I was Addicted to Gambling...
What's the Government's Excuse?
HighGrader Magazine November/December 1998
By Doug Little
I was a liar, a cheat and a thief. On October 22, 1996 I finally admitted that I was addicted to gambling.
This powerful, baffling and insidious disease led me to do things I would never have believed possible. I "borrowed" $80,000 from eight bank accounts I controlled, only one of which was my own.
I would work all night running a charity casino at a local hotel. At 5 o'clock in the morning, I would take thousands of dollars in proceeds, not to the bank night-deposit, but across the Lake to the 24-hour, real casino hoping to win back the thousands I had already lost.
I always promised myself that this time it would be different. Twenty-eight hours later I would leave, broke and another $10,000 in debt with other people's money.
I rationalized my stealing as borrowing. I kept accurate records of what I took so I could pay it back (very convenient for the police investigation that followed).
As the Manager of the Downtown Orillia Business Association I was among the first to support the Chippewas of Rama in their bid to obtain a native casino. In 1995, a number of community economic development groups formed the Community Casino Task Force to work with the Casino Rama operators to maximize the casino's economic impact throughout the local region. I was a key player on this Task Force.
In the 18 months leading up to the opening of Casino Rama in my hometown of Orillia, I visited the major casinos in Windsor and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan five times. I was the guest of mayors, city officials and casino executives. I was Mr. Downtown Orillia, fighting to make sure my community and its businesses benefited from the new world-class casino. By day I checked out the economic impact of the casinos and by night I gambled ferociously. I went home broke every time. I lost everything.
Denial. I used to tell myself it would be different when Casino Rama opened "then I won't be away from home and have to gamble until my last dollar is gone." It seemed a sure thing. My salvation. But winning or losing, I never went home until all my money was gone. I often gambled as much as two and three times a day. Some times I snuck out on my sleeping wife in the middle of the night. I shielded my secret life from everyone.
In an never-ending web of lies and deceit I covered my losses "borrowing" from one account to pay another, eluding one banker and, concocting stories of money coming in soon, to beg off another. I couldn't rest at night for anxiety and desperation. My only chance for sleep was to buy a lottery ticket hoping for a win big enough to pay back all the money I had "borrowed".
Many times in those desperate, early morning hours returning broke from Casino Rama I contemplated suicide while driving across the Atherley Narrows Bridge. So many times I thought, "why not just end it and drive off the side of this bridge?"
On October 22, 1996, after the three-month mania in Casino Rama, I threw my final $500 at the roulette tables and slot machines and walked out to face the fact that I was addicted to gambling. It was time to accept the consequences of my actions. I have not gambled since.
I am diagnosed a "pathological gambler," a mental illness recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. Certainly my behavior over that two year period was insane although you would never have convinced me of it when I was in action. Symptoms of this illness include denial, self-delusion, rationalization and minimization.
I pleaded guilty to theft and breach of trust. On June 27, 1997 I was sentenced to serve a 12-month conditional term in the community and two years probation. There are still those in Orillia who think I should have gone to jail.
I have taken responsibility for the things that my addiction to gambling caused me to do. I blame no one else for my actions and I make no excuses. My two-year gambling binge cost me my family, my home, my job, my reputation and my community.

Institutional Gamblers
Today I believe that our Provincial Governments and some municipal governments in Canada are addicted to gambling. More accurately, they are addicted to the money gambling provides. I believe they are exhibiting the same classic addictive characteristics of denial, rationalization, minimization and delusion that I experienced in my compulsive gambling binge.
I should make it clear that I am not opposed to gambling per se, any more than I am opposed to drinking alcohol. What I am opposed to, however, is the government being in the gambling promotion and gambling expansion business. As with liquor, drugs and tobacco, I feel government should be in the gambling control business.
Gambling, like other potentially addictive and abusive pastimes, has inherent problems. These need to be met with caution, awareness and education. Not denial, rationalization, minimization and delusion. Not confusion, double-speak, secret deals and collusion.
The first step, as it is for all addicts, is to break through the veil of denial and get governments to admit there is a problem. John Ralston Saul, Canadian philosopher, and Governor General's Award winner, points out that in Canada "the governments of the citizen are now devoting themselves to the corruption of the citizen."
You may have noticed I never say "gaming industry". Well, keep your eyes peeled because the government and the gambling industry never say gambling - the sanitized name is "gaming" - part of the newspeak. Gambling is not a very nice business but it has been sanitized and sanctified by the gambling industry and our governments.
Writing in the Globe and Mail earlier this year, Donna Laframboise showed how government advertising has sugar-coated gambling so that what was once considered "a moral and social evil that undermined communities ....(has become) a socially acceptable pastime. This image makeover is the direct result of what may be the most expensive and most sustained government-funded advertising campaign in Canadian history."
Since the early 1970s we have been bombarded with advertising that not only presents gambling in a positive, exciting and fun light, but have sanctified it as a way of supporting "good causes". The Ontario Lottery Corporation, just one of several government agencies across Canada promoting lotteries, spent $375 million in advertising over the past 22 years ($17 million a year on average) literally shouting at us to gamble.
In 1996 alone, lotteries across Canada spent $43.4-million on advertising compared to a total $42.5 million spent by Provincial and Federal Governments urging people to do everything from voting to buying Canada Savings Bonds.
"No other single issue has been promoted so relentlessly and so expensively by government," Laframboise states.
The stakes are high for governments. In 1995, 2.7% of their revenue was coming from gambling. It's safe to say that in the three years since those national figures were tabulated, government gambling revenues have continued to sky-rocket with the opening of new casinos in almost every province. More are on the way.
In Ontario it is estimated that by 1999 gambling will account for $3-billion in the government's overall budget of $50-billion -- 6%.
But what isn't being factored into the equation are the hidden costs to the economy and society. Most problem-gambling surveys and studies reveal that between one and three per-cent of the population are or could be compulsive or pathological gamblers. In addition there are another 5 to 10% who are problem gamblers.
The wholesale expansion of casino and electronic gambling - slots and video lottery terminals (VLTS, the so-called crack-cocaine of gambling) - is a relatively new phenomenon across all North America. No one knows the long term impact on addiction, not to mention other social and economic impacts of this expansion.
One study in New Jersey, by Henry Lesieur, Ph. D., showed 39.2 % of the high school students had at least one disruption in their lives due to gambling. A shocking 10% had admitted to the "use of illegally obtained money to finance gambling." Six per-cent were diagnosed as pathological gamblers.
An Ontario study revealed gambling-related problems are four times more prevalent among those aged 12 to 19 than those aged 18 to 74. The Canadian Foundation on Compulsive Gambling (Alberta) claims eight per cent of Alberta's teenagers are addicted to gambling.
Given this evidence, and certainly governments have this evidence, it seems logical that like drugs, alcohol and tobacco, the marketing and promotion of gambling among young people should be carefully monitored and controlled.
Instead we have the Ontario Lottery Corporation marketing to children through Lotto 6-49 tickets in Happy Meals at McDonald's and through instant scratch tickets using children's games like Monopoly, Yahtzee and Battleship.
Last year Loto-Québec was criticized by consumer groups for using cartoon characters on instant-win tickets in a province where there is no minimum age for lottery ticket purchases.
"Gambling is causing huge social problems in Quebec, and here's a government agency trying to set up the next generation of compulsive players", said Natalie Saint-Pierre, an official with the Fédération nationale des associations de consommateurs.
Loto-Québec's response was, "Our customers are adults; it's not just kids that look at cartoons."
It's all a continuation of the confusion, double-speak and outright deception that has characterized the expansion of gambling in almost every jurisdiction. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ontario.
In Toronto, Gamblers Anonymous has tripled the number of meetings in the past three years. When I went looking for treatment in 1996 there was only the Donwood Problem Gambling Program, an out-patient program, and residential treatment at Homewood and Bellwood mixed with other addictions. Today there are 44 agencies operating similar problem-gambling programs across Ontario as well as other addictions facilities offering treatment for compulsive and problem-gambling. It is the growth industry of the 90s.

Counting the Costs
So far the only economic impact studies that have been done in Canada have been by consultants for the gambling industry (and their government partners) on the impact on communities that host casinos like Orillia, Windsor and Niagara. These studies are the cheerleader type, assessing the profits, the jobs and the spin-off of construction; they contain nothing about the harmful, economic results of what gamblers lose.
It's a one-sided ledger. It's a lie as an economic impact study. I bought into such a lie for the City of Orillia, believing the casino was going to be an "economic engine" that pulled along the rest of our local economy.
On my last visit to Orillia, almost two years after Casino Rama was opened, I counted one new motel, a gas station and two donut shops. The main street in downtown Orillia was, if anything, worse off, with more stores closed than ever before. Instead of being an economic engine, the casino has been sucking all the disposable income that used to be spent in the local economy.
Oh yes, there are the tourist dollars (although the American tourist dollars are much more in evidence in Windsor and Niagara than Orillia). However those tourist dollars are spent mostly in all-inclusive casinos rather than in the broader community once the casinos reach their full potential with hotel rooms, restaurants and entertainment centres.
When Senator Paul Simon of the United States, appeared before Congress in 1992 he made a forceful argument. "Gambling is not the only kind of business that can remove dollars from a local economy, but very few remove proportionately as much money for so marginal an increase in public revenue. Given the widespread evidence that gambling hurts a community, what rationale is there for government to act as a conduit for the profits of private promoters? The answer is none. But naive public officials remain convinced that someday they'll hit the jackpot. It's a delusion as old as gambling itself."
By far the biggest selling job in Canada has come from the promise of jobs and one certainly can't deny the casino jobs that are in Orillia, Windsor and Niagara. However as Dr. Earl L. Grinols of the Department of Economics of the University of Illinois points out in the Illinois Business Review: "Taking all areas into account, gambling does not create jobs. Rather, it shifts them from one location to another and converts some jobs that would have been devoted to other things into gambling jobs."
These jobs are created at the expense of other businesses. The so-called "entertainment" dollars that are spent on gambling are in fact, dollars that otherwise would have been spent elsewhere in the community.
Dr. John Warren Kindt, of the University of Illinois, in The Economic Impacts of Legalized Gambling Activities states, "Gambling interests are competing not just for the consumer's `entertainment dollar' as they claim, but for all consumer dollars, including the savings dollars. Once discretionary dollars are exhausted, 10% of the public [the problem economic gamblers PEGS] will draw on their savings accounts."
Dr. Kindt continues, "Subsumed in this 10% are the 1.5% to 5% of the public who are compulsive gamblers and will exhaust an average of $15,000 per year over a maximum 15-year period before `bottoming out.' In addition compulsive gamblers also go into debt an average of $80,000 to finance their compulsive gambling."
Dr. Grinols, in a paper "Development of Dream Field Delusions: Effects of Casino Gambling" says: "As best as I can determine, problem and pathological gamblers provide just slightly more than half of the revenues of casinos. What makes this a blockbuster in my opinion is the fact that the casino industry is therefore heavily dependent on the revenues of psychologically sick people. They have to know this. They have to be aware of this fact."
In my three-month gambling binge inside Casino Rama, I saw the same faces night after night, leading me to believe that problem and compulsive gamblers make up a very much larger percentage of casino revenue.
Industry and government seem to have found a way to rationalize the existence of problem and pathological gamblers by setting casinos up along borders and in regions which can draw on outside populations. In recovery, there are no international, provincial or municipal borders it's here we see the harm done by Casino Niagara and Windsor to our American neighbours, and in Ottawa by the Quebec Hull Casino and in Toronto by the Orillia Casino.
It is the basest rationalization for government to discount the harm it is causing simply because it affects people mainly from another jurisdiction. And yet the prospect of feeding off the neighbours is one of the most effective arguments used by governments and the gambling industry to promote expansion.
The effect of these policies are far from benign. Compulsive gamblers in action are six times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, the highest among all those with mental illnesses. In addition, when a pathological gambler hits bottom, they are fifteen times more at risk for suicide than the general population. Dr. Robert Custer, a pioneer in treating compulsive gamblers writes in his book, When Luck Runs Out, that 18% of compulsive gamblers in treatment had attempted suicide - 100 times the rate of the general population.

A week after I quit gambling, I met with a vice-president of Casino Rama, a man with whom I had worked closely for that past year in trying to make sure Orillia benefited from the Casino. I told him of my troubles and he was genuinely sorry for my plight.
"You know", he said, "I have been in this business for 25 years, and I can count on one hand the people who are still gambling that started back then. Sooner or later, we get everyone."
I asked my friend how then could he do it? How could he work in the casino?
"Well", he said, "We just believe you'll either lose it with us or you'll lose it somewhere else. So it might as well be with us."
This must be the mantra of the gambling industry.
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