Unfortunately keeping stoned or drunk is cheaper than feeding a gambling addiction. I can see the stoner by his eyes, the drunk by his smell and demeanour, but can you walk down the street and spot the neatly dressed guy dying inside and putting his wife and kids through hell because he's bankrupted the family? There's only so much drugs and drink a man can consume before passing out or dying, but the amount of money he can consume is limitless. Therein lies the issue and probably the argument for regulation.
Where was the regulation in some of these cases. What about the woman that lost $8 Million at William Hill. Surely this level of play should have raised some questions as to whether this was some very rich high roller or someone who was gambling away money they don't own, or may have obtained from illegal sources.
Surely they would have verified her ID, and from this information, been able to judge roughly what her net worth might be. Someone who has $8 Million to piss away at the casino is hardly likely to be living in a standard residential property, more likely an expensive pad in a gated estate, with all the trappings to match someone with the level of income necessary to "responsibly gamble" with that kind of money.
Quite a few of these big losses have come about because a player has been able to embezzle funds from their workplace to feed the addiction.
Where players have bankrupted themselves and their family, the net losses have been smaller, the kind of money the average person is able to save or borrow, which is likely to be limited by how much they can raise on their home without the banks seeing them as a bad credit risk.
One very useful change would be a ban on gambling with credit, and with online gambling, this would be a ban on the use of credit cards for making deposits. It would at least cut out the easiest route for spending what you don't own.
eWallets are useful in this respect as they decline any attempt to deposit more than is in there. The downside is that they provide a back door means of using a credit card to raise gambling funds, something that would also have to be banned if credit cards were to be banned at casinos.
