A generation ago, gambling required effort. It meant a trip to a casino, a racetrack, or at least a corner store to buy a lottery ticket. It was an adult activity, cordoned off from the daily lives of young people. Today, that barrier has evaporated. The casino is no longer a building on the edge of town; it is a slick app on the phone in your child’s pocket, a pop-up ad on their favorite video game, and an ever-present sponsor of the sports leagues they idolize.
Nursultan Saigarayev.
This isn’t just a new market; it’s a new, aggressive, and largely unregulated form of addiction-as-a-service, and it is creating a public health crisis that we are utterly failing to address. We are witnessing the rise of ludomania—or gambling addiction—on a scale we’ve never seen, and its primary victims are teenagers and young adults.
This problem is not abstract to me. In my home country of Kazakhstan, this digital firestorm has caught hold with devastating speed. Walking through any city, you are assaulted by the bright logos of betting companies plastered on buses, billboards, and apartment buildings. Sports are now inseparable from betting odds, with national heroes promoting the “thrill of the game.”
But beyond the marketing gloss, a darker national conversation has emerged. We are hearing stories of university students who have lost their tuition fees in a single night of online poker, of young professionals driven into the arms of loan sharks by debts racked up on sports betting, and of families torn apart. The problem became so acute that our president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, recently called it a “national disaster” and ordered a severe crackdown on illegal gambling and new restrictions on advertising.
What I am witnessing in Kazakhstan is not a unique national failing; it is a warning. My country is simply a few steps ahead in a global trend. The business model of digital gambling is built on frictionless, impulsive, 24/7 access. It leverages the same “gamification” techniques—bright colors, reward schedules, and “in-app purchases”—that have made video games so compelling, but applies them to a product that can destroy a life in an evening.
The industry’s defenders will claim that age-verification checks are in place. But any teenager knows how to bypass a simple “Are you 18?” checkbox. More insidiously, a new generation of “gambling-like” products, from cryptocurrency speculation to the “loot boxes” in video games, are priming young minds for the dopamine rush of a high-risk bet, all before they are legally allowed to place one.
This is a crisis, and we cannot treat it as a moral failing or a matter of personal responsibility. The house, in this case, is a multi-billion dollar global industry, and it is playing a rigged game against our children. The way forward requires a response as systemic as the problem itself.
First, we must treat ludomania as the public health emergency it is. This means shifting from stigma to support and funding accessible, specialized addiction services—not with token donations from the betting industry, but through a significant government-mandated levy on their massive profits.
Second, regulation must be dragged into the 21st century. Banning the use of credit cards to place bets—a critical “friction” point that prevents people from betting money they don’t have—should be a global standard. We need rigorous, biometric-based age verification, not just trust-based systems. We must also enforce mandatory, low deposit limits for all users under the age of 25, a demographic whose brains are still developing and are most susceptible to addiction.
Finally, we must de-normalize gambling in youth-focused environments. Just as we did with tobacco, we must ban gambling companies from sponsoring sports teams and using athletes and celebrities in their advertising. It is unconscionable to have a child’s sports idol telling them to “make the game more interesting” with a bet.
We would not give a child a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of vodka. Yet we are allowing an industry to put a high-stakes, predatory, and deeply addictive casino in their pocket. Unless we act decisively, the price we pay will be measured in a generation of lost potential, buried in a digital avalanche of debt.
The author is Nursultan Saigarayev, a graduate student of the Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Public Policy.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Astana Times.
