how Britain got hooked on gambling
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Jack Ritchie, a handsome and gregarious 24-year-old, killed himself in November 2017 after succumbing again to his gambling addiction. Liam McCarron, a Birmingham businessman who was left severely disabled after a medical mistake, squandered the financial compensation he received from the NHS in his local bookies, “helped along the road to self-destruction by staff who knew that he could no longer work”. Martin Paterson was left feeling like a zombie — “there but not there” — after getting hooked on betting machines; he attempted suicide too, but was saved when doggers interrupted him.
Stories such as these pepper Rob Davies’s methodical, sensitive and occasionally harrowing polemic about the gambling industry. They are tragedies in the Grecian vein, with the victims playing a part in their
