* The gambling industry sucks cash out communities and shatters families

Aditya Chakrabortty
Midway through our chat, Abbas Marasli rolls off the sofa, yanks up his shirt and shows me a six-inch scar running up his chest. It is seven months old; a permanent reminder of a double heart bypass. Abbas is only 46, but could easily be mistaken as 10 years older. The father of three has lost two businesses, racked up tens of thousands in additional debts, been shunned by brothers and sisters, and gone through a divorce. The root cause of all this stress and misery, he says, is a machine that's spreading across high streets.

Until last spring, Abbas was addicted to betting terminals. That phrase used to mean fruit machines: clunky things with a lever and a coin slot and loud music. Not any more. Games terminals are now highly sophisticated devices for sucking up customers' cash. Walk into a bookie today and you'll be offered virtual roulette or blackjack, the chance to bet £100 every 20 seconds and easy payment by credit card.

It was virtual roulette that Abbas discovered about eight years ago. It soon swallowed up his life. On his way to work, he'd duck into a bookies. Any breaks would be spent running into a William Hill or a Ladbroke's; likewise on the way home. By the end of one day, he could have spent his week's wages, then borrowed from friends and family. He once lost £2,000 in 10 minutes; burned through £10,000 of savings in two days. After a bad streak, he'd attack the terminals or bash his head against a wall. At night, "these machines would be in my dreams".

He describes all this sat under a photo of a daughter's wedding. How did his family manage? "No holidays, no social life." They'd borrow cash from relatives just to buy groceries. Abbas's wife divorced him, only taking him back after he'd undergone therapy for addiction. After she smilingly hands out cups of tea, I'm told she's still on pills for depression.

Who should bear the blame for the destruction of one man and his family? Abbas, surely, but not only him. After all, when he first arrived from Turkey, he was the archetypal good boy: no booze, no fags and only the occasional go on a slot machine. Things changed when he was introduced to what the industry calls fixed-odds betting terminals (FOBT), and what nearly everyone else refers to as the "crack cocaine of gambling". These hi-tech machines have been shown to be four times more addictive than anything else available in a bookmakers. "We've taken the most dangerous form of gambling there is and placed it in the most accessible place possible – no other country in the world has done that," says Adrian Parkinson. He should know; a former manager at a betting company, he helped bring FOBTs to Britain.

In effect, Abbas has been preyed upon by a multibillion-pound gambling industry, which was let loose upon him and hundreds of thousands of others by a Labour government. It was Tony Blair and Tessa Jowell who pushed through the Gambling Act in 2005, which took nearly all the caps off the betting industry. At the time, the big worry was of an imminent wave of super-casinos. The fear was completely misplaced. What happened instead was a tsunami of FOBTs: 33,000 of them across the country now, earning £1.5bn profit each year for the bookmakers.

Forget those cosy images of putting a tenner on a nag at Cheltenham or guessing when Walcott will score his second goal: the modern face of betting is FOBTs. The games that ensnared Abbas are one of the big growth areas for the industry: walk into a bookies and you'll see men – usually young, often from an ethnic minority – staring at an electronic roulette wheel. Because the act perversely limited the number of terminals per shop, but allowed betting companies almost total freedom to set up wherever they wanted, Coral, Betfred and all the rest now set up within yards of each other. Just before Christmas, Shevket Gul, a therapist who works with problem gamblers, drove me along his local high street in a suburb of north London. In a five-minute drive, we counted eight betting shops: multiples of William Hill and Ladbroke's and others in a recessionary mirror image of the way coffee chains used to sprout up.

This is what predatory capitalism looks like: betting shops with machines designed to suck cash out of communities, run by FTSE firms employing staff on miserly wages, while doing their best to avoid paying tax. Sick of seeing their high streets destroyed, anxious about the spikes in theft and violence, local councils, such as Liverpool and Brighton and Newham in east London, try their best to resist the spread of FOBTs – but are too weak and poor to take on the gambling companies.

This Wednesday, Ed Miliband will call a debate aimed at giving councils greater powers to block new gambling shops. Not a bad start, but it will do nothing about the ones that are already there. Better would be simply to cut the maximum stake on FOBTs from £100 to the norm for gaming machines, which is £2.

The big bookmakers claim to offer normal entertainment. "We're no different to Gregg's," an industry spokesman claimed on ITV last autumn. If that's the case, why don't the bookies allow independent researchers to assess the evidence on FOBTs? Instead, most of the research is sponsored – or, rather, neutered – by the industry.

In my talk with Abbas, his son Yusuf has been translating some of the trickier bits. At the end, I ask how the 14-year-old feels about what his father has said. Sat next to his bear of a dad, he looks very small. "How do I explain? Sad and angry. All that money is my family's future gone. My parents divorced, and why? Because of a machine."