The Power of Words. American havoc

2/13/97
American havoc
Why are women are turning into compulsive gamblers?

By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

       Susan's heart was speeding faster than her station wagon down Route 95.
       Ah. Life is wonderful.
       She was on her way to meet her best friends at Foxwoods casino, and every minute put another mile between Susan and her joblessness, her medical problems and memories of the father she had buried a month before.
       Already, she had spotted a black Caddie with the license plate 7-7-7 and a tan Town Car with a plate that read, "Jewel." In Susan's garbled world of signs and omens, these tin-plate messages amounted to a force as sure as the tides. She could feel her palms grow moist on the steering wheel.
       I know I'm gonna hit. Hit big.
       She found her friends -- a cluster of $5-dollar slot machines -- where they always were, behind the mauve velvet ropes, past the gaming tables. Within five touches of a button, the tumblers rewarded Susan's faith. Double diamonds and sevens. Pure optimism, beamed at the machine, had brought Susan $1,600 -- the exact amount of the stationary bike she had wanted.
       I'm leaving with the money.
       Susan didn't buy a bike. She returned to her West Warwick home and stuffed 16 hundred dollar bills under her mattress, away from her husband's prying eyes. The next day, she went back to the $25 machines to spin those hundreds into thousands.
       You have to play big to win big.
       In eight hours, Susan tore through cash like potato chips. The machines ate the $1,600 as well as $5,000 more it had spit at her in $1,000 bursts earlier in the day. Sobbing, Susan drove to her therapist in Coventry. Before her tear-stained eyes he cut up her two credit cards and told her to go to Gamblers Anonymous.
       And that was just the beginning of Susan's career as a compulsive gambler.
       "When I was in the grips of it, I was consumed. Where was I going to get the money to gamble? What lie was I going to tell? What was the next lie I was going to tell to cover up the first lie?" 38-year-old Susan said thoughtfully. "When I went to bed at night, all I thought about was gambling. When I went to get up in the morning -- gambling. Sleep was my only relief."
       Two decades ago, Susan would have been a clinical curiosity. It was men who played the ponies or lost the rent in all-night poker games. Only men surrendered themselves before self-help brotherhoods. The psychologists collected their data and created treatment plans based on the male experience.
       But America's hot embrace with casino-style gambling has begun to integrate the picture. Researchers say that as casinos multiply, so do the numbers of women swelling the ranks of problem gamblers. They bring a distinct psychological profile and their own brand of familial troubles, and they require treatment tailored to those differences.
       "Women are in the stock market. They are on computers. Why wouldn't they be gambling?" said Joanna Franklin, executive vice president of the National Council on Problem Gambling. "Women have credit in their own names. They are more independent. There's every reason to believe that with increased accessibility and the lack of cultural stigma, women will be doing every kind of gambling men are doing, and getting in just as much trouble."
       Susan and the other women in this story are members of Gamblers Anonymous. In keeping with the group's philosophy, they agreed to be interviewed if their identities were protected. They described a hell of lying to their husbands and stealing from their children. During their anguishing journeys, they have committed crimes, attempted suicide, devastated the family finances, and in some cases, the family itself.
       It is possible to break the addiction, with the help of therapy and Gamblers Anonymous, which promotes a 12-step recovery program. But compulsive gambling exacts a terrible toll.
       "I was a rotten, low-down, sneaky, conniving thief," recalls Susan, who hasn't gambled in almost a year. "It took me to a dark side of myself and I never want to go there again."
       THE NUMBER of compulsive women gamblers is a matter of debate. National estimates of problem gamblers -- regardless of gender -- swing from less than 1 percent to 7 percent of the general population.
       Those numbers have been cobbled from a collection of state surveys, which measure a person's relationship to gambling over the course of their lifetime, rather than taking a current snapshot. Franklin says that those types of studies boost compulsive gambling statistics.
       She figures it closer to one percent -- about the same percentage of drug addicts in America. Women pathological gamblers, however, are, for the first time, showing up in these surveys in significant numbers.
       Rachel Volberg, a Pennsylvania-based researcher who has conducted about 30 studies on the prevalence of gambling in the U.S. and other countries, said while the proportion varies by state, on average, male compulsive gamblers still outpace females.
       But her more recent studies, in Montana and North Dakota, for example, show that "women are becoming as likely as men to develop gambling related difficulties," she said. "Half scored as problem gamblers, compared to 35-40 percent in other jurisdictions."
       The four-year-old Rhode Island Council on Problem Gambling wants to assess the extent of the problem statewide. Despite three years of lobbying, said council President Salvatore Marzilli, the General Assembly has only been able to spare $5,000 in legislative grants.
       "The state got $91 million from the Lot alone. To put back a few thousand is a smoke screen," he said. "It's a shame."
       The rise in problem gambling locally can only be measured by the increased attendance at the state's Gamblers Anonymous meetings. Dead in the late 1970s, the group was resurrected about ten years later. The state now hosts eight meetings, six days a week.
       Women, who rarely, if ever, attended in the past, now comprise about a third of each meeting, said Howard Rappaport, a member since 1995.
       "And that figure is climbing all the time. It's unbelievable," Rappaport said. "With the opening of the casinos, we have tremendous amounts of women."
       IN THE TELEVISION ADS, casino patrons are tailored blondes blissfully scooping up their winnings on the arm of a handsome, silver-templed escort. The Thursday morning reality at Foxwoods is tennis shoes and solitude. The jackpots seem slow in coming, too.
       Still, the players, mostly female, feed their slots, dropping coins with an efficiency only matched by the machine's skill at keeping them. Most are gray-haired women, whiling away their golden years with a bucket of quarters in their laps.
       At the $5-dollar machines where Susan once made her big score, a machine disgorges tokens in a shower of dull thuds. A redhead wearing a jacket festooned with dice and cards has just won $250, but she might as well have been opening a can of tuna. Her face is empty.
       Up until 1990, the only places to be hypnotized by the spinning reels were Las Vegas and Atlantic City. According to the American Gaming Association, 27 states now have legalized casino-style gambling. Revenues from all forms of wagering have quadrupled in the last 13 years into a $44.4 billion industry in 1995.
       Plans are underway to build nine new casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City by 2001, and in the last election, Michigan and West Virginia voted to permit casino-style wagering.
       In southern New England, the Narragansetts have been pressing to build a gaming facility since 1992. The Wampanoags of Gay Head, Mass., are currently scouting a casino location in southeastern Massachusetts. In the last five years, Foxwoods has enriched the tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe of Ledyard, Conn., beyond its wildest imaginings. In October, the Mohegan Indian tribe opened the nation's third largest casino in nearby Uncasville, Conn.
       Those who have charted the increase of compulsive gambling among women predict that the proliferation of casino-style wagering will only increase their numbers.
       "The key is video poker and slots," said Henry R. Lesieur, a professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University, who is writing a book on female pathological gamblers.
       The American Psychiatric Association describes pathological gambling as an impulse control disorder characterized by an overwhelming preoccupation with gambling. Its symptoms progressively worsen as the size of the bets increase and the gambler becomes more desperate to find money to cover the losses or continue wagering.
       Compulsive gamblers are more likely to suffer from other psychiatric problems, such as depression, and are often also addicted to drugs and alcohol, experts say.
       But Lesieur's research suggests critical gender differences. Men tend to gamble for excitement. In the high-flying action of the track or a poker table, male gamblers try to prove themselves smarter than the game or their opponents.
       "They are into a wide range of sensation-seeking activities. It's the money, the thrills," he said.
       Women often flock to the solitary pleasures of slots or video gambling machines to escape some problem in their personal lives, such as marital problems or death of a loved one, he said.
       "The escape-seeker could care less about strategy," Lesieur said. "The object is to blot out everything. The machines give them a hit of anti-depressant medicine. It's an anesthetizing experience."
       But as the losses mount and the gambler begins that downward spiral, the distinctions fade. Although the lying, the cheating and family neglect may be the same, female gamblers wreak a particular form of havoc on their families because of their roles as mothers and household managers.
       "What tears them down is not financial devastation -- it's that they have violated the image of what a woman is supposed to be," Lesieur said.
       CARLA WAS THE ELDEST of eight -- the good one, the responsible one, the second mother to five sons. She was also her mother's fourth at bridge and her rapt pupil at calculating the Giants' point spread.
       At age 11, she was playing High-Low-Jack for pennies with the boys. By the time she was married and living in Pawtucket with two daughters, Carla would play poker with the men who frequented her husband's sports bar.
       This is where her mother found her one evening. At an hour when other mothers would be making the next day's brown bag lunch or inhaling the fragrance of their children's just-washed hair, Carla was dealing poker to six other men. Her mother eyed her with disdain.
       "Carla. What are you doing here?" she demanded.
       Carla was incredulous at this question: "What do you mean, Ma? I belong here."
       "Carla, you're a mother. You have two kids. You belong at home with your children."
       Carla refused to be cowed. She was addicted to scotch and sports betting, and those preoccupations crowded everything else out. Years would pass before Carla, now 51, sober, in therapy and in self-help groups, could admit that her twin dependencies had affected her daughters.
       "My kids have gone through hell. I made it impossible for my youngest to go to college without the burden of debt. I've watched her struggle. It breaks my heart," she said. "The guilt is monstrous."
       Robert Whitman-Raymond, a Providence clinical social worker who has specialized in treating compulsive gambling since 1978, said that his clinical experiences defy most of the conventional categorizations of male and female gamblers, but he does concede that women bring a greater burden of guilt into treatment.
       "Most of us today are still in fairly traditional roles," he said. "When Dad is away gambling, he loses extra time with his kids. But the core parenting takes at least one parent. When gambling eats that away, it can easily get into a neglectful situation."
       LISA HAD JUST GOTTEN HOME from work when the phone rang. Her husband was on the other end, puzzling over the credit card company's rejection of his $50 charge.
       The pace of her life, which had roared like wildfire over the 14 months that the slot machines had gobbled up their earnings and reserves, suddenly slowed to a snail's speed.
       It seemed to take her husband years to ask her why the credit card had an $8,000 balance. Panic-stricken, Lisa stood by the kitchen extension racking her brain.
       I'll just say it was a mistake. The credit card company put someone else's purchases on our card.
       Those lies, ready to tumble out, never left her head. Instead, Lisa admitted that she had run up against the credit limit in cash advances to gamble.
       It's over. It's over. Thank God.
       Up until then, it had been easy to hide her compulsion. Lisa was the household money manager. Her husband never even glanced at the debits in their joint checking account. Lisa never gave him reason to. In her mid-thirties, with a well-paying, white collar job, she always paid the bills on time, a model of good credit.
       But in complicity with banks soliciting hard for new customers, Lisa was able to feed her addiction. When one card was maxed to its $5,000 limit, good luck would send her another offer in the mail. In a little more than a year, she ran up a $58,000 debt on ten different cards.
       "I knew that I didn't qualify for all those cards, but I kept getting them," she now concludes, after almost a year in recovery. "It was obvious if you looked at my credit report that I was paying off one card with a cash advance from another. It was a continuing cycle. These companies knew I was a gambler, and they were feeding me."
       Tahira K. Hira, a professor of consumer sciences at Iowa State University who has been studying the impact of gambling on family finances, found that female gamblers were carrying as much credit debt as men.
       "I didn't realize the extent to which they were using borrowing opportunities to gamble," she said. "That the lender would let this happen in the extreme -- that they don't know what's going on -- that's mind-boggling."
       Susan similarly juggled the finances for her family of five, toting up a $120,000 credit card debt and loans. Carla lost her home, her new car, a vacation home and her valuable jewelry to cover gambling losses. All three were forced to declare personal bankruptcy.
       MARIA REFUSED to look at the piece of paper the process server had thrust into her hands one Monday, but she knew what it was: a Family Court summons to dissolve her 14-year marriage.
       Maria, 33, was once queen of the blackjack tables in a short skirt, with a hot streak that seemed like it would never cool. One night, she double-downed a few hundred into $22,000.
       But her husband had finally lost patience with her losses and her all-night gambling binges. They had separated two years earlier. Maria's three children stayed with him and that was fine with her.
       She was four months behind on the rent, three months behind on her car payments, her refrigerator was bare. Now the summons, delivered so casually to her Providence office, meant that her marriage was finished, too. She left work hysterical, painted over the sadness on her face and headed for Foxwoods.
       In two hours, she lost her last $200. Then she went to a phone and called Gamblers Anonymous.
       "I didn't want to do it, because I knew it meant I could never gamble again," she said.
       Today, Maria, Carla, Lisa and Susan are in recovery. All attribute their success to Gamblers Anonymous, but it has been a tremendous struggle, they say.
       While it may be socially acceptable for women to gamble, the stigma against out-of-control gambling for women is still firmly in place, creating powerful obstacles to treatment.
       "Men aren't embarrassed, but women are very secretive about it," Lisa said. "You'd never hear a woman say I went to Foxwoods and lost a bundle. A woman running off to Foxwoods is a heck of a lot different than a man."
       When Carla went to her first GA meeting in 1983, she was the only woman present. She was put off by the foul language and did not return for another two years.
       "I wasn't identifying. I was comparing," she recalled.
       Even with today's increased female presence, GA alone may not be enough for women. Experts say they may also need separate treatment for depression and assertiveness training.
       "GA will probably stir up some of the unfinished business that brought them into gambling, such as their relationship with men," Whitman-Raymond said.
       In addition, Lesieur said that many women have lost their family's support by the time they seek help.
       "Men are more likely to be pushed into treatment by their families," Lesieur said. "But there's no song called 'Stand By Your Woman.' "
       All agree that more research and more education are necessary to catch up with the rapidly expanding opportunities to gamble.
       "If gambling's a jaguar of the highway," said Franklin, "then (research is) on the on-ramp riding a tricycle."
       Michael Telesmanic, Foxwoods' vice president for table games, said that the casino's management shares researchers' concerns. Foxwoods contributes about $200,000 annually to the Connecticut Council on Compulsive Gambling and convenes its own Responsible Gambling Committee monthly to keep its supervisors alert to patrons with a problem.
       The casino offers education in the form of brochures and phone numbers of compulsive gambling hot-lines posted by the public phones, he said. Senior staff are available to direct players to the appropriate resources, when approached. But Telesmanic concedes that it is a service rarely used.
       "Compulsive gambling is no good for the casino," Telesmanic said. "The last thing you want to see is the negative press that comes out of that situation, and we do not need the last dollar out of anyone's pocket. But we rarely take an offensive role."
       SUSAN HAS ONLY one thing to show for all of the money she poured into the gap between the double diamonds and her disease: a Native American doll she bought at Foxwoods with her comp points.
       It is a small work of art, with its delicate porcelain hands and face. But it sits on a shelf above the kitchen sink, forgotten.
       "When I think of where that doll took me," Susan muses. "My girl friend wants it. I ought to give it to her. I put her through a lot. She deserves that damn doll. I don't need it to remind me."
       She points to her chest. "It's all in here."
       It's easy to see the truth in her words. The thrills, the panic, the shame of her gambling life is in her voice and the sweat on her fingers. Her face, flushed and vulnerable without make-up, at times, radiates hope, too.
       "It's fragile. Recovery's a minute-at-a-time. An hour-at-a-time. A day- at-a-time," she said. "But I am a productive person now. My family's intact, and my husband still loves me. There is hope."

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