You should never place the title of an "escape" for something that can consume you whole if you fall deep enough in the hole! It depends on the type of escape though as you provided some examples such as pleasure or an escape from grieving. I suppose if its a short term escape to get your mind off
Regarding what OP was saying, I think he meant that some persons uses gambling as a means to escape from their current negative situation such as times that they are emotionally down due to death of a love one, lose of job, lose of a big contract, divorces and any bad occurrences of life that you can think of. While OP was trying to make a point off this topic because of the experience he had in his country, gambling can still make a lot of people to become trapped while trying to use it as an escape of their emotions and can cause themselves more problem.
Well that's exactly what OP meant in his post and I think he did a good thing because by raising a topic like this, at least most of us know and realize that making gambling an escape from other problems that we are experiencing in life is a very wrong action or decision and it has been proven that in most cases it actually causes more new problems for the person instead of curing them of the previous problem.
On the other hand, we can conclude that we must always be careful and be rational and consider first before making a decision in any scenario, because being a little late in the end will actually lead you to various bad things.