New Gamblers Find Old Troubles

With gambling’s rapid spread--and its widening cultural acceptance--compulsive wagering is taking on a new and troubling look. These days, more teenagers, senior citizens and women are getting hooked.

Although each group gravitates toward different types of gambling, the results are predictably similar: Many end up in financial and psychological trouble.

THE KIDS

Compulsive gambling has now surpassed drug abuse, and is rapidly closing in on alcohol, as the fastest-growing addiction among youths, researchers say. The percentage of problem gamblers in the youth population is more than double that among adults, and they are starting younger than ever before.

In the past year, about 14 million American adolescents gambled, and about 2 million of those have serious gambling-related problems, says Durand Jacobs, one of the country’s leading experts on youth gambling.

“There’s not a high school in California where kids are not making book on sporting events,” says Jacobs, a professor of psychiatry at Loma Linda University Medical School.

Growing up in a culture saturated with legal ways to wager, many young people come to believe that gambling is an acceptable, albeit illegal, activity for minors. Some high schools unwittingly promote that notion by sponsoring casino nights after the prom or graduation, treatment professionals say.

“We’d never think of organizing a kiddie cocktail night and showing kids how to shake the perfect martini,” says Elizabeth George, executive director of the North American Training Institute, a nonprofit group that co-sponsored a think tank on youth gambling at Harvard University last year.

Some youths turn to gambling, George says, to numb the traumas that loom large in adolescence, but don’t have the coping skills or experience to recognize their limits. The stakes get higher in college, where students risk their living allowances or student loans to place bets with campus bookies, young gamblers say.

The far-reaching nature of the problem became evident during recent gambling scandals at Northwestern University, where two former basketball players were convicted this fall of orchestrating a point-shaving scheme to recoup gambling losses. Two weeks ago, four members of the university’s 1994 football team were charged with perjury for denying under oath that they placed bets.

“What the public doesn’t understand about campus bookmaking is how big it is and how damaging it could be,” says Lex Varria, a former bookie who spent a decade taking bets from Massachusetts college students. “I trashed hundreds of academic careers.”

THE SENIORS

Many casinos have hit on a lucrative new customer base in the growing number of senior citizens, a population that often has the free time and enough disposable income to make them an attractive target for gambling enterprises. In Iowa, for example, one casino featured former stars of the Lawrence Welk show as entertainment.

But counselors and psychiatrists say they are seeing a troubling downside: more elderly clients suffering debt and depression from gambling.

Lonely after the loss of a spouse or the end of their career, some elderly people see gambling as a harmless way to pass the time, mental health professionals say.

Unlike younger gamblers, who still can work to recoup gambling losses, it’s too late for seniors to find new income after gambling away their retirement funds.

The scope of the problem is difficult to assess because many seniors are too embarrassed to admit their addiction.

But the Florida Council on Problem Gambling, which runs a hotline, has been fielding a steady increase in calls from seniors, now making up about 20% of those seeking help. “They go into it with little appreciation of the risk involved,” says Pat Fowler, president of the council, “and have absolutely no idea what to do when they realize they’ve lost control.”

Florida resident Jean McDonald, 61, started visiting the casinos in nearby Biloxi, Miss., four years ago after her husband died while they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. “I just withdrew from everything except gambling,” she says. “It was a place to get away, and no one was there who could remind me of Jim.”

A former schoolteacher who sang in her church choir, she lost almost $800,000 in 2 1/2 years and was arrested for writing bad checks.

“It’s caused great pain and devastation in my family,” McDonald says. “It’s something I never thought would ever happen to me.”

THE WOMEN

Although women have never been immune to compulsive gambling, their numbers are rapidly growing with the broader availability of video poker, slot machines, bingo and other games of chance. Now, about one-third of problem gamblers are women, according to treatment professionals.

Men tend to be “action gamblers,” playing games of “skill” such as poker and blackjack, to experience the rush of winning as they compete against others. Many women, however, gamble to escape boredom, abusive relationships or unresolved grief, says Henry Lesieur, president of the Institute for Problem Gambling in Connecticut.

They often play noncompetitive forms of gambling that block out their problems, spending hours alone with seductively flashy machines designed to mesmerize.

Donna, a single mother in Georgia, found the video poker machines across the border in South Carolina a soothing antidote to the stress of working full time as a nurse and caring for three children. She lost her three-bedroom home before she finally got help.

“The machine was my medication,” says Donna, 49. Many women who compulsively gamble experience a distinctive shame, according to treatment professionals. Although women suffer the same embarrassment as men about their financial losses, they also feel guilty for letting down their families, especially if they leave their children home alone while they bet.

Experts say this has inhibited many women from seeking help; female gamblers make up about one-tenth of those in recovery.

“They’re not as likely to go into treatment because there are fewer people pushing them there,” Lesieur says. “They’re violating this Madonna image of what it is to be a mother, and so other people fail to give them support.”