BUCHAREST — On the cusp of turning 40, Dan has been living with addiction for half his life. Yet his eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses are not bloodshot; his arms are not punctured or bruised by needles. Under a fine Bucharest drizzle, he heads for a gambling hall, convinced he has lost almost everything. “People believe that all humans are fit to survive,” said Dan, a pseudonym to protect his identity. “But nature is not like that.”
Gambling venues have become ubiquitous across Romania since the first big betting hall opened its doors in Bucharest’s central train station in the spring of 1990, just months after Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist rule ended in popular revolt and a Christmas Day firing squad.
In May 2015, the Romanian parliament approved a law on gambling that included measures designed to tackle the scourge of addiction. But more than a year later, there are reasons to doubt their effectiveness.
The law has handed responsibility for tackling addiction to the gambling operators that profit from it. Psychologists the industry plans to tap to help people like Dan have had business interests in gambling. Critics said all sides play down the scale of the problem. “Public health has been subordinated to the interests of private companies,” said Eugen Hriscu, founder of Aliat, an anti-addiction nongovernmental organization.
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With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, the major Western gambling operators glimpsed a new growth market. “Hordes of people would wait in line outside the gambling hall, pushing the doors so I would open them faster,” said Cristian Pascu, a founding member of the Romanian Gaming Association of Organisers and Producers who started out as an engineer at the railway station gambling hall, operated by a subsidiary of the Austrian gambling giant Novomatic.
Regulation has been playing catch-up ever since. Between 2004 and 2013 in Romania, the number of rapid-fire slot machines quadrupled. There are now an estimated 70,000. The state’s earnings from gambling licenses and permits have likewise shot up, from €147 million in 2014 to €266 million in 2015. In 2014, some 87 percent of that money came from slot machine operators.
The operators estimate the number of what they call “problem gamblers” at roughly 98,000 in a population of just under 20 million.
Some experts warn the figures point to a growing addiction in the European Union’s second-poorest nation and to a paucity of regulation replicated across the Balkans, where cash-strapped states see gambling as a harmless but valuable source of income.
The operators estimate the number of what they call “problem gamblers” at roughly 98,000 in a population of just under 20 million. According to Hriscu, the real figure is likely far higher. “We as organizers have seen more and more addicts than before,” added Sorin Constantinescu, the head of the Casino Association in Romania.
Constantinescu said gambling operators have recognized the need “to make people aware that they should consider gambling a way to have fun — not a way to ruin your family.”
“It’s normal that we want to make money, but we don’t want to make money at any cost or to destroy people,” he said.
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The law passed in 2015 called for the creation of a “public interest foundation” to be in charge of anti-addiction programs. Romania’s main gambling associations would sit on the board and control its activities. It also foresaw a fund, run by the Romanian National Gambling Office (ONJN), for the prevention of addiction. Each gambling company was expected to contribute just €1,000 euros a year, with online operators and the National Lottery paying €5,000.
The ONJN and one major operator have said they would draw on the experience of the industry’s own anti-addiction program called Responsible Gaming, run by two psychologists — Leliana Parvulescu and Steliana Rizeanu.
Parvulescu runs a “human behavior” consultancy, Zivac, that lists among its clients the gambling company Game World, owned by Bucharest-based Game City SRL, and the gambling association Romanian Bookmakers. She said her consultancy work for Game World, which was focused on “communication and personal development,” ended before she joined Responsible Gaming in 2012 and her involvement with Romanian Bookmakers is restricted to her anti-addiction counseling.
According to the Romanian Trade Registry, Rizeanu and her husband, Radu, opened a company in 1994 called Rino Trading, registered as dealing in gambling and betting. Its address was the same as the psychology clinic Aquamarin that Rizeanu runs and where the industry’s Responsible Gaming program directs addicts. Rizeanu told the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network that Rino Trading ceased activities in 2009, the year before she was hired to head Responsible Gaming. The company is still listed in the trade registry but appears to be dormant.
Parvulescu and Rizeanu insisted there is no conflict of interest, because, as Rizeanu pointed out, the industry does not need compulsive gamblers. “An addict is first of all a person who doesn’t have money, a gambler who creates problems in the gambling venue, for the staff and also for customers, like a drunk in a luxury restaurant,” Rizeanu said.
During Eastern Europe’s cutthroat transition to capitalism, “casinos were there to sell hope,” according to one gambler | Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Romslot, an association of gambling operators and a major stakeholder in Responsible Gaming, said it was unaware Rizeanu had previously run a gambling company but said it should not be considered an issue “as long as she does her job within the program.”
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The gambling industry has gone to great lengths to create the myth that most people can gamble for fun, said Natasha Dow Schull, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of the book “Addiction by Design.” The industry, she said, promoted the image that consumers can “gamble for fun and it doesn’t hurt us at all, almost like we have some kind of physical immunity to it. And then there is this group that has problems.”
Studies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States suggest people with gambling problems account for at least 40 to 50 percent of the industry’s revenues, raising obvious questions over its interest in helping them stop. But the ONJN, Romania’s main oversight body, said it sees no cause for alarm over the scale of addiction. “The media is all over [gambling-related] suicides, but just think how many people commit suicide because of love or bank loans,” said Odeta Nestor, the head of the ONJN and a former financial director at a number of casinos in Romania.
Romania is not alone in Europe in handing responsibility for anti-addiction programs to the gambling operators. But critics said the danger is greater in a country where regulation is loose and the state has failed to consult or recruit independent voices not beholden to the operators. “Ideally there should be a clear cut between the industry and the treatment programs,” said Corinne Bjorkenheim, who manages the Gambling Clinic in Helsinki, an umbrella program for addiction treatment in Finland. Finns are big gamblers, but the industry is nationalized and the state channels much of the revenue back into social causes, including treatment for addicts.
Recently, Dan relapsed. He no longer lives with his wife and child. He moved back in with his parents and gambles at night, just like in his youth.
Pascu, of the Romanian Gaming Association of Organisers and Producers, conceded “there is a little conflict of interest” in Romania’s gambling operators being in charge of combating addiction. Nevertheless, he said: “The education can come from us because we know the industry’s secrets. Educate the consumer to understand the fun element, that you come here to spend time, and not as a source of money.”
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Dan began gambling in the mid-1990s as a student, lured by the free food and drinks. During Eastern Europe’s cutthroat transition to capitalism, “casinos were there to sell hope,” he said. For the youth of small Romanian towns, “these gambling venues have become their meeting places, the community centers,” said Hriscu of the Aliat NGO.
Recently, Dan relapsed. He no longer lives with his wife and child. He moved back in with his parents and gambles at night, just like in his youth. In June, he shared a video on his Facebook profile of the Swiss long-distance runner Gabriela Andersen-Schiess staggering to the finish line of the marathon at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, a symbol of human endurance. “This is the life of an addict,” he said. “At every step, every second, there is pain and suffering.”
Diana Mesesan is a Bucharest-based feature writer. This article was produced as part of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation and Open Society Foundations, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.