The Alicante Platform against the Proliferation of Betting yesterday showed its “indignation” at the amendments that the Popular Party and Vox have presented to the Valencian Gambling Law, in the sense of eliminating the minimum distance that betting parlors must today respect towards educational centers.
The Valencian Gambling Law was approved more than three years ago and established a minimum distance of 850 meters between betting houses and educational centers, with the aim of preventing betting among minors. According to the group in a statement, “now that the activity licenses of many betting houses are beginning to expire, the PP and Vox propose that their licenses can be renewed so that they can continue with their activity, despite being attached to schools. or institutes.”
The Platform, made up of several Alicante neighborhood associations, the Vida Libre association for the treatment of gambling addiction and political parties (Compromís, the Communist Party and Esquerra Unida), announces that, if these amendments are not withdrawn, it will call for mobilizations: “they have decided “Supposing on the side of a minority, of a few businessmen who make a lot of money from gambling, against the right to health of minors.”
For the Platform, these amendments respond “to the pressures of the betting employers’ lobby, which only wants to maintain its economic benefits at the expense of the health of our young people.”
Antonio Castaños, a psychologist specializing in gambling, points out that “the addiction among minors to gambling is worrying, and measures like this make it increasingly worse.”
For all these reasons, the Platform demands that both parties withdraw these amendments and that in no case be the licenses of betting houses opened in front of institutes and schools be renewed. “If they don’t listen to us, we will mobilize again as we did three years ago, our right to health comes first,” they say.
Castaños recently warned in La Vanguardia about the special impact that these places have on the youth population, attracted by an apparently innocuous love of sports, which leads them to gamble first for pure entertainment only to fall, in many cases, into an uncontrollable addiction.
The expert stressed “the suffering and deterioration that gambling entails, both for the addicted person, who in a high percentage thinks of suicide as the only alternative, and for their relatives who, linked to the disorder, experience the emotional consequences of living together, with someone who seems like a stranger and the uncertainty and fear of relapse, with its devastating social and economic effects.
Among the current trends in this regard, he highlighted that addiction increasingly appears in younger people: “the majority proportion is already that of people between 16 and 30 years old.” Another aspect to which the expert draws attention is the fact that “women continue not to go to treatment, despite the increase in the prevalence of the disorder in this gender, which leads us to assume that it is a consequence of the double social penalty.” -family member who suffers: being a player and a woman”.
