Gambling addiction snares thousands in tiny Estonia
It is a small Baltic country with a spectacularly beautiful capital, recent European Union membership, a growing tourist industry: and a guilty secret.
Estonia has a huge problem with gambling addiction.
"Gambling addiction is a devil that can ruin your life," said 56-year-old Anton whose 30-year-old son Rein committed suicide in February after losing all his earnings at a casino in the capital Tallinn.
"States which have such a liberal casino policy simply don't care about their people," Anton said.
According to a recent survey by Estonian market research company Faktum, tiny Estonia with a population of about 1.4 million, a million of them adults, has around 25,000 gambling addicts.
About the same number are regarded as being at risk.
In addition to a booming private casino business, there is the state-owned "Estonian Lotto" which has been very successful in recent years and whose various gambling products can be accessed on the Internet.
"I think the names of all those people who have lost their lives due to casino addiction should be written on the wall of our new national art museum, built with the money collected from the gambling tax," Anton said.
"My son was just one of many who found no way out of that hellish spiral in spite of everything we tried to do to help him."
According to the Estonian finance ministry, state revenues from the gambling tax have increased sixfold in the last 10 years.
Half of the proceeds of the tax is used for cultural projects, including the building of the new national art museum in Tallinn due to open next year.
While Estonia's casino policy may not differ greatly from that of some other east European countries, it is noticeable that compared with the nearby Finnish capital Helsinki, located 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Tallinn, casinos have mushroomed in the Estonian capital.
According to Tonis Ruutel, chairman of the Estonian Association of Gambling Operators, there are 126 casinos in Estonia and last year their profits totalled nearly seven million euros (9 million dollars). Half the casinos are located in Tallinn.
Entrance to casinos is restricted to people over 21.
"The number of casino addicts is always too high, because even one addict is a loss for society," Ruutel said. "We warn clients about signs of addiction and addicts can make a written demand that they be refused entrance to a casino.
"But once they are in the mood to play they ask for the request to be ignored."
"The amount of income collected from the gambling tax has doubled during the last five years," Aet Sallaste, a senior official at the finance ministry, told AFP.
He says his ministry sees no major problem with Estonia's casino business, which it considers a normal part of a market economy.
"There are no problems with the legal regulation of gambling. The monthly gambling tax is currently 320 euros (415 dollars) for one machine and 960 euros (1,245 dollars) for one table and it will increase by almost a third next January if the parliament adopts draft legislation amending the gambling act."
Some casino owners have already warned that the tax increase may lead to an increase in illegal gambling.
But according to another senior official at the ministry, some legal casinos are suspected of criminal activities, such as money laundering.
"It is very hard to prove, but it is hard to believe the huge sums reported by some casinos are correct if you spend your evenings there and see that they are not so overcrowded as to bear out claims that so much money is staked," said the official, who asked not to be named.
The problems of casino addiction came to public attention three years ago when the head of the organisation managing 46 percent of the money received from the gambling tax confessed being an addict himself.
He admitted having gambled away more than half a million eurosdollars) received as taxes for cultural endowment projects.
"Until now there was no evidence of how widespread gambling addiction in Estonia really is," said Auni Tamm, head of market research at Faktum, which compiled the first survey of gambling addiction in Estonia.
"The first step is to acknowledge the problem and then the authorities have to understand that gambling addiction needs various preventive actions like other dangerous addictions."