Around 100,000 people in the Czech Republic were addicted to gambling, online games and betting and another 440,000 people had problems with them in 2014, national drug coordinator Jindrich Voboril and Viktor Mravcik, national drug and addiction monitoring centre head, said yesterday.
The country has a population of 10.5 million.
Last year, one third of adult Czechs tried gambling, while the number of young gamblers is rising most of all. The riskiest group are people aged 35 to 44.
Mravcik said people spent around 138.1 billion crowns on gambling last year, which raised the operators’ revenues by 10 percent.
The gamblers lost 31.4 billion crowns. Gambling brought 7.9 billion crowns to the state budget last year, 2.4 billion crowns of which went to the state and 5.5 billion crowns to municipalities, which was an average of 550 crowns per capita.
However, in some regions, the revenue was up to three times as high. This is mainly true of areas along the border with Austria adn Germany, Mravcik said.
A recent study by the psychiatric centre in Prague showed that gambling has negative impacts. Losses, falling into debt, various kinds of problems and the disintegration of families cost around 16 billion crowns annually.
“Approximately 20 percent of those gambling are problem gamblers. If at least half of them were involved in the intervention help programme, the losses could be cut by one to two billion crowns,” Voboril said.
The government is preparing an action plan against gambling until 2018. It places emphasis on prevention.
One of the planned measures provides for the introduction of an information web page with a guidance centre for gamblers and a crisis hotline. Every region should have a gambling addiction centre.
($1=24.827 crowns)
