Program Item Details
TITLE: Dr. Eric Single, Professor of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto and Scientific Advisor Emeritus with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse
SUBJECT: #201 AGRI Conference on the Economic and Social Impacts of Gambling: Research Methodology Framework
SYNOPSIS: ..
AUDIO: Download Audio (mp3 format)
TRANSCRIPT:
#201 May 23, 2006
Interview starts at 17:26
Intro: Gambling scientists are wrestling with the issue of methodology. How can researchers develop studies that allow for better interpretation of their results? This was the topic of great discussion at a recent conference sponsored by the Alberta Gaming Research Institute in Banff. And according to keynote speaker Dr. Eric Single, gambling researchers may benefit from the lessons learned by those working in the area of substance abuse.
Eric Single is a professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and he is the Scientific Advisor Emeritus with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.
Dr. Eric Single
ES: I suppose it’s that we’ve had some experience now in an ongoing process of developing international guidelines for doing studies estimating costs of substance abuse. And that experience has maybe some lessons for the development of similar guidelines for estimating the costs and benefits of gambling.
CC: WHAT WOULD BE THOSE SIMILARITIES OR THOSE LESSONS?
ES: Well, one is you have to use multidisciplinary teams, because these are very complex issues that involve not just economics by any means but epidemiology, criminology, public health, people with familiarity with reporting systems, and treatment systems. You need a team of people. It can’t be done adequately by one person alone or even a group of people if they’re all from one discipline.
The other thing is not to expect too much. The really important thing here isn’t the bottom line. The bottom line estimates, I don’t even believe in my own studies the bottom line estimates. I know there’s so much variability so you have to lots and lots of sensitivity analysis. What if you did a different assumption here, a different assumption there? Every study should have four or five sensitivity analyses attached to it in order to compare it to other studies.
And I guess the major focus should be that you need to see this as not an exercise in getting a bunch of experts who are going to write a cookbook about how to do it, you know, Step One and then you and this this and then do that. It’s not going to be like that at all, not for a long time at least. It’s going to be a process that might take a generation of gradually refining the guidelines through experience and actually applying them in studies. And learning about new mythological issues or problems or new consequences, positive or negative, that emerge and so forth.
And it has to be an international, sort of a consensual process. So it’s going to take a long time. I see this meeting has the potential of being the first step in that process
With regard to substance abuse, we’ve made a huge amount of progress we wouldn’t have thought possible just ten years ago, when we first met here in Banff, ironically. You know, studies were all over the map, widely varying estimates because nobody was using the same framework, they were all over the map And even though we don’t really have a cookbook, it’s more a laying out your options and here are your options. Whatever you choose, try to report it in a way that makes it comparable to a study that might have been done by someone else using a different option, using sensitivity analysis or whatever.
So, it’s that kind of a thing. It’s a starting point, the way the concept of GDP started a generation ago, or more than a generation ago. Now it’s a very useful tool in economic analysis.. Even though I agree with Anielski points that it doesn’t cover the whole of social wellbeing by any means.
Initially it was subject to all kinds of criticism, a lot of people came to the conclusion that it was an impossible thing to do. But they were proven wrong. Even Chad has a GDP which is reasonably robust. So I’m hoping this will go the same way, a generation from now. It won’t be even in ten years, but a generation from now we’ll have a well established agreed upon methodology that everyone can use.
CC: WHEN YOU LOOK AT THAT, DO YOU GET ANY INDICATIONS AS TO HOW ENTRENCHED, NOT JUST SUBSTANCE ABUSE, BUT NOW GAMBLING HAS BECOME TO OUR OVERALL ECONOMY AND THE WAY WE LIVE?
ES: Terribly entrenched. I mean, the arguments often been made that governments themselves are more addicted to gambling than anybody else because of the revenues that come from it. And I think we’re just beginning to see the magnitude of some of the problems associated with that at the individual level in terms of problem gambling and pathological gambling at a community level.
But I also think that a large part of the gambling research literature has failed to take into account - it’s early, I’m not criticizing people here – but what may be the major consequence, the major adverse consequence of legalized gambling I think is it’s impact on the distribution of wealth in society. It’s not that it creates some pathological problem in problem gamblers. That is a real problem and part of the problem.
But I think an equally important of the problem that’s really not well studied at all is what happens - all gambling represents a regressive tax. Some of them are incredibly regressive like lotteries. Lotteries basically take a little bit of money from a lot of people and create a few millionaires. And it is disproportionately taking money from poor people because that’s the only chance they’ll ever have in their lives of becoming millionaires. So it’s not just everybody equal tax. It’s what they call the so-called voluntary tax.
And what I really dislike is it’s making us more like American society. The difference between rich and poor is growing rapidly. And legalized gambling is very much accelerating that process. And that’s to me a the key difference between Canadian and American society, is the difference between rich and poor and the social welfare net that we have here that they don’t have in the States and the more sense of civic culture. They don’t have a concept of civic culture down there. It’s everybody’s out for themselves. It’s a more dog eat dog world. And our higher quality of life which we clearly have in terms of UN Indices and other things, I think in a large part stems from the fact that we have more social equality.
CC: YOUR PRESENTATION YOU MADE A COMMENT ABOUT COMPARISON BETWEEN ILLEGAL GAMBLING AND LEGAL GAMBLING. WHAT’S BETTER?
ES: Well, yeah. Almost universally when proposals have been made to introduce legalized gambling, one of the major rationales is that it’s going to replace illegal gambling. As if illegal gambling is much worse for the public than legal gambling possibly could be.
And in fact, most of the gambling that is replaced by these new legalized gambling opportunities is not illegal so much, it’s social gambling. Things like a bunch of friends getting together and playing poker or betting on sports events, whatever it might be.
In those situations, it’s not at all obvious that opening casinos and providing legal gambling opportunities is going to be an improvement over that situation. In social gambling, there are 101 informal mechanisms by which people can reduce the harm that might come from excessive gambling. And their friends do it, too.
I’ve been in poker games, and probably most people have been in poker games where they’ve seen where somebody wants to borrow money, they‘ve lost more than they came with. And people stop loaning them money because they’ve lost enough.
Or someone who is winning has a good hand, but he doesn’t pound someone, he doesn’t take advantage against someone’s who’s losing. That kind of thing happens all the time in social games. There are mechanisms that prevent the damage from getting too bad for a bad gambler.
By contrast, you go to a casino in Ontario today, you can mortgage your house 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It’s the only place in the province where you can do it. Now where is the government responsibility here to do that sort of thing? The behavior of the gaming industry itself has a lot to do with whether or not it really is preferred over quote/unquote “illegal gambling.” I think in a lot of ways, quasi legal or illegal gambling is probably better for the public than is the legal gambling, especially when you take into account the great increase in volume when gambling occurs.
CC: THIS CONFERENCE IS ABOUT SOCIO-ECONOMIC IMPACTS AND BENEFITS AND THE NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF WHAT WE SEE COMING OUT OF THIS GAMBLING CULTURE THAT WE’RE CREATING NOW, WHAT WOULD YOU SEE THEN AS BEING AS GOOD RESEARCH AND THE SETTING UP OF GOOD RESEARCH ON THE SOCIO ECONOMIC IMPACTS?
ES: The speakers this morning I thought were excellent. And I didn’t always feel that way about some of them. Like Mark Anielski’s concept of well-being, rather than simply economic outputs in dollar terms, is crucial to really getting at these issues. It’s an excellent start, I think to look at something more than just employment and revenue and arguing about whether you should count this and not count that. He’s looking at the whole well-being in the community.
That’s where we should go. It’s well consistent with trends in public health. We no longer think of health as the absence of disease, we think of it as a whole lifestyle, a whole sense of well-being.
CC: THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
ES: Thank you.
Dr. Eric Single is a Professor of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and the Scientific Advisor Emeritus with the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse. He spoke at the recent conference on the social and economic impacts of gambling hosted by the Alberta Gaming Research Institute.
FEATURED LINK: Alberta Gaming Research Institute