Boston Globe

Letters to the Editor
Boston Globe
135 Morrissey Blvd.
P.O. Box 2378
Boston, MA 02107

Dear Editor:

The results of the Harvard Medical School study on problem gambling revealed that close to 99 percent of all Americans and Canadians gamble with little or no adverse consequence. Your readers would never know this from reading Dolores Kong’s Dec. 5 article.

Your article also left your readers in the dark on another important point. While the study showed that there has been a small increase in problem gambling from 0.84 to 1.29 percent during the past two decades, your readers were not informed that his number was well below the 11 percent that has often been quoted in reviews of this issue. Your readers would benefit by having all the facts instead of carefully selected snippets of information.

Your readers were further misled by your article, which indicated that the increase in problem gambling in recent years is due to the growth of the gaming—entertainment industry, when the study made clear that weaknesses in previous studies likely led to this erroneous conclusion. As the Harvard study reports, “…more than half of all disordered gambling prevalence research has been released since 1992. Much of this new research focuses on segments of the population who experience higher rates of gambling disorders [such as alcoholics, drug dependents, manic depressants or prisoners, for example] than the general public. This pattern of recent investigation of ‘higher risk’ populations may have created misleading perceptions of increasing rates of disordered gambling.”

With those points made, it should be said that the gaming—entertainment industry recognizes that one problem gambler is one too many. It was with this in mind that the industry established a unique partnership with academia to found the National Center for Responsible Gaming, which sponsored the Harvard study. The Center provides resources and capabilities for scholarly research on gambling disorders in order to provide a scientific basis for the development of prevention, education and treatment strategies for problem gambling.

It is important that those who have difficulties gambling responsibly receive help and those who enjoy the activity without problems do so in an environment free of recrimination. Our efforts in this regard are not unlike those of organizations that extend assistance to individuals who abuse credit cards. These people deserve help, but their problems should not be blamed on the credit system, nor should those who use credit cards responsibly be penalized due to the problems of a limited number of people who cannot use the cards responsibly.

On the issue of problem gambling, your readers deserve better than your article provided. They deserve the truth, the whole truth, no matter what the author’s opinion. Dolores Kong and the Boston Globe are entitled to hold whatever opinion they want regarding the subject of gaming, but it is intellectually dishonest to spin the facts to support that opinion.

Sincerely,

Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr.