Should we thank Governor Slot Barns and the political hacks for promoting and endorsing the destruction? Refusing to listen to reason and conduct an INDEPENDENT COST ANALYSIS?
More Casinos: More Problem Gamblers?
February 22, 2013|By BRIAN DOWLING, The Hartford CourantDeron Drumm hid his horse-betting addiction from almost everyone he knew.
Some thought he just made unwise financial choices. Those who knew he often gambled didn't know it was serious, though it was.
Drumm lost control, lied to friends and family and embezzled money from his law firm to fund the addiction. He lost his job and his wife. He had two strokes, a heart attack and, he says, hit bottom about three years ago.
"Friends didn't know I gambled," says Drumm, 41, sitting in the bright second floor office at Advocacy Unlimited in Wethersfield, where he is the deputy executive director of the nonprofit advocate for addiction and mental health issues.
He wears a blue, long-sleeved polo shirt, which matches his eyes, and black pants. His head is shaved, with neatly trimmed brown sideburns connecting to a beard. A limp remains from his first stroke.
"It led to incredible devastation for me and those around me," Drumm says. And the climbing back of it has been a task, he says.
It's likely that stories like Drumm's will become more common at least initially, experts say, as the region's gambling footprint expands beyond small southeastern Connecticut towns and into cities like Springfield and Boston.
"You're going to add some new cases," says Lori Rugle, director of the state office of Problem Gambling Services. "It's a trigger for a lot of people in recovery."
The competition for casino licenses in Massachusetts has already sparked broad marketing campaigns, including mailings or fliers, that make their way to the doorsteps of recovering gamblers.
Eventually the plans will materialize into resorts that promise states more revenue.
"People in recovery think that this is a new place so maybe my luck will be different here," Rugle says.
In the gambling world, one in 50 people who walk into a casino is considered a troubled gambler.
That number has shifted over time, though, higher especially in the late 1980s and early '90s during the most rapid expansion of gaming in the United States following the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.
With a similar expansion underway now in the Northeast — including three new casinos in Massachusetts — many expect the problem gambling rates to again inch up.
A 2012 study conducted for the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre looked at results to more than 200 problem-gambling surveys between 1977 and 2011. It found that, from a baseline of about 2 percent in the late '80s, problem gambling rates in the United States peaked at about 4 percent in the mid 90s.
The report's conclusion found a connection between casino availability and problem gambling, though over time the rates tended to decrease.
"It's certainly the second time in my career that I've seen this kind of expansion that we're looking at currently," said Rachel Volberg, one author of the Ontario study and a researcher who specializes in studies of problem gambling prevalence.
The casinos play a part in all this by running awareness and self-exclusion programs and participating in state and national problem gambling councils. They train their employees to identify problem gamblers.
But advocates, including Drumm, are saying the approach to gambling problems and how they're treated by the state and courts is flawed. Fewer resources are available to recovering problem gamblers than there are for drug addictions. Experts say that little is known about the social costs caused by problem gambling.
Drumm says it's because the problem is hidden: There's no smell of alcohol on the breath or smoke on the clothes. And possibly because of that it's not treated like other addictions — even though in some cases the potential for damage is deeper.
"You can gamble whatever your savings account is; you can bring it all to one hand of black jack today," Drumm says. "Your body wouldn't take that much cocaine or alcohol before it killed you."
Volberg said that increased casino exposure does seem to have an effect on the rates of problem gambling, but that the effect is limited in time as populations tend to adapt to the casino around the corner.
Among the reasons, according to the Ontario study: Communities become aware of the dangers of problem gambling; the novelty of new development wears off; industry or governmental efforts make gambling more safe; and the age of the population increases.
Another reason: problem gamblers are removed from the local population because of consequences of their actions — that is, bankruptcy or suicide, the doorstep of which Drumm said he found himself in early 2010.
Growing up in Mansfield, then moving to New Britain, Drumm said he was a shy kid, awkward even, and diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder. Rituals filled his day and he was often anxious.
Sometimes driving, he would think that he hit someone and would circle around again and again, getting out of his car to check. Prescribed drugs didn't help much.
"Through that all I had low self esteem," he said.
He pulled together the last few years of college in South Carolina, studying hard to get accepted into law school. Visiting home, he would put in bets at jai alai and horse races.
He looked forward to the weekends when he could be out in the fresh air, at venues like Saratoga or Belmont Park in New York. All this time, he also visited casinos.
"I found a place in the casino where I felt like I belonged," he said. There, his OCD symptoms seemed to recede, his rituals and anxieties almost disappeared. "I found some peace there."
Meanwhile, Drumm graduated from the University of Connecticut's law school and started a real estate and bankruptcy law practice in Avon.
Betting, for Drumm, began with $20 wagers on horses. He said that he would often place the race bets, watch the race, then walk over to the slots and play until the next race. With phone betting, he could call in bets from anywhere, even at the office.
For problem gamblers, often the rush of a bet or win eventually needs to result from larger wagers or bigger wins. The feeling from a $600 win on a race or slot machine that once caused a rush, eventually doesn't do it anymore.
Drumm said that his bets eventually reached into the thousands of dollars, and he dreamed of becoming a professional gambler. He had systems for placing bets on horse races that focused on minute details of the event, like the jockey's color or number.
All the while, he would accompany friends to casinos to play slots casually. "I would go out with friends making $2 bets," he said. "Then I'd 'go to the bathroom' and make real bets, then go back and play the little $2 things they would."
Somewhere, Drumm lost control. He remembers losing one night and driving home, crying and swearing that he'd never gamble again. That didn't stop him.
He attributes his first stroke five years ago to stress and high blood pressure from gambling.
"That I thought would be my bottom: I had a stroke and would never gamble again," Drumm said.
"That wasn't low enough."
He went through credit cards and savings accounts. He stopped paying student loans. He began to take money from the law firm , first embezzling $10,000, then $20,000, then $30,000.
Ultimately, he took more than $200,000 from his firm.
The approach to problem gamblers in Connecticut had for years focused on one word: abstinence.
The result was programs that asked people to quit gaming cold turkey.
Casinos fully supported this system by running self-exclusion programs, where gamblers sign up to a list saying they're not welcome on the property and if they're identified at the casino they will be escorted out. And if they were to win big, they wouldn't recieve the money.
From 2000 to 2007, 1,782 visitors to Mohegan Sun casino signed up for the self-exclusion program, according to a study by the Connecticut Counsel on Problem Gambling.
Ray Pineault, the casino's chief operating officer, said employees are shown a video about gaming problems and tested rigorously on how to identify a problem gambler.
The Mohegan self-exclusion study showed that less than one in five participants found out about the program through the casino. A similar group of participants think that the program is advertised enough by the casino. The average gambling loss during the preceding years for group was $26,686.
Those who excluded themselves from the casino, the study said, felt less anxious, depressed, angry and stressed. Of the number who self-excluded, 16 percent returned in almost two years.
The measure appears to be working for many, but Rugle at the state office for Problem Gambling recommends an added focus on "harm reduction" to "meet people where they're at."
She said that abstinence, in part, can keep people from seeking help until they hit bottom, rather than simply finding ways to avoid harm. The slogan, she said, is "take the problem out of gambling."
Rugle said she would like to see the self-exclusion systems — currently run separately and differently by each casino — consolidated to one and extended to off-track-betting and other venues.
She's working to integrate conversations about gambling into those about mental health, as there's somewhat of a correlation between the two populations.
"The unaddressed gambling problems are adding to the cost and lack of efficiency in some [mental health] treatments," she said.
Mark Abrahamson, a UConn sociologist who conducted one of the earliest gambling studies in Connecticut, said the impact of problem gambling, not just its prevalence, should be examined.
"What is seriously understudied," he said, "is the amount of problems that the state's citizens are creating for themselves by gambling too much."One big problem with gambling, Drumm said, is that the solution seems to lie in the problem. "When I started to get behind big money, there was this thinking of why would I stop now, I just lost X amount of money, I could still win it back, then stop."
He said that he became manipulative, controlling. "I hated thinking about who I was."
In March 2010, his law firm found out about the missing money. Drumm, seeing no other way, said he had a plan to commit suicide.
For problem gamblers, suicide can often seem like a type of emergency exit. When Drumm was down betting, it was comforting to think that there was a way out.
"I would try to mentally go away from what I was dealing with," he said. "Dreaming about suicide was effective for me."
To this day, he isn't sure why he didn't commit suicide.
"Maybe I did not fully understand how much damage I would have to work through internally — I knew of the external. Or maybe enough 'one day at a times' went by and the urge left."
He wound up in a rehab center that specializes in treating lawyers in Florida. "I woke up facing everything, how much damage I did," Drumm said.
In the next few years, he was in and out of court a half dozen times. He was disbarred, losing his job and business in the process. His wife left him. He avoided jail with a plan to pay restitution for the money he took.
His OCD — covered by the gambling for a long time, he said — came back immediately.
On the second day in rehab, he woke up and put on his pants. Then he took them off. He did this over and over about 10 times for no reason. The time in rehab also helped him learn to sit with stress, he said, something that earlier would have drove him to gambling.
The recovery takes a long time, Drumm said, but more than anything he wants people to know that its possible.
"With self-discipline, support and honesty a meaningful life is waiting for anyone ready to stop placing bets," he said.
Instead of just walking away from gambling, Drumm said that he had to move toward something. For him it was a new community of friends and a wellness regiment, including yoga and gluten-free and caffeine-free diet, adopting a "meaningful, simple life."
"When I was gambling, it took so much stimulation for me to feel any joy," Drumm said. "For now to find pleasure in such simple things, it's really enjoyable."
The recovery was a transformation in many ways. Drumm estimated that of the people he knew while he was gambling only about 5 percent are still part of his life.
He remarried, has new friends. He has a new job — the deputy executive director of Advocacy Unlimited, a nonprofit advocate for addiction and mental health issues in Wethersfield. The focus he has at his job drives him to work long hours, but he loves it, he said.
"I give back as much as I can," he said. He's writing a book about how to accept the bad things that happen and how to move on. He has since testified to the state legislature a number of times.
The gambling addict, Drumm hopes, could one day have the same treatment by the state and legal system as the drug addict. There needs to be more assistance for problem gamblers leaving prison, he said, and more available treatment before to keep them out.
The issue as Drumm sees it is widely that problem gambling is largely seen as a weakness rather than an addiction — a condition where, at some point, the gambler losses control.
"If you say or imply that it's not an addiction, you're saying that I decided to choose to destroy my life and my family," he said.
That being said he fully supports taking responsibility for the results of his addiction — he plans to be paying off restitution for years, if not the rest of his life. And he said that he doesn't think that the casinos should simply be closed or gambling outlawed because of the harm people can do to themselves.
He's found that talking with others about gambling problems isn't easy. When Drumm tried to get a group together who all went through similar gambling problems two years ago, no one wanted to.
"The people I reached out to ended up turning me down," he said. "They had rebuilt their lives and
did not want to open old wounds."
He understands their reasoning. They didn't want to dig up old troubles. They had moved on. He hadn't.
"I realize that leaving my past behind me isn't an option," he said. "I need to try and spread the word about what is often seen incorrectly as a 'weakness.' ... I believe it will take people telling their horror stories resulting from an addiction that is every bit as bad as crack cocaine."
Drumm keeps a reminder in his garage of how far he has come, a small sign from his former law firm.
"I want to remind myself why I'm doing this," he said. "It brings a lot back to me."
http://articles.courant.com/2013-02-22/business/hc-problem-gambling-expansion-20130212_1_problem-gamblers-rachel-volberg-lori-rugle
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