ALBANY, N.Y., June 11 -- In the old mobbed-up Vegas they called them degenerates. Guys who couldn't stop gambling until they lost everything.

Vegas had two ways of dealing with them. If they were rich degenerates, the casino would extend credit, so they would always owe the casino money. The casino didn't mind floating the debt, because they knew that the guy would show up again, jonesing for action, and he would have to settle his old bill before they would let him touch the dice.

But if the degenerate was a working-class stiff, they would let him lose all his money, then buy him a bus ticket home, because the last thing they wanted was a bunch of these guys hanging around town after they were broke.

The dirty little secret of corporate gambling is that degenerates are still around and they still account for a lot of the bottom line. The difference, in these squeaky-clean days of Wall Street gambling corporations, is that you have to pretend you're not taking their money. Hence the degenerate doesn't exist anymore. He's a "problem gambler." By using the word "problem," the implication is . . . there's a solution!

And the solution is about as effective as those "Just Say No to Drugs" commercials are. Every casino has a "problem gambler" policy that more or less says they'll refuse to deal cards to anyone who's ruining his life or gambling with his family's welfare check.

In fact, there's usually no way to know that. First of all, how can you tell who's using a slot machine in the first place? A degenerate is not likely to join the slot players club that promises you a chance to win a teddy bear. And even if you're watching a guy wash out at the blackjack table, how do you know how much he can afford? By the way he dresses? There are multi- millionaires who gamble in velour jogging suits.

Naw, nobody's even gonna know it's happening until long after the guy has bottomed out. A degenerate, by his nature, acts like a big shot. He's gonna do everything he can to look successful. A bartender can't always spot a drunk, and a casino man can virtually never spot a degenerate unless he's in a high- roller suite.

The whole "problem gambler" self-righteous party line is nothing more than an attempt to hide the reason most governments traditionally banned gambling entirely: it was considered a con directed against the poorest citizens and the ones who had no self-control. Presumably governments today could do the next best thing and ban "sucker bets"--except for the embarrassing fact that the biggest sucker bet of them all is owned by the government: the lottery.

At any rate, whenever a new state adopts gambling or expands it, they're generally forced--by political correctness, if nothing else--into setting up some kind of mental health program for the "problem gambler." At the recent New York Gaming Summit, for example, former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Jones showed up in her new capacity as Senior Vice President/Government Affairs & Communications for Harrah's Entertainment. Part of her job is to make sure everyone knows that gambling is a clean family-friendly business, just like the movies or amusement parks.

"Gaming's biggest problem," she said, "is that we've allowed the opposition to define what gaming is. Read the National Gambling Impact Study: I'm always shocked how little people refer back to it. It concluded that there are more bankruptcies caused by credit card companies than by gambling. At Harrah's we have a strict marketing code; we're very anti-underage gambling, and our 'high roller' spends an average of about $1500 a year. And we don't cash welfare checks or unemployment checks."

All well and good, but as a matter of fact, there are plenty of places right across the street on Pawn Shop Row that will happily cash that check, and usually for a whopping 10 per cent fee besides. Harrah's would be doing a greater social good if they did cash the check instead of sending the person to a place that will give two-week loans at 800 per cent interest before the gambler even receives the check! And does Harrah's have a policy against letting the mentally retarded gamble? Of course not. I'm about as far from a bleeding-heart liberal as you can get, but if the gaming companies are gonna crow about these "protect people from themselves" policies, we might as well ask how far they're willing to go.

What it comes down to is that a "problem gambler" policy looks good on the company's annual report. The truth, though, is that most people don't think gambling degeneracy is a real disease--even the people who say they understand it. So what is it exactly?

According to the American Psychiatric Association, there is a genuine clinical condition called "pathological gambling." And it's defined as being five or more of the following 10 conditions:

1) Being so preoccupied with gambling that you're always reliving past gambling experiences, planning new ones, and dreaming up ways to get more gambling money.

2) Gambling more and more money each time because you need more stimulation.

3) The inability to control, cut back or stop gambling.

4) Symptoms of restlessness and irritability when you're prevented from gambling.

5) Using gambling as a way to escape problems or get rid of a bad mood, like anxiety or depression.

6) Chasing your losses--always trying to "get even" with past failures.

7) Lying to family members or your therapist about how much you gamble.

8) Committing crimes (forgery, fraud, theft, embezzlement) to finance your gambling.

9) Screwing up your marriage, relationship, job, education or career opportunity because of gambling.

10) Borrowing money from others to get rid of a desperate financial situation caused by gambling.

Okay, the interesting thing to me about these "diagnostic criteria" is that they all sound like pretty much the same thing: got to have action, will do anything to get more and more of it. And it seems to me that, once you do have five out of ten of these problems, you've already lost all your money.

I asked Keith Whyte about this, and he said it's true. Whyte is Executive Director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, and he was at the New York Gaming Summit to try to get the newcomers to gambling to set up a support system. He said, for example, that of the 60 counties in New York state, 52 of them have no services for compulsive gambling. It doesn't even show up on the radar.

"Last year 144,000 people called our help line," he said, "but we don't always have a place to send them. The fact is, we know now that problem gambling starts around age 12. By the time they get to a casino, we've failed. One-third of the high school students in America bought a lottery ticket last year."

There's very little research about it, and numbers are hard to come by, but there's one study showing that about 6.4 per cent of the population of Nevada has a gambling problem. Nevada is going to be higher than the national average, because Nevada draws gamblers like a magnet, but Whyte says Gamblers Anonymous is growing everywhere, not just in gambling states.

I've always thought of compulsive gamblers as primarily male, but according to the APA at least a third of them are female. In Gamblers Anonymous, however, only about 3 per cent of the membership is female. What this means is that there are a whole lot of women out there who are basically using gambling to deal with emotional problems, and because they're not necessarily wage-earners for a whole family, it doesn't show up as quickly.

"But numbers are a red herring," says Whyte. "The important question is how are we going to help these people? We've got to create a social safety net. It's not sufficient to say, 'Look, we've created this economic development for our state,' and not deal with this."

The only thing I've heard of that might work is a system that the state of Missouri came up with in 1996. In that state members of Gamblers Anonymous can register with the state casino control commission. It's sort of like voluntarily putting yourself in the Black Book. Once you do it, you'll always be banned from casinos in that jurisdiction. The first year Missouri had the program, only 41 people signed up, but today they have 4,007.

Of course, the problem with that system is that it only deals with people who have already attained some level of self- control. Whyte wants more money to find out why people become compulsive gamblers in the first place.

Another problem is that casinos have to enforce the exclusion list, which means additional personnel--and as a practical matter, how are you gonna find a guy who wanders in off the streets and plops down at a machine? Unless you start flagging every single person who walks through the door with face-recognition software, chances are the guy could drop several thousand before you even knew he was there.

Then there's the fact that the degenerate is going to be skilled at concealing his habit, plus the fact that the disease is progressive. At what point does he cease to be just a wild guy who gambles a little beyond his means and turn into a compulsive gambler?

One thing we know is that casino employees are more than twice as likely as the general public to become degenerates, and that convenience-store clerks tend to develop into lottery addicts. The more widely available gambling becomes, the more it's gonna show up in the form of self-destructive behavior. And that, among other things, is embarrassing for the states that have legalized gambling. One the one hand they're promoting family values, and on the other they're profiting off a system that wrecks homes.

Jim Maney, the Executive Director of the New York Council on Problem Gambling, says that "it's no different from substance abuse. There is real devastation." And yet, if a degenerate comes to him for help, there's very little to offer him. "We're overwhelmed already," he says. "In Manhattan we have one treatment program that's open five hours a week."

How do they even find you, he was asked.

"Easy," he said. "The phone number is on the back of horse- racing and lottery tickets." That would be, of course, losing tickets that they couldn't cash.

© Copyright 2002 United Press International and Joe Bob Briggs

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