Harvard Weighs in on Online Gambling

May 6, 2009

According to Dr. Howard Shaffer, Director of the Harvard Medical School�s Division of Addictions, online gambling is safe and non addictive. In fact, Shaffer says that not only are online gambling casinos not addictive, but that they are actually much safer than their land based counterparts. They found that most people play at an online gambling site gamble very moderate amounts and in very �mild ways.�

Shaffer says that this is not what they expected to find when they started the online gambling study. He says that something else that was unexpected was the number of gambling addicts out there. They found that even though the number of people participating in land based and online gambling had increased the number of people who had fallen prey to gambling addiction had not.

Shaffer says that the claims that online gambling lead to gambling addiction is just not true and is unfounded. He also says that you can try to keep online gambling illegal but it will never work and you will end up wasting money fighting a futile battle. He says that the best thing the government can do is to regulate the online gambling industry, so that they can keep those that are participating safe from scams.

Regulation, not elimination is the key � especially since they have found no correlation between online gambling and increased addiction. However, land based casinos are much more addictive, in part because of the fact that there are no windows for clients to see what time of day it is, and that they pump oxygen in to the casino to keep people awake so that they will play more.
 

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