Austria and Germany News

The ultimate way to handle addictions
The wife of my neighbour has a problem. She just can't pass any shoe store. Last year she bought more than 90 pairs of shoes. I guess she is an addictive consumer. But she is not alone; about 200,000 other Germans share her problem. And don't forget the 25 million addictive smokers, the 8 million alcoholics, and, of course, the 300,000 addictive gamblers. And don't forget the group of abusers of drugs and medicaments, people with sex-addiction problems, and so on. But the only group you can currently read about nearly every day in all of the newspapers and magazines is the gamblers. Before March 2006, they were no problem at all, not worth mentioning with one sentence in a newspaper. But on March 28, the Federal Constitution Court of Germany decided that the only reasonable way to justify a government monopoly on all games of chance is the protection of addictive gamblers. Of course, this also means to stop any kind of advertisement for all games of chance in Germany. The second option, which was shown by the Federal Constitution Court, was to liberalize the market by giving licenses to private companies. But the majority of our politicians in their infinite wisdom decided to keep the monopoly for the government. Thousands of private sports-betting offices had to close and it was some kind of a lottery, in which part of Germany the office was located, because some local officials handled the "problem" more liberally than others. Overall, several thousand people lost their jobs, taxes went down, and more social problems were created. As independent economic research has proven, the income generated from all games of chance will decrease by 75 percent without being supported by advertising; some of our politicians reacted very fast. Traditionally, these funds were used to help recreational sports as well as cultural and social projects. So, they said, if we can't advertise anymore and household income will drop, we can't offer financial help for these projects anymore. Meanwhile, private companies like Bwin started to support hundreds of recreational sport clubs, sponsoring them with tricots, shoes, and other stuff. This is not legal, shouted the local authorities in Southern Bavaria. And while the players on a small football club in a little village were training, the police showed up and the players had to take off their tricots, because "Bwin" was printed on them.

As time went by and the politicians realized that it might not be such a good idea to stop all advertising for games of chance offered by the government, they tried to interpret the Federal Constitution Court's decision a little differently. Maybe, only the advertising performed by private companies is bad and endangers the addictive gamblers, while their own ads are good and protective. Who cares? If you switch your radio on, there are still plenty of jackpot announcements for the public lottery and statements of how exciting it is to play the daily keno lottery. Of course, this is not advertising - it is just information for the people. With all of these measures, it was easy to see, how a massive part of the money that was formerly spent in Germany now found its way to foreign companies that offered their services through the Internet. This has to stop, the same politicians were thinking, and they discussed a brand-new idea, in their infinite wisdom. Why don't we force the Internet providers to block all IP addresses of foreign companies? Dear politicians, forget about it; this didn't even work in the Islamic Republic of Iran, so why should it work in Germany? And once you have finally solved the problem with the addictive gamblers in Germany, there is plenty more work to do. To protect all of the other addicted people, why don't you introduce a government monopoly on consumer goods, cigarettes, alcohol, medicaments, and, of course, sex?

Michael Keiner is a German poker pro who is sponsored by 888.com. You can find him playing online at PacificPoker.com.