In the second article of our occasional series “Open Book”, a democratic platform we offer out-of-industry commentators, Grace Graham-Taylor looks at the contentious issue of gambling addiction.
In the summer of 2021, Luke Ashton, a husband and father-of-two from Leicester, England, took his own life, writes Grace Graham-Taylor.
Unbeknown to his family, in the preceding months Ashton had relapsed into a debilitating gambling addiction, a problem he had struggled with since 2018 but had largely managed to conquer — until the COVID 19 pandemic hit, and the lure of free-bet offers became impossible to resist.
Though far from an isolated case, Ashton’s death made history as the first in which a gambling firm was formally…
