Nova Scotia’s Finance Minister Peter Christie presented a financial statement just before Christmas. It showed that revenues from liquor and tobacco were down, while those from gambling were up sharply.

This put flesh on a suspicion I’ve had for some time: that our problem gambling amounts to exchanging one addiction for another.

In real life, there are always addictions and you have to somehow manage them. But we’re doing that badly if two of them are the targets of broad societal and governmental campaigns to muffle them, while a third is being promoted like crazy.

The mounting tally of damage wreaked by gambling is the subject of news stories news stories almost daily — 15,000 problem gamblers (1,500 of them teenagers); a stream of hair-raising testimonials of lives ruined; statistics showing that Nova Scotia depends more on gambling for provincial revenues than any other province; anguished calls for the government to do something; threat of a class-action lawsuit by addicts, and so on.

As the pressure rises, the question also rises as to when the Nova Scotia government is going to turn from promoting gambling to limiting it.

It is, of course, going to turn.

Although Premier John Hamm always looks immovable in the first blasts of a political storm, the secret of his staying afloat has been to change course whenever the waves get too high.

The question, rather, should be: What is he waiting for?

Since the province was forever teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, there was a residual logic in favour of wreaking social mayhem through gambling since it did provide the revenues to balance the budget, or nearly so.

But now, since the finance minister announced that we’re flush with cash — thanks to more federal money, more cash from our own tax sources and likely more offshore revenues — that argument has lost even its feeble hold.

Of course, it’s more than just that. Gambling has become in a brief time the mainstay of many small retailers and community institutions.

I’m told, for example, that my local community hall here in Yarmouth County would have to close if it weren’t for the VLTs.

There’s also the fact that changing course is not going to be easy because it means, for the Hamm government, swallowing its own marketing, which is never easy.

After wanting to freeze the number of VLTs when he was opposition leader, the premier and his government increased the number of VLTs, allowed them to be moved to “high volume” locations and fudged the purpose of a minuscule $4-million allocation to treat addictions.

In addition, there’s been talk of setting up online gambling and other even more addictive forms.

Over and above that, there’s a whole context beyond government that favours gambling and that influences government.

The casinos are in the news again, for example.

When they were first installed here a decade ago, opposing them was to declare that one was hopelessly backward. Like many other elements of what we often mistakenly call progress, there was an air of inevitability about them.

Tourism required them (although it’s the locals who supply most of the lost cash); otherwise, we’d look like a bunch of hillbillies, and that was the end of the argument.

And beyond that, gambling has gone deep into the social fabric, thanks to expert marketing from lottery corporations and governments.

A therapist with an addiction program for adolescents recently took a shot at parents who give scratch-and-win tickets to kids as gifts. This, she said, is sending the wrong message and can start an addiction. It’s down to the kids.

Whether or not the government comes around quickly or slowly, whether it has to be beaten over the head a while still before it does react significantly, it is imperative that the pressure by the public, opposition politicians, medical professionals and others against gambling in its too-pervasive form continue to mount, so that the worst of this scourge can be decapitated.