I entered my first betting shop at the age of 16. Despite the Think 21 policy, I was allowed in without having to prove my age. I went in to put a bet on the football, and I'll always remember the day. It was the first time I ever played a fixed-odds betting terminal. An FOBT is a touch-screen machine with a variety of different games, but the most popular is roulette. I remember feeding £10 into the machine, placing £2 bets on either red or black, and quickly doubling my money. From that day on, I played FOBTs every single day for the next four years.

At the time, I had a part-time job while I was in the sixth form. I earned about £650 a month, which, for a 16-year-old with no bills to pay, is a small fortune. I used to work 20 hours a week, and I once worked out that during each shift I made £32.44, but I would always go to the bookie's before, and sometimes after, I went to work – and bet £30 to £40 a spin. This soon increased to the maximum. The time between spins on FOBT roulette is about 20 seconds, and it's possible to bet up to £100 each time.

I neglected just about every aspect of my life during that time. I scraped into my second-choice university and there was a betting shop next to the campus. I used to go in there every single day, before lectures, after lectures, every spare minute I had. I had no savings, despite having worked for two years while in the sixth form, so I was gambling with my student loan, and constantly extending my overdraft.

After four years, when I was 20 and halfway through my second year, I hit rock-bottom. I had no money, and no possible access to credit. I worked out that I had lost £16,000 – all the savings I might have had, all the money I had earned and all the money I had borrowed.

I was fortunate enough to receive cognitive behavioural therapy to help me overcome my addiction but, with only one NHS clinic for problem gambling in the country, it's imperative that the government limits FOBTs. Otherwise, it's inevitable that even more will become addicted to what have been described as "the crack cocaine of gambling".

It's for this reason that I'm now part of the Campaign for Fairer Gambling, which advocates a reduction in the maximum stake from £100 to £2; an increase in the time between spins; the removal of casino table game content from FOBTs; and a reduction from four FOBTs per shop to one. These recommendations would make the machines less addictive and create significantly fewer problem gamblers.

The DCMS select committee recently recommended lifting the cap on the number of FOBTs per shop as an "anti-clustering" measure, as bookies leapfrog regulations by opening up as many shops as possible, and usually in deprived areas. Research commissioned by Channel 4's Dispatches found there to be more than twice as many betting shops in areas of high unemployment than in areas of low unemployment.

The government is due to respond to those recommendations this month, but both the Campaign for Fairer Gambling and Community, the union that represents betting shop staff, will be hoping they are rejected. Ryan Slaughter from Community said recently: "Our members want to be bookies, not bouncers. Betting shop workers up and down the country will look upon this report with dismay and outrage, because they experience physical and verbal violence on a daily basis owing to the presence of FOBTs."

Tonight's Panorama, which investigates the destructive rise of FOBTs, will more than substantiate Ryan's claims. The government needs to act quickly. The last British Gambling Prevalence Survey in 2010 showed that problem gambling in the UK had increased by 50% in three years and, while the proliferation of FOBTs is not entirely responsible for this, better regulation of these machines could help bring the numbers down.

• This article was amended on 13 November 2012. The original claimed that FOBTs had doubled the number of problem gamblers in the UK to nearly half a million. This has been corrected.