In this second edition of In The Shadow Of Chance I have made only small changes to eliminate typographical errors and to make the material a little more readable. It is very close to the 2000 first edition published by Rob Sedgewick and ExGambler Services. Chapter Seventeen is an exception because it has been completely rewritten; the subject matter is the same, but there have been major changes in wording and content in an effort to make it more useful.

My work with problem gamblers began in 1978 in Ohio at a time when very little legal gambling was available. Gambling in Ohio then was so very different from gambling today. Then, all that people had were a few racetracks in the state and Atlantic City many miles away. The Ohio lottery was just coming into being. Other kinds of gambling were illegal, but they flourished. If anything, my stories are now actually arguments against the old blanket prohibition of gambling. Legalized gambling and modern ways to gamble seem to push problem gamblers to a bottom sooner. As a result, problems are more easily recognized by society, and help is made available sooner. Gambling related crime by gaming operators is almost eliminated when gambling is decriminalized or legalized. The gaming business is so lucrative that cheating by the operators is hardly necessary. Crimes by gamblers desperate to pay debt and continue with the addiction, of course, are still reported in our daily news. Nevertheless, I continue to think that prohibition is harmful to society. Legal gambling, compared to prohibition, is the better of a bad choice.

Marijuana is an interesting example of prohibition’s failure. It has been prohibited for decades, but it remains a popular drug of choice for many. Now, research tells us that the active ingredient in marijuana may actually retard the development of Alzheimer’s, a brain disease that afflicts many elderly people. So, its medical uses expand. Had the drug been decriminalized, we would probably have discovered this a long time ago. I don't recommend drug abuse or gambling to anyone, but prohibition causes more problems for society than it solves. It certainly did when we, in the United States, prohibited the manufacture and consumption of alcohol back in the 1930s. Prohibition is a childish and destructive tool, but it remains the law for many kinds of behavior, and I never recommend breaking any law. We can only try to change the law in the usual democratic ways.

Back to In the Shadow of Chance: are we sure this writing has a place in the modern world of gambling treatment and prevention in view of the somewhat out-dated gambling stories I tell? The games and the players change, but in its extreme form, pathological gambling is unchanging. The descriptions of problem gambling, regardless of the age or fashion, seem the same whether you read about gambling in 19th Century England or in Las Vegas today.

Like any behavior that involves risk or the possibility of harm, gambling is dangerous behavior. In most forms of dangerous behavior, we reduce the risks to a minimum through harm reduction. For example, driving a car is dangerous behavior, and we reduce the risks by traffic rules, seat belts, licensing and so forth. We also do all we can to maximize driver skills in order to reduce risk. In gambling, however, chance plays a greater role than skill. If it did not, there would be no profit in running a gambling business.

Let me offer a very simple definition of gambling, one that should not offend statisticians and economists, although gamblers themselves may not like it.

Gambling is the division or redistribution of wealth based primarily on the outcome of chance or random events.

It’s simpler than it sounds. People toss some wealth into a pot and then divide the pot among themselves depending on the fall of the dice or cards. But this random redistribution of wealth is seldom free. Somebody, called the house, usually has to own or run the game and usually wants to get paid for that service. So, the house takes a cut from the pot before the winners get paid further reducing any role skill might play in the outcome. Almost always, more goes into the pot than is paid out to the players, even in friendly games among neighbors where the pot is raked to pay for beer and sandwiches.

The owner or proprietor of the game is not gambling, of course. The owner’s income is guaranteed and doesn’t depend upon chance at all—it’s just a business. In fact, running a gambling operation can be a very smart and lucrative business. It doesn’t matter who plays, who wins, or who loses; the rake goes to the house each time the game is played. For the rest of us, if we choose to gamble, it is merely expensive entertainment.

Problem gamblers often make the mistake of thinking they are running the game forgetting that they are just customers paying for entertainment. This has been called the illusion of control.

Generally, wealth must be earned by labor and skill. But, it takes no significant skill, and very little labor, for a gambler to disburse this wealth on the winds of chance.

Gamblers, of course, make it feel like work. For them it involves extreme stress, enormous risk, and long, desperate hours of frustration with an occasional thrill. All this, however, is not really work. It’s just unproductive entertainment.

A rational person, someone not involved with gambling addiction, will conclude that on the face of it—and to its core—gambling simply does not make sense. It seems stupid. That is my point. Why would even a fool find such an activity attractive? The answer is that most people who gamble are just having a lark while some demonstrate serious delusions about the nature of their own behavior and about the nature of gambling. Anyone who gambles beyond a small occasional bet placed as a joke or as simple entertainment is demonstrating serious emotional and/or intellectual problems. Anyone!

Gambling, if you accept my definition just for the sake of discussion, must be judged a foolish activity, a surrender of control of valuable assets to chance. But most active gamblers are not stupid. They are not intellectually disadvantaged. Let me cut through many complex theories of gambling and anticipate a major theme in this book: I suggest that active gamblers are emotionally handicapped. Their intellectual ability to see the futility of gambling is undermined by emotions that are often unrecognized.

Gamblers, of course, argue that they are the exceptions to the rule, that they have special luck, power, or skill. They argue that for them gambling is a business. They claim to have a system to beat the odds. They claim to be—and they feel that they are—exempt from the laws of probability. And the merchants of gambling services do everything in their power to encourage those ideas. This is direct evidence that these merchants have long understood the psychology of gambling even if the players have not.

Throughout this book I will try to describe the difference between prudent and foolish risk. Not that truth alone is ever a remedy for delusion, but every effort must be made to strip away any irrational defense of gambling on chance events.

Other terms require some brief definition.

The medical term pathological means that something is related to sickness or disease. Thus, pathological gambling refers to the sickness or the disease of excessive or heavy gambling. Other less extreme forms of gambling are referred to as social, chronic, problem, or episodic gambling. Problem gambling includes all degrees of gambling behavior beyond occasional social gambling, up to and including pathological gambling.

Even after working for many years with problem and pathological gamblers I am not really comfortable using such medical terms to refer to what most people would think of as voluntary self-indulgence, or simply a bad habit. But these medical terms are now well established and have become conventional in the professional literature. And I do not think the word habit is very helpful since it implies a moral judgment. In my view, the word disorder fits the problem better than disease, sickness, illness, or habit. So I shall keep the terms problem gambling, pathological gambling, and pathological gambler, but refer to the problem as a disorder rather than a disease. In particular, I consider it as a mental disorder.

The older term compulsive gambling is still used in Gamblers Anonymous but is somewhat misleading since pathological gambling is not considered to be a truly compulsive disorder as those disorders are defined in the psychiatric literature today.

Degenerate gambler is sometimes used in gambling circles to refer to a chronic, hopelessly addicted gambler, but there is no real use for such a label.

By the time the reader finishes this book there should be no problem in recognizing a pathological gambler, so we will put that issue aside for now.

Estimating the prevalence of any disease or disorder is always complicated by the limitations of our techniques and by the fact that the situation is constantly changing. Gambling increased dramatically as more states legalized it and as more people find it possible to travel to gambling centers. No estimate will remain valid for long. As this is written, the best conservative estimates of the number of pathological gamblers in the United States vary between 1.5 percent and 3.0 percent of the adult population. These figures may seem small, but they amount to millions of people. There may be at least twice as many problem, episodic, and binge gamblers as there are pathological gamblers. The problems presented by gambling, of course, affect many more people than that; the victims who don’t gamble include wives, children, employers, and friends, all of who suffer because of the gambler.

Pathological gambling, sometimes called the invisible mental disorder, is more common than many better known diseases and mental disorders, and it is far more costly. Back in 1979 I did an informal study by asking gamblers entering treatment to estimate their losses during their previous year of gambling. I found that the typical pathological gambler seeking professional help had lost an average of $10,000 that last year. A few years later, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Compulsive Gambling Treatment Center reported an average per-year loss of $45,000 by their clients. Theirs is probably a more realistic figure for that era.

We must remember, in assessing the tragedy of pathological gambling, that most of the money lost by these people was not earned money. True, they do lose all they earn, a considerable amount in itself. Yet most of what they lose at the bottom of their gambling career is obtained through loans, theft, and family bailouts.

Toward the end of the problem gambler’s career he or she is almost always using other people’s money. Hardly a day goes by now without a news article about a priest, attorney, accountant, securities dealer, or public official caught misappropriating funds, losses often in the millions of dollars. Although sometimes not mentioned in these accounts, problem gambling is frequently at the root of the problem.

Billions of dollars are lost in gambling every year in the United States. No other disorder coss so much in terms of our national treasure before it is even treated? If we add the losses of problem and recreational gamblers, gambling is clearly the largest industry, dollar for dollar, in our country. Much of it is underground and off the books, just as the problem of the pathological gambler is often ignored and hidden from public view.

This kind of money could build a major city from the ground up, or provide new housing for much of the population of the United States, or provide every major city with a new charity hospital, and still leave money to start new schools of medicine and nursing.

Suppose that I have miscalculated, in my eagerness to impress the reader. Suppose pathological gamblers only lose $5,000 per year (the amount some gamblers like to bet on a single football game), and suppose there are only one million pathological gamblers in our country (the number we would likely find in New York or New Jersey alone). That still gives us a yearly loss of $5 billion. Such a sum could house all the homeless people in our country for the rest of their lives, and leave millions to fund research on a dozen different disorders.

    Citing a 2003 report in an Atlantic City newspaper, Bill Burton, in his Guide To Casino Gambling, wrote:  

Really comprehensive figures for total gambling losses every year in the United States are difficult to find, but in the years since this report in 2003, the amounts spent on gambling have continued to rise.

The government spends very little on research. Treatment may not be covered by some health insurance programs, and many people, in fact, have no health insurance. Gamblers imprisoned for gambling-related crimes cost taxpayers more billions every year. If we consider the yearly losses of all gamblers, not just pathological gamblers, all estimates are meaningless. As a nation, we spend more on gambling each year than on law enforcement, education, and health care combined. Gambling is clearly more than a minor recreation.

Gambling can be both intensely pleasurable and dreadfully expensive. It is the most attractive, insidious, and damaging of human indulgences. Pathological gamblers are desperate, broke, and—up to the point of suicide—quite ready to deny that there is even a problem.

None of this speaks to the misery of the pathological gambler’s family: Christmas without presents or love, Mommy always “away on trips,” Daddy locked in the bedroom with two television sets and a radio listening to sports broadcasts, no hot supper again tonight because the adults are off to bingo. The figures don’t talk about businesses ruined, divorces, suicides, or child abuse. The figures only prove that pathological gambling is the most expensive mental disorder in the world.

Alcoholism, schizophrenia, and cancer are expensive in terms of lost income, pain, and emotional turmoil, yet none comes close to problem gambling. Treatment, we now know, can save lives and dollars. Published scientific reports have shown that effective treatment can prevent further gambling in over half of those treated, and research has shown that treatment is an excellent investment because most of those treated go on to fully effective living. Recovering gamblers go back on the tax rolls and eventually pay for their treatment by contributing more to society than they took from it.

As we became more sophisticated and experienced in treating pathological gambling, it was no longer be necessary to keep gamblers in mental hospitals for weeks at a time as we did in the beginning. Less expensive outpatient care has become the rule. Thousands of skilled alcohol and drug treatment personnel can readily extend their work to gambling problems. Treatment is getting cheaper, more effective, and increasingly available, even as the problem grows worse with the continuing growth of gambling activity. Meetings of Gamblers Anonymous are now far more available; in the early 1980s there were no G.A. meetings between Cleveland and Los Angeles. Now there are many, and they are the best long term follow-up resources for problem gamblers.

Whatever pathological gamblers lose each year, we are the ones who must replace that money through taxes, insurance premiums, service fees, and higher rates—reason enough to be angry with gambling, gamblers, and the merchants of gambling.

I do not fly the prohibitionist flag, however. It is not my purpose to stir anger, only to raise awareness so we can get on with the difficult tasks of recognizing and treating the effects of gambling, on both the gambler and ourselves. Concern and determination is appropriate, yes. But anger would lead us to act and think as impulsively as the gambler. And anger has no place in the life of quiet abstinence so necessary if the individual is to put gambling in the past.

Nor will prohibition solve our national gambling problems. England’s experience with gambling over several centuries, a period marked at times by prohibition and at other times by the withdrawal of control, reveals a national discontent with both prohibition and free access to gambling. In the United States, the attempt to prohibit alcohol manufacture and sale was a disastrous failure; again we see a chronic dissatisfaction both with control and freedom. The War On Drugs begun in the United States during the 1980s has been another futile and expensive failure. And although we admit the war has failed, the prospect of legalization frightens us into paralysis.

My mission is primarily and always directed toward the gambler who wants to stop. The majority of us, who can gamble in limited moderation, want and deserve the freedom to do so. The gambling industry, of course, should be held to high standards of honesty through rational supervision and regulation, but I have no quarrel with the makers and sellers of gambling services other than to demand reasonable consumer education and protection. The main consequence of the prohibition of gambling would be a huge influx of newly defined criminals into our courts and prisons, already overflowing with drug offenders and drunk drivers. Prohibition never has and never will solve any of our problems.

The simple wish to ban, prohibit, and be rid of gambling and other indulgences is a natural, human response to the anger these unproductive behaviors create in us. But anger does not result in clear thinking about the best use of available resources. Only maturity can help us to make good decisions.

Gambling is not the problem. We are the problem. And while we can change, we cannot prohibit ourselves, our passions, or our weaknesses.

This is not a manual about how to manage gambling, nor is this book about money, economics, politics, or social issues. It is about building a life after gambling addiction; it is about recovery from pathological gambling. We will talk here about how we think, what we believe, and what we value. We will base our discussion on the premise that feelings, thoughts, and values, when badly chosen, can lead us to destruction. We will learn that recovery is based on the notion that often the most important single thing we can do in life is to change our minds deliberately.

Here is the real dilemma, the real resistance: We are willing to change everything except our ideas and values. But if life is to change for the better, our minds must first change for the better. In that most difficult yet simplest of tasks lies both the hope and the despair offered in the treatment of any addiction.

I have written this book as fictionalized personal experience; the characters are composites of actual people I have met. Some writers would call this creative non-fiction, but I prefer to call it realistic fiction. All case material is based on actual events and stories, but I have changed the names, locations, occupations, and sometimes even the sex of individuals to protect privacy. It will be clear from the context when I have used actual names in referring to colleagues and others who were not patients or members of self-help groups. In referring to certain legal cases involving gamblers, I have used real names and cases since, in the courts, their information entered public records.

In talking about what happened in certain Gamblers Anonymous meetings I attended as a guest, I have again muddled together different events and made-up names in order to talk as realistically as possible about the problems these groups face every day.

I have also made liberal use of literary devices such as fantasy and story telling in order to drive home certain important points that apply in the real world. I even introduce one of my imaginary playmates, a sort of Taber alter ego. Maybe you can figure who that is, he asked me not to tell.

I attempted to make the book as readable as possible for my primary audience; pathological and problem gamblers who wish to abstain and to build meaningful lives free of gambling. It is also written with the families and friends of gamblers in mind. The book may also be of interest to mental health professionals, politicians, policy makers, gambling industry personnel, and the concerned general reader.

Rather than assuming the position of teacher, lecturer, or textbook writer, I am inviting you to experience with me my own journey of discovery, a pilgrimage that began in 1978. It is one that continues to lead me into unexpected corners of the mind, and into contact with some of the world’s most unusual people. I truly hope to share some of the excitement and wonder that is always a part of the mind-walker’s journey.

Julian I. Taber, Ph.D.

Las Vegas, Nevada, 2000 (First Edition)

Whidbey Island, Washington, 2008 (Revised Edition)