‘Raspadinhas’: How the instant lottery hooked the poorest citizens in Portugal

Catarina Basto does a quick count of the instant lottery tickets that she sells in her stationery store in the center of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. “We have 21 different kinds, not counting the special products that come out for Christmas, Easter or the vacation season,” she says. Raspadinhas, as the popular game is known in that country, can cost from a few cents to more than $16. The mechanics are simple: players scratch off some numbers to see if a lucky match will entitle them to a prize. They are sold everywhere; until January of last year, they could even be purchased at post office stalls — an irresistible temptation for the retirees who went there to collect their pensions at the beginning of each month.

The government banned their sale at the branches of the CTT — the company that operates the postal service — as a result of the study Quem Paga a Raspadinha (in English: Who pays for the scratch-off tickets), financed by the Economic and Social Council in 2023, which brought to light worrying figures about the addictive potential of this game. However, dealing with this gambling problem will require the government that emerges from the early elections that Portugal is holding on Sunday to take new measures. The report, made by seven researchers from the University of Minho, concluded that approximately 100,000 people had “problems” with this lottery, with about 30,000 already suffering from a pathological addiction. The authors of the study were astonished by the data: “We knew that it was a significant problem, but not that it had such a high incidence,” says Pedro Morgado, professor of psychiatry at the University of Minho and one of the coordinators of the study along with the economist Luís Aguiar-Conraria.

The most troubling part for Morgado is the predominant profile of the most frequent players: low-income, advanced-age, uneducated people with manual occupations. “We saw that gambling especially affects the most vulnerable layers due to several reasons: the rules are simple, it is widely spread in cafés, newsstands and supermarkets, the reward can be immediate and the bets are cheap, which creates the illusion that one is not spending much,” explains Morgado. To this, he adds the effects of the indirect publicity that the raspadinha gets every time someone wins big and it appears in the media.

At the newsstand he has run for three years near a shopping center in Lisbon, Xavier Sepúlveda witnesses this phenomenon every day, although his demographic perception is different. “The people who buy the most are over 50, but there are clients of all kinds, from a cleaning lady that takes a €1 raspadinha every day to a lady who owns many apartments that spends €500 every day. Everyone plays according to their possibilities,” he says. The sale of scratch-off tickets skyrockets during the holidays, Sepúlveda explains, because giving them out as Christmas presents has become a tradition in recent years. He also noticed that the sales increased during the Covid-19 lockdown. “I’ve never sold as much tobacco and raspadinhas as I did during the pandemic, due to people’s anxiety,” he says.

Morgado speaks about a historical turning point in the evolution of the instant lottery. “In Portugal, it began to gain popularity after the 2008 crisis, and especially during the harsh austerity measures that followed, starting in 2011. In 2014, it took a huge leap and became the most popular game,” he explains. Another indirect, poisoned gift from the troika, the institutional triad formed by the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, which intervened in the country’s administration between 2011 and 2014 in exchange for a €78 billion bailout. The adjustments and cuts of those days impoverished large sections of the population. “The growth in sales of raspadinhas was collateral damage of the time of the troika. People turned to them in the hope of finding financial balance for their lives,” continues Morgado.

The monopoly of these instant lotteries in Portugal is in the hands of the Santa Casa de Misericordia, an institution founded in 1498 by Queen Leonor to help people in need and which today develops social, educational and cultural initiatives for the groups with fewer resources. The paradox posed by the fact that the institution that uses money to help the most disadvantaged is financed with a product that harms their mental health is a hard one to solve. “This is a social problem that affects those that Santa Casa supports the most, which are the most vulnerable and most in need of social and health support,” admitted the head of the institution, Ana Jorge, to the Lusa agency, days after the study of the Economic and Social Council was published. Jorge offered the organization’s collaboration to fight addiction and promote responsible gambling.

The study, which will be complemented with two new stages, found that people with monthly incomes between €400 and €664 ($435 to $725, approximately) are three times more likely to be frequent buyers than those who earn more than €1,500 ($1,650). In addition, those over 66 years of age are twice as likely to fall into it as young people. The researchers also observed a relationship between instant lottery ticket purchases and the consumption of alcohol, which favors “disinhibition and difficulties in making decisions that are beneficial to health,” state the conclusions.

The research coordinator does not see prohibition as the solution. “Every time we ban something, the immediate effect is people switching to other unregulated, riskier games,” warns the psychiatrist. Among the alternative measures, he proposes greater control of indirect advertising, the application of self-exclusion mechanisms similar to those in other forms of gambling and, in the long term, educating people more about the risks of gambling disorders in instant lotteries. Morgado praises some government decisions, such as the dissociation of the raspadinha from the national heritage — its funds used to be allocated to cultural institutions, promoting the idea of spending on a good cause — and the prohibition of sales at post offices.

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