The panelists at the plenary session of the International Center for Responsible Gaming’s 24th annual conference at the Venetian Expo in Las Vegas were experts in gambling addiction.
Ted Hartwell is the executive director of the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling. Michelle Malkin is an assistant professor of gambling-related harms at East Carolina University and a speaker and researcher on gambling-motivated crime. And Ed Talbot is the executive director of the New Hampshire Council on Problem Gambling.
They’re experts, partially, because they’ve all sought help for problem-gambling issues.
“I started at a slot machine and within months was trying to learn every table game and then I became a pai gow player,” said Malkin Sunday during the session, titled “Ask Me Anything! Voices of Recovery from Gambling Disorder.” “… Any new game that showed up, I wanted to learn it.”
Malkin lost her job as an attorney because of gambling. She also lost her partner and their three children and eventually spent a year in prison for stealing funds from another organization for which she worked. Talbot spent so much time at a dog track that he wrecked his marriage and became estranged from his daughter. And Hartwell, who would stop at a casino to gamble on his way to pick up his daughter from day care, lost his marriage and nearly ruined his avocation as a cellist for the Las Vegas Philharmonic.
“I’m one of those select groups of individuals who not only had the potential to destroy my own life and my family’s life, but impact multiple workplaces in this community through my activities,” Hartwell said. “I also have, thankfully unrealized, the potential to jeopardize this country’s national security. (Hartwell had a national security clearance when he worked for the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.)
“When we talk about problem gambling, gambling disorder, as a public-health issue, you better believe that it is, because it’s not just an issue for that individual.”
The panelists emphasized that individuals don’t have to wager large amounts to have issues. When Talbot started betting at a Massachusetts dog track in 1963, his wagers were relatively small. But as he started to spend more time at the track – he eventually worked there – there were signs he refused to acknowledge.
“Everybody else could see that I had a problem,” Talbot said. “I thought I didn’t, because I only bet on greyhounds and I didn’t bet big money. But as the disease progressed, the problem became more expeditious.”
It seems counterintuitive, but the panelists agreed that the expansion of gambling across the country is a good thing. Malkin admitted she was upset at first to witness gambling spreading across the country. Then she started conducting her own research and learned that “everybody’s gambling anyway.
“Legal and regulated gambling protects people better than illegal and unregulated gambling, but it comes with responsibility,” Malkin said. “The responsibility is funding for resources, education, outreach. What we’re seeing is (gambling is) growing, growing, growing but we’re actually seeing some cutbacks in the funding going toward these things in certain places. These individuals who are already gambling, and new individuals are being introduced to it, but they’re still in the same place I was in the ’90s of not understanding how to gamble and set limits.”
Many of those new gamblers are college students. Hartwell cited statistics from an NCAA survey that revealed 60% of college students who live on campus gamble on sports, with 70% of those students gambling in markets where it’s not legal or being too young to legally gamble.
Hartwell said this poses issues for NCAA athletes, notably that they have to assume most of their fellow students are gamblers and may be looking for inside information on games.
“We know from surveys looking at gambling attitudes and behaviors that the National Council on Problem Gambling has funded that sports betting seems to be the one thing where there’s a lot of cognitive distortion as a gambling activity, the ability to make money,” Hartwell said. “In every demographic, this is higher, but again, particularly in that 18-to-25 group. And very few states have allocated one percent of the revenue that the national council recommended if they were going to legalize sports betting that goes specifically to the issue of problem gambling. Whether it’s awareness, research, or treatment, very few have taken advantage of that opportunity. So we’re going to see an issue in this area.”
