didn't work of course. After they had lost just over ten thousand slot-machines (and twice that number of gamblers) it was clear the immense cost didn't justify the result - what with the spiralling cost of exploding slot-machines.

I suggested hiding sociopathic marksmen in the rafters with the promise of a bounty on each gambler brought down. That idea was vetoed in council because it turns out they'd already tried that over in Hicksville and it hadn't worked there, what with the occasional overly-excited sniper  tumbling to his death, sometimes landing on a slot-machine and prematurely exploding it, insurance premiums were starting to go through the roof.