No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Balancing Acts: Gambling-Machine Addiction and the Double Bind of Therapeutics
... This does not produce net economic benefits, particularly when less labour-intensive gambling sectors such as online gambling or EGMs substitute for sectors that provide more jobs or government revenue, such as casinos, racing tracks, or lotteries. Such a development can be seen in the case of EGMs substituting for traditional table games in casinos (Levitzky et al., 2000;Schüll, 2012Schüll, , 2013. This type of substitution does not reduce the total win of casinos, but it may reduce employment opportunities in the industry. ...
In economics, cannibalization refers to a process in which a new product or service partly or completely substitutes for those in existing markets. This systematic review analyses the existing evidence on cannibalization within gambling markets to determine whether such substitution takes place between different types of gambling. The analysis shows that new gambling products substitute to a certain extent for existing gambling products. The sector in which the evidence is most convincing is the casino industry, which cannibalizes lotteries and pari-mutuel racing. There is also evidence that casinos substitute for other casinos and for non-casino electronic gaming machines. Lotteries substitute for casinos, other lotteries, sports betting, and pari-mutuel or racing industries. In other cases, the evidence is less conclusive and sometimes non-existent, or industry relationships are more complicated. This review also found that even in cases where substitution does occur, it is incomplete, and thus the introduction of new products tends to expand the overall gambling market. We discuss these market dynamics and identify gaps in the available research. © 2018, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. All rights reserved.
... This does not produce net economic benefits, particularly when less labour-intensive gambling sectors such as online gambling or EGMs substitute for sectors that provide more jobs or government revenue, such as casinos, racing tracks, or lotteries. Such a development can be seen in the case of EGMs substituting for traditional table games in casinos (Levitzky et al., 2000;Schüll, 2012Schüll, , 2013. This type of substitution does not reduce the total win of casinos, but it may reduce employment opportunities in the industry. ...
In economics, cannibalization refers to a process in which a new product or service partly or completely substitutes for those in existing markets. This systematic review analyses the existing evidence on cannibalization within gambling markets to determine whether such substitution takes place between different types of gambling. The analysis shows that new gambling products substitute to a certain extent for existing gambling products. The sector in which the evidence is most convincing is the casino industry, which cannibalizes lotteries and pari-mutuel racing. There is also evidence that casinos substitute for other casinos and for non-casino electronic gaming machines. Lotteries substitute for casinos, other lotteries, sports betting, and pari-mutuel or racing industries. In other cases, the evidence is less conclusive and sometimes non-existent, or industry relationships are more complicated. This review also found that even in cases where substitution does occur, it is incomplete, and thus the introduction of new products tends to expand the overall gambling market. We discuss these market dynamics and identify gaps in the available research.
Psychoactive substances are subject to law control, imposed through the system of medical prescription or legal prohibition, with legal penalties for their unauthorized use. The consumption of drugs in a non-medical contexts is often labelled as "drug abuse", and the substance used in this way as a “narcotic” - the term endowed with illegality (Goodman et al. 2017). While legal, medical and popular discourses attempt to establish the distinction between what is an illicit drug and what is a medicine by creating the presumptive ontologies of drugs, this way of approaching substances has become the object of critique within drug research associated with the ‘ontological turn’. Scholars in this field of study have destabilised the assumption of a fixed, ready-made, singular drug objects, postulating thinking about substance use as a mutable system of relations intertwined in the broader assemblages and ecologies of drug use.
In this article, by using ethnographic examples and through the analysis of research conducted within the so called “psychedelic turn” movement, I demonstrate the fluidity and multiplicity of psychoactive substances and examine diverse ways in which the dominant – Euro-American – drug categorizations are undermined. I pose the question of how the border between what is an “illicit drug” and what is a “medicine” is stabilized and destabilized through the embodied users’ practices and scientific discourses.
This chapter discusses the accumulated perspectives on illicit drugs that evolved among anthropologist drug researchers during the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first two decades of the twenty‐first. The staff of the National Institute on Drug Abuse knew that their efforts to understand illicit drug use faced a dilemma, because the active epidemic of illicit drug use was not amenable to the usual epidemiologic techniques for studying outbreaks of disease. Once the qualitative researchers have gained access to drug‐using populations, determined the drugs used, described how they are used, and developed a general understanding of what drug use means to the users, the quantitative side of the investigation still has much to do. Tobacco among all drugs, licit and illicit, tobacco has the strongest dossier in dealing death to its users, yet new users flock to it from the ranks of the very young.
Voluntary self-exclusion programs allow gamblers to voluntarily be denied access to gambling venues for an agreed upon period. Many people who self-exclude decide to return to gambling venues after the exclusion period has ended, however people who reinstate may be at risk for the recurrence of gambling problems. This study was designed to determine the efficacy of a tutorial created with the intent of reducing the risk of harm to those who reinstate. People who wished to be reinstated were asked to complete a survey on gambling related issues and then watch the tutorial video. An online video-based tutorial designed to reduce gambling related harm and to provide information about treatment services was developed. The control group (N = 131) consisted of people who reinstated in the year prior to the implementation of the online tutorial. The experimental intervention group (N = 104) were those who reinstated after the implementation of the online tutorial. There was a significant decrease in gambling and problem gambling comparing pre-exclusion to during exclusion in both the experimental and control group. Furthermore, this drop in gambling problem was sustained for 6-months and 12-months after reinstatement. However, no main effect or interaction was found that supported the efficacy of the tutorial. Self-exclusion by itself was associated with a sustained reduction in problem gambling. There was no significant evidence that the educational tutorial had any additional impact on the reinstatement process.
Language ideologies are cultural representations, whether explicit or implicit, of the intersection of language and human beings in a social world. Mediating between social structures and forms of talk, such ideologies are not only about language. Rather, they link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. Through such linkages, language ideologies underpin not only linguistic form and use, but also significant social institutions and fundamental nottions of person and community. The essays in this new volume examine definitions and conceptions of language in a wide range of societies around the world. Contributors focus on how such defining activity organizes language use as well as institutions such as religious ritual, gender relations, the nation-state, schooling, and law. Beginning with an introductory survey of language ideology as a field of inquiry, the volume is organized in three parts. Part I, “Scope and Force of Dominant Conceptions of Language,” focuse on the propensity of cultural models of language developed in one social domain to affect linguistic and social behavior across domains. Part II, “Language Ideology in Institutions of Power,” continues the examination of the force of specific language beliefs, but narrows the scope to the central role that language ideologies play in the functioning of particular institutions of power such as schooling, the law, or mass media. Part III, “Multiplicity and Contention among Ideologies,” emphasizes the existence of variability, contradiction, and struggles among ideologies within any given society. This will be the first collection of work to appear in this rapidly growing field, which bridges linguistic and social theory. It will greatly interest linguistic anthropologists, social and cultural anthropologists, sociolinguists, historians, cultural studies, communications, and folklore scholars.
Basic concepts and case studies from an emerging field that investigates human capacities and pathologies at the intersection of brain and culture.
The brain and the nervous system are our most cultural organs. Our nervous system is especially immature at birth, our brain disproportionately small in relation to its adult size and open to cultural sculpting at multiple levels. Recognizing this, the new field of neuroanthropology places the brain at the center of discussions about human nature and culture. Anthropology offers brain science more robust accounts of enculturation to explain observable difference in brain function; neuroscience offers anthropology evidence of neuroplasticity's role in social and cultural dynamics. This book provides a foundational text for neuroanthropology, offering basic concepts and case studies at the intersection of brain and culture.
After an overview of the field and background information on recent research in biology, a series of case studies demonstrate neuroanthropology in practice. Contributors first focus on capabilities and skills—including memory in medical practice, skill acquisition in martial arts, and the role of humor in coping with breast cancer treatment and recovery—then report on problems and pathologies that range from post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans to smoking as a part of college social life.
ContributorsMauro C. Balieiro, Kathryn Bouskill, Rachel S. Brezis, Benjamin Campbell, Greg Downey, José Ernesto dos Santos, William W. Dressler, Erin P. Finley, Agustín Fuentes, M. Cameron Hay, Daniel H. Lende, Katherine C. MacKinnon, Katja Pettinen, Peter G. Stromberg
This book is an extended intellectual conversation about the ways personal lives are being undone and remade today. Examining the ethnography of the modern subject, this group of scholars probes the continuity and diversity of modes of personhood across a range of Western and non-Western societies. Contributors consider what happens to individual subjectivity when stable or imagined environments such as nations and communities are transformed or displaced by free trade economics, terrorism, and war; how new information and medical technologies reshape the relation one has to oneself; and which forms of subjectivity and life possibilities are produced against a world in pieces. The transdisciplinary conversation includes anthropologists, historians of science, psychologists, a literary critic, a philosopher, physicians, and an economist. The authors touch on how we think and write about contingency, human agency, and ethics today.
Andrew Lakoff argues that a new 'pharmaceutical' way of thinking about and acting upon mental disorder is coming to reshape not only the field of psychiatry, but also our very notions of self. Drawing from a comprehensive ethnography of psychiatric practice in Argentina (a country which boasts the most psychoanalysts per capita in the world) Lakoff looks at new ways of understanding and intervening in human behaviour. He charts the globalization of pharmacology, particularily the global impact of US psychiatry and US models of illness, and further illustrates the clashes, conflicts, alliances and reformulations that take place when psychoanalytic and psychopharmacological models of illness and cure meet. Highlighting the social and political implications that these new forms of expertise about human behaviour and human thought bring, Lakoff presents an arresting case-study that will appeal to scholars and students alike.
Never has a reconsideration of the place of drugs in our culture been more urgent than it is today. Drugs are seen as both panaceas and panapathogens, and the apparent irreconcilability of these alternatives lies at the heart of the cultural crises they are perceived to engender. Yet the meanings attached to drugs are always a function of the places they come to occupy in culture. This book investigates the resources for a re-evaluation of the drugs and culture relation in several key areas of twentieth-century cultural and philosophical theory. Addressing themes such as the nature of consciousness, language and the body, alienation, selfhood, the image and virtuality, the nature/culture dyad and everyday life – as these are expressed in the work of such key figures as Freud, Benjamin, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze – it argues that the ideas and concepts by which modernity has attained its measure of self-understanding are themselves, in various ways, the products of encounters with drugs and their effects. In each case, the reader is directed to the points at which drugs figure in the formulations of ‘high theory’, and it is revealed how such thinking is never itself a drug-free zone. Consequently, there is no ground on which to distinguish ‘culture’ from ‘drug culture’ in the first place.
The concept of addiction is historically and culturally specific, becoming a common way of
understanding experience first in early nineteenth-century America. This paper considers
the relation to the concept of elements in current professional definitions of addiction (as
dependence). Addiction concepts have become a commonplace in storytelling, offering a
secular equivalent for possession as an explanation of how a good person can behave badly,
and as an inner demon over which a hero can triumph.
This stimulating collection of essays is the product of face-to-face dialogues among anthropologists, sociologists, and philosopher-historians, all of whom focus their attention on the newly created biomedical technologies and their application in practice. Drawing on ethnographic and historical case studies, the authors show how biomedical technologies are produced through the agencies of tools and techniques, scientists and doctors, funding bodies, patients, clients, and the public. Despite shared concerns, these essays reveal that the authors have achieved no consensus about the objectives of their research, and the deep epistemological divides clearly remain - making for provocative reading.
Many people find themselves dissatisfied with recent linguistic philosophy, and yet know that language has always mattered deeply to philosophy and must in some sense continue to do so. Ian Hacking considers here some dozen case studies in the history of philosophy to show the different ways in which language has been important, and the consequences for the development of the subject. There are chapters on, among others, Hobbes, Berkeley, Russell, Ayer, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, Feyerabend and Davidson. Dr Hacking ends by speculating about the directions in which philosophy and the study of language seem likely to go. The book will provide students with a stimulating, broad survey of problems in the theory of meaning and the development of philosophy, particularly in this century. The topics treated in the philosophy of language are among the central, current concerns of philosophers, and the historical framework makes it possible to introduce concretely and intelligibly all the main theoretical issues.
Denial, which is viewed here as a composite phenomenon, is the major obstacle to treatment for the alcoholic and the significant others in his life
This book contains the fifteen invited papers delivered at the NATO International Conference on Experimental and Behavioral Appro aches to Alcoholism, held August 28 through September 1, 1977, at the Solstrand Fjord Hotel, Os, Norway. The editors of the book were Co-Directors of that conference. As well, 65 other scientists from 12 countries in the free world presented scientific papers on ex perimental and behavioral topics of relevance to alcoholism at the meeting. A most receptive audience of almost 200 persons also par ticipated actively in the discussions which followed every invited and contributed paper. The beauty of Norway, the hospitality of the proprietors of the Sol strand Fjord Hotel, the aura of Grieg and Troldhaugen, the en thusiasm of the speakers and participants - all combined to make the conference most memorable for those who attended it. Many persons and institutions deserve special thanks for their part in the success of the conference. Among these persons are Dr.