Why we need YOUR help to get ‘Krave Choco Roulette’ off the shelves.

In the six years that I’ve been campaigning about the information in my documentaries, I can honestly say that I never in a million years thought I’d find myself tackling food companies.

When I personally first noticed this cereal branding, it was during an advert break on 4OD.

What caught my eye was how similar it was to bingo and other gambling adverts, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, and it was just like a casino ad!

Some people argue that it’s just harmless fun and it’s all just because the game is a lucky dip scenario, despite the fact that it’s proven that the advertising industry spends millions of pounds every year on making people familiar with products and concepts over long periods of time.

To those people aware of this, it could be perceived that whether it’s intentional or not, that it is concept-branding. In other words – gambling grooming.

The front of the box is obviously a slot machine, with the actual old-style lever placed on the side of the box, and at the back of the box they make no mistake to show you that it’s a slot machine. (Notice the red lever on the right)

So what does eating a breakfast that is highly likely going to be eaten by a child due to its chocolate sweet taste really have to do with bandit machines? Why on earth would a marketing company even link the two?

And why would an activity that is mostly limited to over 18’s placed for a young person to be exposed to, first thing of the day?

At this current stage in time, this is the only evidence the campaign has on financial/sponsorship links between giant food corporations and the gambling industry but this is something we are working on.

We may find that this is simply irresponsible marketing, but we haven’t really heard back from them to make us think this is something they are willing to change in a hurry.

We do however face massive issues in terms of getting people to see the seriousness of all this. And in terms of getting the public on board, so far this has been a huge struggle due to people simply not being concerned enough about it.

We urge everyone reading this to please take a moment to think what kind of future are we making for our children, when we are promoting to them an activity that is currently affecting millions of people in the UK alone?.

There is much more pro-gambling advertising and propaganda out there that unfortunately the truth has been well hidden and blurred from the public eye.

Since 2005 a lot has changed in the UK landscape in regards to online gambling and betting shops since the gambling act 2005 came into place.

Although this was made out to the public to be a law to help protect vulnerable and young people, it was in fact a law which meant many of the safeguards and precautions we had to protect people against gambling have actually now been removed. This was brought in with wording such as ‘liberalisation’ which when said like that may sound quite modern and appealing.

So if you do check out our petition, unless our campaign has actually shifted up a gear and people have started to get on board you will notice our petition numbers may be quite low. So we need as much help and support from as many of you as possible to get people taking this issue seriously and tackling it.

What started a campaign to challenge the gambling act and MP’s profiting from it has become a mission to raise awareness and try to change perspective.

So if you’ve watched our new documentary called ‘Spellbreakers’ then we urge as many of you as possible to please sign and share the petition and as much of our campaign material to your friends and family as possible.

Signing the petition only takes a few seconds and we give a massive thanks to everyone that has taken the time to sign it and share it to help raise awareness of something which has the potential to cause a very damaging effect to our society.

Here is the link to our change.org petition, thanks for reading J

https://www.change.org/p/kellogg-stop-selling-kelloggs-krave-choco-roulette-and-gambling-related-marketing

Please support our latest campaign to say NO to gambling promotion on Kelloggs cereal

Hi folks.... it's Ben here from the Neuroliberation campaign. It's been a while since there's been any activity here on the gambling-awareness front but we are back with a new campaign and urge as many of you as possible to please support it.

Over the last week myself and a few others have been on a mission to to make a stand against the new Kellogg's cereal 'Krave Choco Roulette'.
The problem that myself and many others have with it is that it is blatant in-your-face gambling grooming. The front of the cereal box is basically a bandit machine, the adverts on television for it blatantly are promoting gambling to people, and Kellogg's Krave's facebook page's main image is of it's new 'Krave Choco Roulette' and they'v even gone to the extra lengths to make the box appear like a bandit machine.

What turned out to be a campaign to Kellogg's to say we find this highly irresponible marketing , became (like most of my gambling-awareness projects) a campaign to raise public awareness and attempt to open minds.

Over my last week campaigning about this on the internet I have come to realise that most people really don't see a problem with it... a common reaction I get is "Oh so seeing this image in a box is going to make me want to gamble.....yeah right whatever!! .... so what I say is this ....

Marketing companies are very clever people , do you not realise the psychological tricks involved here...please just think about it.... perhaps google about marketing branding and concepts, and the lengths these companies go to in order to get the public familiar with a brand or concept.

I would not be surprised to find out deals have been done behind the scenes here from people within the gambling industry ... there's a lot of money to be made here.

I urge as many people as possible to sign the petition we'v got going at change.org , it's been going slow but hopefully we can get this issue out into the public domain because the unfortunate fact seems to be that people in general really aren't aware of this, and certainly aren't standing up and fighting against this enough.... especially when they aren't realising that this is the pollution of our next generations minds and way of thinking.

I think it's sad that not enough people care about protecting our communities from gambling addiction. The trouble is, is that for one it's not talked about enough so people aren't really aware of how much in people they actually know around them, and two a lot of people aren't thinking about this deep enough and as a society we are letting ourselves walk right into the traps of marketing companies that will for sure create heaps of gambling addiction.

Whether or not most gamblers will go onto develop an addiction is another story, but the fact remains that the number of gambling addicts will be growing as the industry expands if we don't have the right precautions in place, and I think that the fact we now have bandit machines on our children's cereal boxes is growing evidence of that.

So yeah, we'r urging as many people as possible to sign this petition because every signature counts and so does every comment. What' great about commenting on the petition page as well as signing is that it gives Kelloggs the clear image that this is a nationwide or even international concern , and it also gives them the reasons as to why we'r not happy with this.

Here is the link to the petition, and we also have a facebook page too. We need all the support we can get to open minds here and not let our children walk down an industry-led path of gambling addiction culture. Take care.

https://www.change.org/p/kellogg-stop-selling-kelloggs-krave-choco-roulette-and-gambling-related-marketing

Once again I urge all of you that 'get it' to please just take a moment to take some action by signing the petition and leaving a comment and sharing it with your friends and family. Hopefully we can make a stand against this sort of marketing now which are likely to lead our next generation down a path of mega-gambling acceptance. Thanks for anyone that supports and has been supporting already, we can't do this without every one of us pulling together to make the change. Let's do it and take care!

https://www.change.org/p/kellogg-stop-selling-kelloggs-krave-choco-roulette-and-gambling-related-marketing

Other items on the market pretty much doing the same thing....what is happening here???

Notice the word attention also on the packet near the roulette wheel

But when you look at this also , think about it.

Come on.....really???

https://www.change.org/p/kellogg-stop-selling-kelloggs-krave-choco-roulette-and-gambling-related-marketing

Kids, computer games and gambling - Part 2

If you haven't read part 1 yet then click here to read



Whilst writing part one of this article I got thinking about how in many computer games children and young people are taught to collect and win coins. 
We’v already gone into the fact that computer games and gambling games are starting to merge into one, but maybe this started quite some time ago.

Is the ‘win win win’concept integrated into our brains from early childhood? 
Whilst playing seemingly harmless computer games where we have to collect coins or complete missions to for them, are we actually being brainwashed? 
We already touch on this slightly in one of our latest posts about ‘TV game shows’ but it seems the deeper we look into things the more we have been taught that gambling is some sort of core value of culture in society. 

Even the bible mentions how the coin was used to distract, divide and control people and it seems that still thousands of years after and to this day that the desire for the coin has ruled over man’s state of mental and spiritual well-being. 

Many of today’s computer games on both consoles and social networking sites use cleverly marketed slogans such as ‘Free coins’. With that along with playing computer games for a few years could we be being taught to learn that there’s always the chance to get money for free, and could also contribute to many of the gambling addiction stories where the victim thinks he’s playing because ‘he likes the challenge’?

It could also be perceived that not only are we seeing a narrowing gap between computer and gambling games, but also a narrowing gap between computer games and reality.
It’s not a new thing that people have expressed concerns about computer games and their impact on peoples moods and goal-directed behaviour. 
But it seems that most of the time gamers are not taught the true value of money and how to use it responsibly, but instead learn that it’s something that is easy to come-by and that it can just be spend willy-nilly.

I can only think of a few games that contradict the above and those are games such as ‘The Sims’ and ‘Theme park’which are possibly the exception as they don't involve the hyper-mode coin collecting.
Another question we could ask is – how many computer games inspire people to hoard money and always need more?
Think about it, from the age of just a small child we play games where we're taught that if we collect the most coins that we’ll be the winner and that we’ll succeed. With a philosophy like that being taught to us all of our childhood then no wonder so many people fall right into the gambling industries lap and don't see any problems with what's going on in today's gambling-mad culture-programme.

Who designed these concepts? And why are children being taught so often that collecting the most coins makes them the winner?
Is this all just a coincidence?

Kids, computer games and gambling – Part 1

Most of us are more than aware of how children and young people are easily susceptible to computer games. Those who play them on a constant basis will often tell you how the graphics and sounds can make an imprint on their brains as they experience them in non-gaming reality and dreams. 
Gambling is certainly no different.

As both children and adults, it could be that the feeling of being a ‘winner’ is something we should be extremely careful about and not just brush aside as 'harmless fun'. 
To refresh our memory maybe it’s best to remind ourselves that the processes inside us that often make us want to ‘win’ are our own natural brain functions and they are being high jacked.

As human beings we wouldn't have become as advanced as we are today if it wasn't for the ‘drivers’ in our brains that experience the ‘buzz’ of gaining something that we find useful in our lives. We wouldn't eat food, make babies or want to exercise because we wouldn't feel the reward gained by an exciting and powerful feeling in the brain created by the chemical release of dopamine.

Even people that don’t gamble or play computer games can sometimes be affected by it. Some people do in fact still get addicted to eating, having sex or exercising. 
But their cravings for the chemical release stem from something which is originally and essentially 'good' for us, unlike both gaming and gambling which don't hold any real value or purpose in life.

But one thing of particular concern in today’s world is the merger of computer and gambling games.
For a long time the industry has known that using bright colours, pictures of fruit and exciting sounds appeals to a lot of people, but now it seems the industry has taken it one step further.

One thing we should keep our eyes out for and maybe think to something about is ‘themed’ gambling games.
One example is J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which has had its graphics licensed to both computer games and gambling software creators.
Lord of the Rings is now used in various digital ‘slots’ machines which will obviously have a huge appeal to children and young people. When these machines are places in eye’s sight to where children can see them even if they are unable to play them then maybe it can creates an urge inside their brain to want to be old enough to play them.

The estate of J.R.R Tolkien had actually taken Warner Brothers to court over the gambling use of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ imagery knowing that this was definitely not the purpose for which the books were written. (We’re not sure how it went but we’ll try giving an update soon)

The industry knows that anything you've grown up with and are familiar to is certain to grab your attention when placed on a gambling machine. Have you noticed how many gambling machines are made with themes associated with ‘fun’, movies and family games?

How about the family board game ‘Monopoly’? It’s a game many of us have grown up with and maybe it's engrained in us that ‘it’s OK to play monopoly’ and that ‘it’s just a game’.
What if by seeing ‘Monopoly’ on an arcade machine, we bring back to the surface feelings of joy and winning? What if all those subconscious feelings get a little entangled deep in the brain?

We see the same happening with other themes such as ‘Batman’ for example, a series of movies which obviously has a large fan-base consisting of children and young people. It seems that the industry knows quite a few sales secrets to bring out our ‘inner youth’ in order to manipulate us to keep spending money.

One of today’ most outrageous examples is the use of the currently well-known and highly addictive Facebook-based game called ‘Bejewelled Blitz’. 
Not only has the logo and imagery being used on a wide variety of digital slot machine games but here in the UK we now have ‘Bejewelled Blitz’ scratchcards at almost every newsagents store. They between £2 or £3 each depend which one you buy.

This could be considered to be a form of ‘grooming’ because the people who make these products know how to make them appeal. This is how our so-called reality seems to be constructed on many levels – ‘Get them whilst their young’ is the motto of many business people.

Or how about the even more blatant ‘Rainbow riches’ gambling game which one can only wonder how on earth this game is marketed to adults.
It’s brightly coloured and child-like graphics are often placed on big posters outside betting shops premises which can and will attract the attention of young children which again seems to be a form of grooming to prepare them for when they are of legal age to start gambling.

Rainbow Riches game

We already see a wide variety of games on social networking sites such as Facebook offering users the chance to win ‘virtual’ money which can only be spent on playing the game furthermore. In many cases people find themselves sucked in and addicted to winning things that aren't even real! But it's the thrill they're really after.

As we’re trying to keep some of our posts a little more ‘digestible’ we’ll cover more in part two about how these types of games may deeply integrate a future of gambling into a young person’s and when looking at the bigger picture it may be considered by some as a sort of ‘social engineering’.

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO

Louis Theroux – Gambling in Las Vegas

One of our aims here at the Neuroliberation campaign is to try to get people to think a little deeper about the mental health effects of gambling on people. We’ve been saying for years how gambling addictions can severely affect the mood of someone and Louis Theroux in his usual documentary style did just that in one of his documentaries titled ‘Gambling in Las Vegas’.
His documentary does an excellent job of highlighting how so-called ‘business friendships’ are never really what they are cracked up to be. Would a good friend let you sit playing a machine for hours on end each day whilst losing thousands of pounds?

Louis starts the documentary off by interviewing a high-roller who has a hired someone on a casino payroll to ‘show him around’. Because he spends so much money at the casino they’ve given him the best suite in the hotel free of charge with complimentary service, the largest hotel suite in North America. The job of the guy he’s hired is to keep him spending and playing at the tables as much as possible.
At one point in the film the guy admits that it’s bad that he’s losing, you’ll notice his ‘friend’ quickly move in and say “aah it’s just a warm up”. 

7:40 into the documentary Louis is interviewing a cashier and a casino player that is $4,000 up. Louis says to the cashier “He’s winning and winning” and the cashier replies in these ever-so significant words 

“You want people to win, that way they’ll come back. If they never win they’ll never come back”
Louis then asks what then happens in which the cashier replies “We want them to win a little bit, and then we take all their money”.

Louis is then introduced to a lady called Martha who is playing on the high-limits slot machine in the casino. 
It’s obvious that she has a severe gambling addiction, she wastes thousands on the slot machines each day, but one question it may make us ask is - who could actually stand and watch that happen to somebody? And as human beings do we really care for each other anymore?

Soon after he asks one of the casino staff about how they are able to take part in that scenario. Unfortunately employees at any gambling premises are rarely taught to really help a problem gambler, and this includes betting shops and bingo halls here in the UK. 
Many even swear by the training manuals they are given, and one of our concerns should be for our own way of thinking. Look at what we’re doing to each other!

The man he’s interviewing says that if he saw a regular person spending a lot more than they usual would that he’d say “are you sure you want to be doing this?”.
Unfortunately it’s no secret that it rarely works with people whilst gambling. They are in the thick of an addiction whilst staring at a hypnotic machine that manipulates their neurons to go crazy, like they are another planet.

You see in this documentary clearly that gambling addicts become like children in the sense that they know it’s doing them no good but will make up every excuse under the sun to condone it.
I doubt Martha the high-roller slot machine player was ever really and truly helped when she had spent too much.


Louis also interviews another two guys who have come to Las Vegas on a holiday trip.
Whilst watching it’s soon clear how much gambling has affected their mood and mental status, they are hyped up on the most sold drug going on the planet ‘The desire to have more money’.

24 minutes into the film one of the guys playing blackjack with Louis asks his friend to move because since he sat there he lost $3,000 on one hand. This is a pure example of the delusional mind that gets created in gamblers.
It’s certainly not uncommon for people who have been gambling to create false senses of mysticism. Talk to any ex problem-gamblers and many of them will explain how the logic mind tries to link numbers and patterns. People often believe that god is guiding them to their big win.

There’s heaps more we could tell you about the documentary but we don’t want to spoil it for, all in all it’s a highly recommended watch. 
It raises many big questions about our morals in society, and how we seem to socially accept being part of a dark-circus where what we are sold is mind control and illusion, often for a costly price.

Local councils still have no say on betting shop planning.

For the last few years gambling activists, journalists and other groups have brought up the problem that local councils still hold no power over the existence of large numbers of betting shops in central shopping areas. 

Maybe this is something we need to spur on with again and keep the topic hot.  The gambling act 2005 means that we as a community don’t have a say in whether betting shops take over our towns and cause social damage.
Should we be doing more about it? Maybe the answer is yes. If you would like to help us with that then email us at Neuroliberation@gmail.com

The most we’v seen happen really were attempts by labour MP’s David Lammy and Rowenna Davis whom both expressed passionate concerns over the clustering of betting shops. But other than that we've seemed to socially except today's ‘gambling everywhere’ culture a lot faster than we expected.
Since when did it become normal to have Ladbrokes betting shops inside mainline train stations such as London Victoria and Liverpool Lime Street?
Since when was it normal for betting shops to have the most lucrative premises in town centres?

The fact that local councils can’t provide a solution for its residents in terms of the amounts of betting shops seems like a law which serves only the gambling industry instead of society.
Something still needs to be done about it, maybe if we think hard enough we’ll get there.

What can you do to stop your town centre being over-run by betting shops and the damage they are causing to people’s lives?

The most persuasive and constant gambling advertising of them all. TV!

Written by Ben Thacker(Campaign founder)

When this campaign started, its primary purpose was to get today’s large number of modern-day betting shops off the high-streets and away from the influence of children and young people. Not only that, but to raise awareness of the large volume of problem gambling that has manifested  in the UK since 2005, and the many forms of social depression created by it.

For those that have seen the first Neuroliberation campaign documentary, you’ll know that the campaign originally focused on the issue of betting shop proliferation.
But since my time campaigning I've had my eyes opened by others to the other forms of gambling that cause many others lives to spiral out of control.
The most common responses I seem to get are often in concern of how easy it is to gamble on your mobile phone these days, and how gambling advertising is now always on the TV.

Not long into the campaign I’d been reminded that The Jeremy Kyle show is sponsored by foxy bingo which also I was concerned about since the show is portrayed to be about morals and ethics.
I guess overall it really got me thinking – how much is gambling really promoted on TV?

For now let’s put aside all the sports and bingo adverts on almost every page of a newspaper, the ads on almost every TV break and the supposed ‘free offers’ that infiltrate our Facebook feeds.
Let’s look a little deeper to a more subtle level of gambling promotion, to where gambling is rammed down our throat since the day we are born. Game-shows.

Our logical problem-solving brains love games. They simply can’t resist the challenge.
But as our mind machinery starts working and getting stuck into it, we forget that it’s all a circus whilst constantly being suggested that it could be us winning the large sums of cash and prizes on offer.

The audience claps and cheers and the contestants show passionate signs of excitement.
The circus is in full swing as the presenter himself speaks with an energetic and engaging voice. “How does it feel to win all this money he says”.
Maybe TV really is the devil? Once in its time it could have served a greater purpose to inform and educate us, but once we've taken a step back and look at it from another perspective we see that it’s nothing more than a constant charade to hype up and convince us that their version of reality is how life really is.

We’re subliminally suggested for hours on end each day to keep dreaming of ‘the win’, and that ‘that win’ will solve all our problems.
Even the game-show title ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ sounds like a well marketed and response-provoking question. I'm sure anyone with a decent bit of sales experience would agree.

The odds of a jackpot winning line on the lottery is approximately 1 in 14 million, yet millions of us are constantly told week in week out “It could be you”. On Wednesday’s and Saturdays it’s us the people that are inside the circus tent, it’s us that the excitement-building game-show host is spurring on.
Somewhere inside it all is a much bigger message being subconsciously pushed – the association of great feelings with winning large amounts of money.
The game-show circus charade with its engineered ‘group think reality’ tricks us into believing that it’s normal because this is how everyone apparently thinks.

Some say that it’s just entertainment, but I’d like to believe we're intelligent enough beings to search for something a little more meaningful. Whenever I see a game-show on television nowadays I can’t help but feel how meaningless and ego-creating they are
The hosts often portray as much laughter, humour and personal connection as they can into the show but it still doesn't hide the spell.

My critics will complain that I'm nit-picking and making mountains out of molehills, but what is it that I'm trying to achieve by writing this piece?
I guess all I'm trying to do is get people to think about the suggestions and concepts that are pushed onto us, and get them to ask ‘Is this really a healthy and constructive pattern of thinking?’

It's worth thinking about. Stay wise!

Please print and share this flyer!

Wise'n up the youth! Here's an A5 flyer design for anyone concerned about the situation, to print out and share.
Please DO NOT use the picture below but download the actual A5 flyer at https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/60646100/Free%20your%20mind.jpg

Where's all the Scottish money going?

I know I'm not the only one here that thinks that £1,057 is a fair amount of money. It's certainly a lot to lose over a year.
Imagine if every single person in Scotland simply lost that amount gambling on Fixed Odds Betting Terminals (FOBT's). How much of a difference would it have to peoples lives and even to the local economy.

If every single person in Scotland lost £1,057 in a year gambling then it would equate to £4.4 billion put straight into the hands of the gambling industry who continue to constantly lobby for tax on gambling to be lowered.

Well that;s exactly what's going on! That's how much was gambled last year in Scotland on FOBT's alone.

How much of that money came from legitimate sources? How much of that money was stolen from friends,families and employers by the hundreds of thousands of people in the UK with a gambling addiction? 

£4.4 Billion! In just a year! Scotland ain't even that big of a country. That's a heck of a lot of money gone out of local communities and economies.. OUCH!

Click here to read more. 

Why the campaign is called 'Neuroliberation'.

A lot of people say that I should change the name of the campaign to something more direct and specific about betting shops. But my impulsive passion got the best of me early on and I'd already spent a lot of time promoting the name 'Neuroliberation' on the internet, making videos and printing flyers. It would have been wasting resources for me to do it all again.

But maybe things have worked out just fine. Perhaps the name 'Neuroliberation' it gives it a more intriguing edge.

When I first started the campaign , it wasn't simply because I knew lots of people were getting hooked on gambling, it was a lot deeper than that.

I'd never thought about campaigning about gambling whatsoever until one particular night when I was having a small party with a couple of friends. It was at the time in my life when I was in and out of betting shops all of the time, and it was on that night of the party that I first started seeing the mental health effects of my gambling addiction and the chaos that was going on in my mind from playing roulette machines.


I just wanted to have a good time at the party, but I found myself getting anxious, self-concious and paranoid and I didn't know why. Its hard to describe how my feelings were at the time, but I could feel that something big was eating me up inside me. I could feel the rotten damage caused by the fixed odds betting terminals games taking over my mind.
That night I was aware of my own demons. The constant frustrations of losing my own self-control and the guilt of losing my income was causing deep wounds and it was the first time I realised how much of an after-effect gambling can have on your emotions.


I told my friends that I had to chill out because I was getting a bit anxious .After a few moments of just kicking back I decided to google 'inner conflict' because I was aware of how much from time to time I had felt these 'battles' going on inside my mind.

Google led me to start reading all kinds of psychology papers and to watch a few YouTube videos. Quite quickly I began to realise how much all this gambling stuff has its roots set in mind control, tricky and manipulation. OK so for thousands of years we'v had gambling-addicts in our community. The world see's him as a fool, but we allow it so often because we only look at it on the surface. If people watched enough gambling psychology videos and spent more time self-educating then I'm sure many more of us would have a completely different view on the so called 'lack of discipline'  in a problem gambler.

The deeper you look into who lobbies for the gambling industry , and who regulates it  the more you realise that the industry knows full well what it's doing. It knows that the fixed odds betting terminals games cause mental health issues and cognitive disruption  It desperately tries to bury those facts but they just have to know about it because there's so much psychological research out there and within a few hours I was able to find enough to know that gambling creates completely new neurological pathways in the brain and can even cause brain damage.

People have to find this information for themselves though. Guess I need some more links up on the page. But your not going to hear the full truth about it from the TV because the whole media is rife with triggers, advertisements and things that influence your brain on those deep and well researched levels. 
To anyone that's studied psychology it's pretty much standard knowledge but I know that I and many others never went to university or studied psychology so it's important to remember that the knowledge needs to be shared. There's a lot that can come from that. Be sure to check out Robert Sapolsky on Youtube , he explains a lot of things quite well.

Maybe it's difficult to grasp the concept that thoughts and emotions are actually real manifestations and electromagnetic energy. Before I did any of the research I took it as a pinch of salt. My thoughts were my thoughts, just something that never really existed physically . 

I'm all for taking responsibility and shifting your thought patterns to conquer a gambling addiction but I personally think that sometimes taking responsibility is taking a step back, swallowing your pride and admitting that maybe you weren't fully in control. Unfortunately a lot of people see that as being lame because it can easily seem like your just avoiding responsibility for your own actions.

I was annoyed, big-time. How dare anyone intrude on MY brain like that. I was getting taken advantage of by a corporate industry and now I knew how much of a trap it all was, and I knew that they knew it too.
I just felt slimy the more I thought about it. Betting shop staff have to watch people everyday falling under the spell and becoming victims of the black magic that's going down. But they are buttered up through their training to believe that the people feeding hundreds of pounds into the roulette machines are just happy-go-lucky people that like to gamble hundreds or thousands of pounds in just a few minutes.

The very same knowledge and information about neurology can be used to heal and empower us. But unfortunately it's also always been used to trap people and put them under a spell too. I already knew to what extent it was happening to because during my gambling addiction I saw so many other people queuing up to play the roulette and ending their last few spins going mental after losing their control and everything they had after feeding the machines with hundreds of pounds.

So I immediately went a bit radical and started petitioning on the street and giving people the information. I'd set up a pasting table at the bottom of St James street in Brighton and would do a few days here and there during the summer. I'd got a great response from the public and the more I talked about the issues the more people were telling me how they knew someone else that had a roulette addiction. I'm still hearing these stories a few times a week and every time I mention my campaign in a conversation. So it's not just me, I'm not going mad....I think.

I rushed the naming if the project as I just wanting to get started and waste no time planning. 
I called it 'Dopamine mind control' and did a radio show on Brighton's Radio Reverb. I kept it under that name for a few months but I soon thought that the name sounded too barmy, tin-foil hat brigade and conspiracy theorist'.

The more I looked into the neurological workings of the brain, the more I decided to focus my attention on that because I knew that it was difficult to find other gambling campaigners that were focusing on the actually neurology. I also wanted people to know that the same information can be applied to many things around us and once you know about the deeper workings of the brain, the more you realise that most of us are being mentally abused everyday by giant corporations and we by educating ourselves we can generally have some form of better defense against it.

That's when I decided to call it 'Neuroliberation' - to free the mind. That's what I wanted, a  stop to the abuse. For us to educate ourselves and not be fooled by lobbyist who try to sell you worthless junk or try to get the nation hooked on gambling. Unfortunately a lot swallow it up and digest the meal. Just because the bloke said it on the telly. The automatic rejection that someone would put their business interests before public safety concerns.

So OK, it would be difficult to get rid of all this Neuro-marketing , betting shops and all of the other mental bombardments completely out of society, but at least if we spend a little time looking into how our brains work when people are gambling then we can at least protect ourselves from a lot of crap that's going on out there.


Here's parts 2 and 3 of the film. Lots of psychology information going on from the last bit of part two and the first bit of part 3.

How the campaign is going so far.....

After creating the petition to get betting shops out of our high streets and town centres, 4 months has now past since the start of the petition.
I often wonder if maybe I had been a little over-enthusiastic about it , maybe I  had aimed a little too high to stop the social problems I had seen being created in our communities from the anti-social nature of betting shops filling up our high streets.

But maybe it needs that push from someone, what some people consider to be an extreme view may just help keep the topic on the public talking board.
But the message here is that gambling has always ruined lives and families, since before the gambling act when people were getting hooked on horse betting. The proliferation of betting shops and the introduction of fixed odds betting terminals hasn't been the creator of individual, family and community problems... it simply meant that the problem has been extremely magnified over the last ten years.

I'v learned a lot in the last four months. The most important fact being that the 'normalisation' of gambling is already here to some degree.
Take a look at our Facebook page comments , a lot of people consider my campaign to be nonsense with many people claiming that betting shops are a great contributor to the economy and that if we should ban betting shops then we should also ban cigarettes and alcohol.

Even when I explain that gambling advertising laws are a lot more relaxed than cigarette and alcohol advertising laws, they often argue in favour of the betting shops.
Not even when I mention that bar staff have a 'duty of care' to stop people being too drunk can I manage to swing them round. I'm shocked by how many people genuinely believe that betting shop staff are trained to intervene when they see a problem gambler. Again , all non-gamblers because they are unaware of what really happens in gambling environments.

When I'v taken to the streets and been out and about I get a very different response in general. People usually give great feedback and encourage the campaign and it's really easy to get people talking about the way gambling has affected their area. It's those people that spur me on and convince me to carry on doing what I believe is the right thing to do.

So on that level the perception of the british public currently seems divided , despite a channel 4 dispatches covering betting shops and a really well filmed panorama which highlighted a lot of facts that a lot of other media outlets have failed to highlight.
Maybe too if it wasn't for the emails from film producers then I would have quit the internet campaigning altogether as the constant negative comments about my campaign can often drag me down.

So far I'v done an interview for a SKY TV channel and two student documentaries which has been really encouraging to carry on because if it wasn't for the blog and possibly the networking, I wouldn't have received the request emails.

A few months ago near the start of the relaunch , I'd been successful in hounding Gamcare to sort out their Twitter page. A member of GRASP had pointed out that they had re-tweeted a 'racing post' competition tweet which is a serious flaw for the UK's leading problem gambling clinic.

So after phoning Gamcare and leaving them a few voice messages on their answer-phone ,I emailed them about how ironic it was they had re-tweeted a gambling promotion. I presume those complaints were reinforced by a few complaints from members of the GRASP group too.

Gamcare phoned back to say they apologized for the 'mistake' they had made and that the person that had been using twitter account had been taken down from that position.
When I'd checked to see if the tweet had been taken down I took a look at who they were 'following' on Twitter, which became a bit of a concern to me.

I always knew they had to see what was going on inside the gambling industry , but for problem gamblers that were counting on getting help from Gamcare, I thought it was a very contradicting message to have them following casino's, betting sites, pro-gambling forums and companies such as the racing post.
It was potentially leading problem gamblers back into the darkness of the pro-gambling world.

So after one or two more email exchanges between Neuroliberation campaign and Gamcare  we received a big thank you from them after being told we had pointed out some vital flaws with their Twitter page, and had convinced them to create a new Twitter account for following gambling industry pages without it leading problem gamblers to visit those pages.

For me personally I took it as a success. Maybe it was only a small change but nevertheless was some form of action with a small positive change.

A big 'thank you' to Pete Jones for having me in on the radio to explain about my campaign, talk about the issue of betting shops and the national lottery and I played a few tunes of my own songs live-on-air. It was a really fun radio session.


For those unaware of why I am so passionate to change the way betting shops operate in the UK , it originally all began from experience my own gambling addiction after playing on electronic roulette, winning £500 then developing a chronic addiction to it. I was angry at seeing the constant streams of people going onto fixed odds betting terminals, putting hundreds of pounds in whilst losing all control and common sense whilst betting shop staff simply watched without ever intervening. How could this be legal I thought??

But it was after an episode of anxiety when I decided to research the effects of gambling on the brain and the manipulation of dopamine that I decided to campaign.
Realising that gambling was getting more and more popular in the UK, and knowing that it was leading millions of people into family devastation and cognitive impairment I just couldn't see why betting shops weren't being challenged by the general public.

I'v always liked to portray the campaign as being somewhat professional , but with all the money (except a £26 donation from GRASP group) coming from my own pockets, after losing my kitchen job things are getting a bit difficult to manage. Even when I was working I had given up a lot so I could run the campaign , but now things seem to be twice as hard.
(Please click here to make a small donation , All donations are accounted for and from time to time we will publish everything our money has been spent on).

Our demonstration on 24th November was far from a success as the weather just wasn't cut out for us on the day, myself and another neuroliberation campaign member still went ahead despite no breaks of dryness in the day. (see here for more info)

We'v got a lot of plans for the Neuroliberation campaign , as the weather isn't great we will be taking an indoors approach , if you know anyone that could hire us a hall for free or a small charge then please get in touch as we are looking for venues in all areas of the UK , but specifically London, Brighton and surrounding areas are a really great place for us to start.

Hopefully we'l be able to educate people about how gambling is affecting communities, families and individuals mental health in depth , how betting shops and online gambling are creating crime, poverty and depression.

We would love to continue working with students so if you are a student that would like to collaborate with us then please do get in touch. (email here)

We'v put our gambling-crime researching on hold for the moment as we'v just been getting ready for the demo, but our current records of gambling-addict related crime since 2005 currently stands at over 200 cases of convicted gambling addicts that were charged for all kinds of frauds, thefts, robberies and murders. The total figure stolen from victims in those 200 stories alone stands at around £60,000,000 . But that's just convictions!!

We are also about to start researching gambling-related suicide , with the most familiar story to us being of Manchester primary school headteacher John Reilly hanging himself after losing his home to an online poker addiction. (see here)

There's a lot more to come from the Neuroliberation campaign. Being so passionate about this issue despite the negative feedback from many social media users (lots of positive feedback too) , I'm going ahead with the project because there simply isn't enough people highlighting the corruption in parliament relating to gambling laws.

A big applause to GRASP group (click here), who seem to be the main group in the UK researching deep enough to see what's actually going on in relation to the gambling act and government/gambling industry corruption and PR tactics.


I mentioned our online support is small at the moment, we are urging everyone that supports the cause to please visit and 'like' our Facebook page (here), please share it with your friends. Currently at time of writing we have 219 likes on facebook and it would be great if we had a lot more.

We know that there is a lot more than 219 people that support this cause so please try and help us network. (We simply can't afford to advertise at the moment, especially with ZERO funds in our account.)

So that's it from us for the meantime, a lot of work still needs to be done and we really need passionate volunteers to help push this campaign forward, so if you think you can help in any way then please do get in touch as your actions are vital.

Please do whatever you can to help me keep this campaign going :)

Thank you.

Ben Thacker @ Neuroliberation campaign.

http://www.facebook.com/Neuroliberationcampaign

Thank you Gamcare for taking down your racing post twitter retweet

We are delighted to say that Gamcare are listening to our complaints and seem to be taking them very seriously. Gamcare have apologized for the promotion of gambling on their twitter account whilst explaining that it is not in their policy to do so.

We will be communicating more with Gamcare in the near future and we hope to see those pro-gambling links on their 'followers' list removed in the near future. We are working on it.

Take care