Can 𝙋𝙨𝙮𝙘𝙝𝙚𝙙𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙨 Treat a Gambling Addiction?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Can psychedelics be used to treat a gambling addiction? Well, that's what researchers from the center of psychedelic research Imperial College London have been trying to work out.

[00:00:10]Gambling has evolved a lot in the past 4,000 years. [music] It's gone from lottery style games in ancient China to dice games in ancient [music] Rome to horse riding in the 17th century to casinos in the 20th century and now it's online. It's available to you in any location at any time through your phone. You can sit on the toilet having a [ __ ] and lose your entire life savings in the next 10 minutes if you want. The profits of the gambling industry in the UK currently stand at about 14 billion pounds a year. That's according to the UK Gambling Commission.

[00:00:48]To put that in context, that's larger than the UK cinema, music and video game industries combined. But as long as there's been gambling, there's been people who struggled with compulsive behavior around it. There's an [music] estimated 1.4 million adults in Britain that have a gambling problem. That's about 2.7% of the adult population. Again, that's according to the UK Gambling Commission.

[00:01:14]The people that are most at risk are men, people who also have issues with alcohol and other drugs and people who suffer from depression. Could psychedelics help these people? I spoke to Dr. Rayyan Zafar from Imperial College London so he could explain more about how this could work. Right guys, today we're here with Dr. Rayyan Zafar.

[00:01:36]He's a researcher who specializes largely in sort of psychedelics and the potential for psychedelics to treat addiction. So thanks very much for joining me. Cheers.

[00:01:48]Um so you are a neuro psychopharmacologist. First question is what is a neuro psychopharmacologist?

[00:01:54]Good question. Yeah, if you break it down into three words, neuro part means the brain. So I study the brain. The psyche bit in the middle means the mind and the pharmacology or pharmacologist bit means drugs. So I study how drugs affect the brain and the mind essentially. I was really interested in trying to place an objective lens into mental health through the disorder of addiction. Try to understand where circuits have become hijacked and then using that information trying to understand whether we can develop new technologies potentially such as psychedelics that might be able to restore these networks that have been kind of hijacked by disorders like addiction. And brain imaging is one of the most advanced ways in humans that we can understand why we do things, why we think what we think, why we're attracted to reward, the impact of drugs in the brain and also we can now begin to see things like addiction within the brain itself.

[00:02:52]>> And so brain imaging, how does that work exactly? So you've probably heard of MRI.

[00:02:58]So that's probably the most used brain imaging tool. So you sit in a scanner.

[00:03:03]What I do is I show you patients videos and images which we hope might elicit a response in them in that emotional brain centers or their cognitive brain centers. You can make people watch videos. People watch porn in the scanner. You can give people psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, cocaine, alcohol. You get to develop a very good picture and image of how behaviors, how drugs and diseases. You can You can map all of those things with things like MRI. And then if we scan enough brains for people, let's say with a condition, we can say if we compare that mean signal to those without the condition, we could say that we think this part of the brain in this specific processing is where potentially the disorder is being driven by.

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[00:04:17]>> So let's take gambling as an as an example cuz that's something that you've looked into quite extensively. What's going on in the brain when someone who has a gambling addiction gambles? So what we've found is that it looks very similar to people with a heroin addiction or an alcohol addiction.

[00:04:36]>> like a drug because now if I didn't win that amount of money, it didn't give me the same rush, buzz, hit.

[00:04:42]>> Gambling is without a substance, but it's a behavior that is addictive.

[00:04:48]And so the reason why we wanted to look at gambling was because we wanted to understand how behavior alone can reorganize the way that our brain finds the world rewarding. And it's the first clinical behavioral addiction which has been recognized medically.

[00:05:04]So in the brains of people with gambling addiction, we see that there's structural differences. So we found in some parts of the brain are smaller. So the the volume, the actual tissue has shrunk or reduced in volume compared with healthy controls. We've also found that the way that the reward systems are connected and interconnected look very different. They're not as widely connected. The brain is a little bit more insular. The reward system is more kind of talking to itself which is a hallmark sign of addiction. Winning and waiting to see if you've won, the anticipation, they're both pretty much the same. The taking part repeatedly when you don't win is as activating to a gambler as the winning.

[00:05:48]>> We also see that the brain hyper reacts to cues in the environment that are related to gambling and in some people there's an under reaction to natural rewards. So that shows that a functional level, the brain is really interested only in things that might be related to gambling or things that will help engage someone with gambling behaviors. One of the things that the media and popular culture have unfortunately done is place dopamine at the center of the addiction story and it's quite a reductionist view. Instead, what we're now moving away from is using terms like dopamine causes addiction towards if there's something in the environment what happens is the brain circuits that measure what's rewarding in the environment fire up in response to a gambling advert. And part of that is dopamine mediated, but it's not really the full the full picture. And that's called key reactivity, that process. For someone with an addiction, over time the brain learns through consumption what will give them the hit.

[00:07:05]And over time it becomes quite implicit in scanning the environment to try to search that because the brain thinks it's necessary for their survival. There was one betting shop that I had omitted from my self-exclusion that I'd done the previous year. On the edge of the town, kind of bolted onto a housing estate, this little parade of shops just where it kind of sat on its own.

[00:07:30]And I remember I went in there four times the week before I actually relapsed, actually placed a bet. It's when the brain is tricked into believing that engaging in that addictive behavior is is necessary for survival is when addiction really kind of takes hold. And in gamblers' brains, we do see that. We see this kind of really strong firing not even to just behavior, not to playing gambling, but to actually just watching a gambling related clip. The addiction had taken over. So even though I had come to terms with it, the addiction was still running the show. I suppose it must be really difficult for people with those issues because if they relate it to sports, then just watching for instance a football match Yeah.

[00:08:16]could actually have that reaction. Yeah, well there was some analysis done by the University of Bristol this year and they found in a Premier League match last year, there were 5,000 advertisements related to gambling in 90 minutes.

[00:08:29]>> Wow. all shown on the screen. You wouldn't recognize it. I I I also thought, [ __ ] me, that's quite a lot.

[00:08:36]But 5,000 independent triggers within a football match. I mean every single week at the football, like the first thing I'd want to do when I got there is bookies, bookies, bookies. It got to a point where I wanted to get to the bookies more than I did the football.

[00:08:51]And what what treatments are available generally for gambling at the moment? If you If I presented myself to the GP and said I've got a gambling problem Yeah.

[00:08:59]what would happen then? So the NHS had been lucky enough to set up something called the National Gambling Centers.

[00:09:05]Then they provide different kinds of therapy. So you have CBT based therapy, so that's talking therapy which changes your cognition and your behaviors.

[00:09:15]There's psychodynamic therapy which might be more if you have a trauma related background.

[00:09:21]And even some drugs are prescribed now like naltrexone which is an opioid antagonist commonly used to treat smoking. smoking or alcohol addiction as well. And then there's also some inpatient rehabilitation wards that are for, you know, people that are really severe with gambling. In the UK right now, we think there's about 1.4 million people that have a gambling disorder. Wow.

[00:09:44]That's way more prevalent than I thought it was. Yeah, and in in any given year, about 50% of 16 to 25 year olds will gamble. So it's actually the most consumed addictive behavior Yes. that we know of. It's consumed more than alcohol. Social media was actually used probably a little bit more, but that's now intertwined with gambling because it's all available on your smartphone. It's is is is horrendous. It's one of the most unregulated industries right now, I think.

[00:10:16]The Gambling Commission in the UK been trying very hard to try to regulate some of these online platforms.

[00:10:23]You've also seen the class action lawsuits happening in LA at the moment where organizations like Matter and and so on have been, you know, harangued for making their social media platforms addictive. But it I think it's these streaming services where the problem lies because within those you also have loot boxes, which are a form of gambling. A loot box, sorry, what's that? So, you can pay for upgrades within like a platform to like allow you to access greater levels or tiers of a system.

[00:10:55]In and of In and of itself, that is a form of gambling because you're kind of paying money into a system to try and get more reward out of it and you don't know whether you're going to get more reward. I've probably been gambling since I was about 12 years old. I started gambling on a online video game called Runescape and they had these mini games inside the game where people could bet gold against each other. My mom used to buy me like gold inside this game. I would gamble it against other players and I remember for the first time when I was probably like 12 or 13, just feeling sick to my stomach losing gold in a video game. Do they have strong lobbying groups, the gambling [snorts] industry, like the alcohol industry?

[00:11:36]So, what I'd say is the highest some of the highest tax payers in the country are people that own some of the largest gambling companies.

[00:11:49]So, that's one thing and I'm not making any causation or accusations about lobbying. I've never come across the gambling lobby. I don't really do that much on the political policy side of things.

[00:12:01]But there's stories in the press about politicians being paid off to go to, you know, a nice fancy box at Wembley to watch football and MPs are courted by these people all the time and so and that's all out in the press and you can read that. And so, yeah, they're they're prevalent and they're there trying to sway influence, which is quite significant. It seems to me that we as a society are having a much better conversation about drugs these days, harm reduction, addiction, recovery. But we don't always talk as much about addictions that are less stigmatized because they're not illegal like gambling, eating, or social media for instance. Psychedelics are now being talked about as potentially part of the general treatment for addiction in the future. So, it's good to see that all types of addictions are being included.

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