The National Center for Responsible Gambling, which is a charity funded by a powerful lobby group for casinos, says that colleges can treat gambling like alcohol and policies can be written to control its abuse while at the same time it acknowledged that it can be healthy when enjoyed in moderation. The organization walks college officials through the process of this transition.
It has planned to launch on Tuesday an internet based resource center to supply information about the hazards of gambling addiction and what paths colleges can follow while formulating policies on gambling for students.
However, at the same time, a group which claims to oppose “predatory gambling” says that it will be wise for colleges to look much more closely into this before falling for the proposal. The group contends that the stance of the center which promotes colleges to take a much more progressive stance on gambling is nothing but an attempt to garner goodwill as the casinos which fund the center are lobbying for the adaptation of more permissive laws which will allow the casinos on the internet to specially focus on college students as the target audience.
The new website extends a report which came in 2009 from a task force of the responsible gambling group which outlined an education policy landscape in which colleges largely ignored gambling and the threats that it posed on student’s well-being. The center said in its report that as of 2005, gambling policies had been formed by only 22% of the 119 colleges that it has sampled.
No more scientific data is possessed by the center; however, it also doesn’t have a reason to think that there has been any change in the situation since then, according to a senior research director named Christine Reilly. Reilly also says that more ways of promoting the site are being explored by the center. The recommendations for the site are also being looked into; these include funding the colleges so that they can initiate the policymaking process which has been prescribed.
