Deseret News (Salt Lake City): Like drug addiction, gambling hooks some

It's sort of like that old pigeon experiment, says the Gambler; that one where the birds press a button with their beaks to get a morsel of food. When the rewards come consistently, the pigeons only press the buttons now and then. When the rewards are random, the birds can't leave the buttons alone. They'll press those buttons all day.

He's talking about pigeons but also about gambling, the way it can get under your skin.

Some people can gamble just a little, the same way some people can drink one glass of wine, the Gambler says. And other people, whether they're winning or losing, just can't stop.

The first time he went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, he looked around the room at all the other gamblers -- the sports bettors, the craps shooters, the video poker players -- and he thought, "I'm not like these people." He hadn't lost everything, had he? And when the cocktail waitresses came around to his blackjack table, hadn't he ordered orange juice every time? Later he decided his smugness was just one more lie. He lied to himself, his wife, his church, his creditors, his employer.

There was a time when he would sneak away from his office two or three times a week, racing to Wendover to lay down some money on the blackjack tables. One time, early on, he nearly lost $10,000 in one night, then miraculously broke even.

"It was the worst thing that could happen," he says now. "I had dodged a semi-truck bearing down on me." Three years later, after taking out loans on his paychecks and the family van, his losses totaled nearly $20,000.

Therapy and his resolve to save his marriage are what saved him, he says. And the good thing about the blackjack tables, he says, is that they're 120 miles away. Internet gamblers don't have a desert between themselves and their computer, and shopaholics are tempted every time they go to the store. Maybe he's lucky after all.

On a recent evening he sat in a windowless room with seven other members of Gamblers Anonymous. As is the custom at GA meetings, they took turns reading from a pocket-size yellow pamphlet that includes the credo common to all "12-step" programs, and this definition: "Compulsive gambling is an illness, progressive in nature, which can never be cured, but can be arrested."

Some people in the substance abuse field, says Salt Lake addictionologist Dr. Michael Crookston, believe that calling gambling an addiction "cheapens the diagnosis of drug and alcohol addiction." Their feeling, he says, is that there have been decades of research legitimizing substance abuse as a disease, "and now everyone else wants to tag along."

That reluctance is due to "a lot of stigma and misunderstanding of this issue, and it extends to the medical profession as well," says Kevin Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, an advocacy group. "Much of the addiction research actually uses gamblers," he says. "Because there's no 'substance,' in essence you can study pure addiction."

Scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) show that the brains of cocaine addicts and gamblers -- the drug users looking at pictures of cocaine, the gamblers looking at pictures of cards or dice -- are similar, both showing activated dopamine and adrenaline pathways, Whyte says. Up to 30 percent of an addict's risk for developing gambling addiction is genetic, and there is an element of crossover between gambling and substance abuse disorders, he says.

As with all addictions, says Ogden psychologist Dennis Ahearn, any time a person does something "in conflict" -- if his religion prohibits it, if he's lying -- the greater likelihood he'll become addicted. He'll feel bad, then drink or gamble to feel better, which will make him feel bad, and on and on. And, too, the need is for more of the drink or drugs, more money wagered, as his body acclimates to the rush.

For problem gamblers, "the money is simply a way to keep them in action," Whyte says. It is the moment just before winning that is better than winning: the moment before the card is turned, the moment as the cherries and sevens are about to drop into place.

For him, that's all in the past, says the Gambler. He hasn't played blackjack in four years. He also stays away from the stock market. Instead he took up photography. Now he wonders if maybe he got a little addicted to that, too -- his obsessive search for the perfect digital camera, the feeling of suspense he feels right after he clicks the shutter and right before he sees the picture, the euphoria when it's good, the disappointment when it isn't, the relief that he can press the button again and again to try to get it right.

At least, he says, he can share his memories through pictures now, "instead of burying the memories in lies."

E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com