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THE latest survey on gambling reveals two signs that require monitoring and action: More people are starting young and more regard lotteries or social gambling as leisure activities. The Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports found 75 per cent of respondents started at 24 or younger, up from 63 per cent three years ago. A 'substantially' higher proportion - 49 to 54 per cent compared with 25 to 36 per cent in 2005 - regard 4D, Toto, the Singapore Sweep or gambling with friends as pastimes. Also worrisome, the survey found an increase - from 50 to 60 per cent - in the number of those earning less than $1,000 a month who gambled. Tracking gambling participation and perception is necessary to come up with effective ways of preventing addictive, even ruinous, behaviour. The decision to permit casino resorts has heightened public concern over the ills of gambling, but it has also prompted concerted measures to deal with pre-existing and emerging challenges.
The National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG) has not varnished disturbing changes in perception. The increasingly popular view of gambling as a leisure activity first came to light in a survey it conducted last year. Compared to its 2006 findings, that study also pointed to a higher percentage who thought gambling very unlikely to disrupt family life, who felt it was possible to win big with the right skills, and who would continue gambling to recover losses. It is fair to ask, as some MPs have, if such views reflect increased social acceptance, in turn prompted by tacit official approval that the casino go-ahead may have signified. However, even without the casinos, opportunity has long matched demand - together with addiction risks - as online gambling, club fruit machines and football betting have added to the temptation of horse racing, lotteries and card and mahjong games.
Nevertheless, have more permissive attitudes begun to manifest increasingly as actual behaviour among the young, as the early-start finding seems to indicate? A Canadian expert estimates between 4 and 6 per cent of young people in Singapore experience some gambling and gambling-related problems. This is consistent with rates in a number of Western countries, but that is cold comfort. The NCPG will have to struggle against a strong counter-current of increasing tolerance, if not indulgence, among adults. But there is little alternative than for it to expand its outreach far beyond the 12,000 primary and secondary school children it has reached so far. Prevention is much better than having to put back together broken lives.
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