‘Nowadays if you’ve a mobile phone you’re effectively in a betting shop’

• HARD-pressed people foolishly resort to gambling as a means of coping during the cost-
of-living crisis, (Fears over desperate gamblers, May 11).

But some people’s lives are blighted even in the best of times by an ever-present cost-of-living crisis resulting from someone in their family being hooked on gambling. And new technology has made this more widespread than ever.

Nowadays if you’ve a mobile phone you’re effectively in a betting shop. By all accounts our legislators have been expensively lobbied over the upcoming gambling bill so prospects for change are dismal. Gambling, like smoking, wrecks lives and surely it is time it was treated as the evil that it is.

W BURNS, WC1