Problem gambling draws sporadic help

Hooked on Gambling: Third in a three-part series

Kathy Bassett, 49, a registered nurse from Topeka, Kan., didn't blink when Harrah's opened a casino 15 miles from her front door.

She had zero interest in gambling. Nor did she worry about its social ills.

That was before 2003, a nightmarish year that Bassett said opened her eyes wide to the problems associated with addictive gambling. In sequential order:

-- Her son, a casino pit boss, was arrested for stealing to support his gambling habit.

-- Her mother, retired and in her 70s, filed for bankruptcy after losing her life savings to the slot machines.

David Benintendi

-- Her 37-year-old brother, David, in despair and shame over his inability to quit gambling, put a shotgun barrel to his mouth, pulled the trigger and ended his life.

This trilogy of shocks scared Bassett into researching the impact of compulsive gambling on ordinary families such as hers. She soon discovered plenty of others undergoing similar grief. Now, she's an outspoken anti-gambling crusader who is determined to expand and improve prevention and treatment programs.

"I just got so angry," said Bassett. "This is an industry worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and ... it means nothing to them" - meaning government, Indian tribes and gambling companies that profit from legal gambling.

Bassett said her research showed that help for problem gamblers in the United States is sporadic, inconsistent and badly underfunded. Especially when compared with tobacco, alcohol and drugs - addictions that states spend $2.5 billion a year to treat, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.

The evidence supports Bassett's analysis, a review of the issue by CNHI News Service showed.

Not one federal dollar has been spent directly for treatment or prevention of problem gambling even though a Harvard University addiction expert, Professor Howard Shaffer of Andover, Mass., framed it as a public health issue in the country for the first time in a 2002 study.

"Excessive gambling, drinking, drugging are different expressions of a common, underlying disorder," said Shaffer of his study. "But pathological gambling is being viewed (by the government) like some rare disease - much like AIDS was in its early stages. It doesn't get the attention it should as a public health issue."

Few federal dollars have been allocated for medical and other research that might help detect the problem before it gets out of hand, or provide guideposts for prevention. Congress did pay for a $5 million, two-year study of the social and economic implications of gambling in the late 1990s, but little came of the short-lived effort.

Indian tribes that own 405 casinos on sovereign tribal lands and the 48 states with some form of legal gambling are similarly stingy with spending on programs that could diminish the volume of high rollers.

Twenty-two states offer no programs at all, CNHI News Service found. And the 26 states that provide treatment don't put a lot of money into it, operate in isolation from others despite the wide ranging mobility of problem gamblers, and appear to accept the claim that sufficient community programs exist to help the truly addicted.