What Do Gaming Regulations Regulate? Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions Provides Analysis of Disordered Gambling and Regulation
What are the driving forces behind state gaming regulations? What are the models on which gaming regulators base the policies they enforce? Is there a consistent national model for gaming regulations? Does the social perception that gambling is a problem encourage increased regulations?
These are the questions that led researchers at Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions to probe further into gaming regulations. Howard Shaffer, Ph.D., C.A.S., director of Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions, and Richard LaBrie, Ed.D., associate director of research and data analysis at the Division on Addictions, discussed their findings surrounding this issue during a conference session in September at Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas.
The objective of their research was to ascertain the methodology behind each state's gaming regulations with regard to disordered gambling in order to create a better understanding of how and why regulations are imposed. What factors do gaming regulators consider when developing their respective laws? The answers to these queries, according to Shaffer and LaBrie, could greatly help casino operators understand the origin of and reasons for enforced regulations and subsequently create continuity throughout the industry.
In an effort to determine the driving factors behind state regulations, Shaffer and LaBrie attempted to find a pattern behind each jurisdiction's regulatory activities. They set out to decipher if state regulatory measures were formulated to impact one or more sequential stages of gambling: initiation (regulation through awareness efforts, prevention measures or advertising/ marketing); gambling activities (regulation through signage, employee training, alcohol service, credit restrictions or loss limits) or gambling consequences (regulation by self-exclusion, help lines or treatment programs).
An examination of all states with casino gaming revealed no evident single model or uniform approach for gaming regulations. Whatever the method behind state gaming regulations, it is not explicit to those researching it or those who are mandated to follow it.
This revelation led to another review. Perhaps regulations are a function of the duration of legalized gambling? Not so, according to Shaffer and LaBrie, who discovered that states like Nevada and New Jersey, which have had legalized gambling longer than any other states, have similar or fewer regulations than states such as Michigan or Missouri, where gambling has not been available as long. Therefore, duration does not help explain state differences in gambling regulations.
From a public health perspective, however, Shaffer and LaBrie suggest that there are clear gaming regulatory targets. These include people and groups (gamblers and the gaming industry), gambling activities (exposure and access to gambling) and gambling settings (industry growth and activities within and around gambling settings).
So what do these findings tell us? There is still much to be learned, according to the researchers, but they did offer some thoughts and recommendations.
First, they pointed out the possibility that efforts to regulate gaming can have many different effects. It is not yet clear whether gaming regulations increase, decrease, have no effect, or are independent of gambling-related problems. Further research is necessary before it is feasible to determine the actual effects of regulation.
What is most important (and problematic) from their assessment of current state gaming regulations is that there is no apparent model driving regulatory activities. From Shaffer's and LaBrie's perspective, a positive first step would be to develop standards in which regulators have a responsibility to make explicit the basis for the regulations (preferably model-driven) they propose. Clear, model-driven regulations, according to the researchers, are the basis for effective public policy. They provide a quote by pioneer addiction researcher Norman E. Zinberg to emphasize this point: "Bad laws punish many people and deter few. Good laws punish few people and prevent many."
As part of the research agenda of the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, Shaffer and LaBrie plan to expand upon their initial gaming regulatory research by investigating how existing regulations were developed in the states where casino gaming is legal and examining the process leading to regulatory procedures in international gaming settings.
