BANGKOK:
— An academic seminar yesterday revealed
a shocking finding of gambling addiction among Thai people showing lottery is
their first gambling in life, and card game is most favourite among children
with youngest gamblers aged only 7-year-old.
The
seminar themed “Gambling Trend in Transition Period” was jointly hosted by the
Thai National Health Foundation and the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.
The
finding was based on the survey of 7,018 samples aged over 15 years old from 26
provinces. The youngest samples are 11 children whose ages are just 7 years
old, and most favorite gamble is card games, followed by “namtao poo pla” or
fish, prawn crab dice game, and lotteries.
According
to Prof Nualnoi Trirat, director-general of the Centre for Gambling Studies, of
the Faculty of Economics of Chulalongkorn University, the most favourite
gambling among children age 7 is card game, followed by dice gambling and
lotteries.
She said
more than 60% of samples started first gambling under 20, and the most popular
gambling is state lotteries, followed by underground lotteries, and football
gambling.
The
survey also showed that as football is now one of the most favourite sports in
the Thai society attracting more Thai fans, particularly the Thai League,
matches, the lucrative business of football gambling is also growing with the
trend.
The
Centre for Gambling Studies in the past year revealed that more than 1.9
million Thais are addicted to football gambling, 500,000 of which are women,
generating cashflow of over 130 billion baht.
But the
most popular form of gambling remains to be state lotteries with 19 million
Thais trying at the chance of luck nationwide, followed closely by 16 million
Thais for underground lotteries.
Both
forms of gambling generated as high as over 200 billion baht cashflow.
In the
past 12 months, the survey revealed that more than 27 million Thais had
gambled, creating a cashflow of over 360 billion baht.
The
seminar agreed that the problem of gambling addiction in Thailand has not been
handled seriously and now it should be timely for the Department of Mental
Health (DMH) to come and look into the situation closely as gambling addiction
is considered a mental health issue, which could lead to other physical health.
It
proposed that the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) look into
gambling seriously and raise it as a national agenda so that a special team
should be appointed to seriously tackle the problem, citing example of more
than 76,000 cases of gambling in the court.
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