Nobody will ever mistake suburban Buffalo (N.Y.) for Las Vegas, but the two locales share an invisible string.
Back in 2001, Amherst Town Justice Mark Farrell established the nation’s first therapeutic court for problem gamblers, five years after he founded the first suburban drug court in the United States. The idea behind these efforts was to provide rehabilitation and penalties other than incarceration to nonviolent offenders who committed crimes to feed their addictions.
By all accounts, Farrell’s innovations were successful.
“We were never able to get enough funds together to properly evaluate it, but anecdotally, the success rate was phenomenal, as it is for drug courts,” said Keith Whyte, executive director for the National Council on Problem Gambling.
