Researchers, casino execs talk problem gambling

Adam Goldman

Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2002 | 11:07 a.m.

The quality of gambling research and funding for it must be increased significantly if effective treatment and preventive programs are to be developed to counter the growing problem of gambling addiction, public health experts said Tuesday.

"I'm concerned about gambling as a potential public health hazard," Howard J. Shaffer, director of Harvard Medical School's Division on Addictions, said.

Shaffer and other experts said it was most important that the roots of all addiction, including gambling, be reconsidered with a critical scientific eye.

Research money is needed, they said, to help eliminate the junk science that has influenced gambling-related health issues for the worse.

"We are an immature field," Shaffer said. "I think we have begun to understand the epidemiology of gambling. We are just beginning to look at who is vulnerable and who is at risk."

Questions of addiction and treatment brought more than 300 of the most respected academics, researchers, public health gurus and gambling industry officials in North America together for a three-day conference at The Mirage hotel-casino.

The experts focused on how gambling can be used to better understand other addictions, such as drugs, alcohol -- even shopping.

The event was sponsored by the Harvard Medical School's Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, the National Center for Responsible Gaming and the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling.

The three-day conference, which concluded Tuesday, could be the beginning of a more focused effort to formulate a cohesive and uniform health policy to address the rise of gambling that now exists in some form in 48 states, officials said.

One study co-authored by Shaffer found that about 1.6 percent of adults will have a serious gambling disorder in their lifetime. An additional 4 percent face moderate gambling problems.

That number tends to ebb and flow, but it also could be on the rise, Shaffer said.

Shaffer said that gambling as a health issue has taken on added importance because it has become so widespread. He said that "gambling temples," such as the ones found in Las Vegas, were once far away from the average person.

Now gambling has cropped up in stores selling lottery tickets, a slew of tribal casinos and bingo halls.

"This has changed our relationship with gambling," he said. "We are no longer protected by distance."

Researchers also suspect that people might be genetically predisposed to gambling. There's also reason to believe, they said, that a person's background could influence whether he or she gambles.

"If life has dealt you with a bad hand," Shaffer said. "You are vulnerable to gamble."

Deborah Klein Walker, acting director of the bureau of substance abuse services at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said that states must organize. If state and local health departments don't, she said, the problem will only get bigger.

The gambling issue needs to be quantified so legislators realize that more money must be allocated to it.

"Without data you have no action," Walker said. "Data is important because it drives change. Government does not change government from within."

Alan Feldman, an MGM MIRAGE spokesman who also sits on the National Center for Responsible Gaming's board of directors, said the industry is committed to funding future research.

He said a handful of gambling corporations have committed more than $5 million over the next five years to independent researchers.

"We give money, but we have no say how it is used. That is in stark contrast to the smoking industry," he said.