It's never too late, if your friend really has a strong determination and commitment to get out of this problem, it's not impossible for him to recover from this problem. However, if in reality your friend is unable to realize bad behavior while gambling, this behavior can only cause continuous losses and losses. It is quite difficult for your friend to get out of this problem (gambling addiction). And I think there is no other way, apart from you continuing to try to make him aware, and that's if you really care enough about your friend's condition. And if you can, persuade him to come to a counselor so that he can get quick and appropriate treatment regarding the problems he is facing. Because if it is not handled immediately, this can become increasingly complicated and become quite difficult to find a solution to.
The will to stop must be greater than the gambler himself because being forced by other people to stop does not necessarily provide full awareness for those who are addicted. Extra care must be given and rehabilitation is a place that needs to be visited regularly so that they can be psychologically trained to do other things that are much more useful and can inspire them to stop. Cases of severe addiction are not much different from people who are addicted to drugs even though the way they are treated is different because both play on the psychology of the brain and their perspective is almost the same.
No one wants to be involved in addiction because it will be quite difficult to cure, but in reality what happens is that it happens because there is no good control from oneself or those closest to them. It is difficult to describe how they were initially involved because almost everyone has experienced delinquency at a young age and when everything happens without control it becomes even more dangerous.
Yes, that's true, even though many people give advice and advice or even force them to become aware and stop being addicted, they won't be able to stop if they themselves don't have the awareness to stop. It is also true what you said that their awareness must be greater than the advice they get from other people, in other words, they themselves must first have awareness to be able to stop the addiction to gambling which is detrimental to them. If they don't have their own awareness then it will be difficult for them to stop their addiction.
It is true that no one wants to fall into a gambling addiction that results in losses, but the fact is that they become addicted and experience many losses because they themselves respond wrongly to gambling. If they can respond to gambling well and correctly, perhaps they will not experience many losses. or addiction. In my opinion, if they are addicted to gambling and have experienced a lot of losses, it has proven that they have lost self-control, because if they had good self-control from the start, maybe they would be addicted to gambling or big losses would not have occurred.