Bohuslav Sobotka, the Socialist Democrat prime minister of the Czech Republic, has announced a plan to increase awareness of compulsive gambling and offer treatment to addicts. “We are the first government to approve a document of this kind,” Sobotka told the Prague Daily Monitor.
Presently, the Czech Republic spends up to 16 billion crowns (US$635 million) per year on the issue. The Monitor reports that 2 billion to 5 billion could be saved by “an efficient regulation of ‘hard gambling,’” citing a study from the Psychiatric Centre Prague.
