Ex-Gamblers Fight Urge : Lottery Fever Leaves Some in a Cold Sweat

Barbara C., a compulsive gambler, says she has not placed a bet in two years, three months and 30 days.

The 53-year-old Clairemont housewife’s fortitude won applause at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting last week in Pacific Beach. Once so addicted to lowball and blackjack that, without telling her husband, she borrowed thousands of dollars and gambled it away, Barbara has paid off her loans and fought the temptation to bet again.

But in the last month, the waif-thin, dark-haired woman said, she has been tempted in a way she never expected. At her corner grocery, at the neighborhood bar, the California Lottery is enticing Barbara to fall off the wagon.

“Basically, I’m a recluse in my own home, because I’m afraid to go out alone,” said the housewife, who, like other Gamblers Anonymous members, won’t reveal her last name. “It came as a shock to me they were selling tickets at my neighborhood grocery store. I haven’t been back since.”

Barbara is not alone, according to experts on compulsive gambling. The advent of the lottery and the lure of its $2-million jackpots already is creating new pathological gamblers and testing the vulnerabilities of bettors fighting to control their addiction.

“It’s like you were an alcoholic, and everywhere you go someone has a shot of bourbon set up on the stand,” said Robert Singer, a professor of psychology at University of California, Riverside.

“The general feeling among gamblers who are trying to quit and stay quit--even those who have been recovering for many, many years--is that they are threatened by the convenience and accessibility and big-win hype that accompany the lottery,” added Durand Jacobs, chief of psychology at the Loma Linda Veterans Administration Hospital.

Singer and Jacobs have asked the state Lottery Commission to fund a research center on gambling with proceeds from the lottery. Six of the 21 states that hold lotteries are conducting research into or providing treatment for people with gambling disorders, according to the National Council on Compulsive Gambling. California Lottery commissioners have indicated a willingness to consider joining those ranks once they are confident that the state’s lottery is on a sound footing.

In the meantime, California’s compulsive gamblers are trying to fend off the lottery’s allure, even as millions of state residents eagerly scratch away at chances to become overnight millionaires.

Jeff E. of North Park puffed through a pack of Pall Mall Golds as he listened to his fellow gamblers’ stories during the Gamblers Anonymous meeting last week at Christ Lutheran Church in Pacific Beach.

His household refrigerator was testimony to his vulnerability to instant-winner lotteries, Jeff said. “One of the battery companies had a rub-off deal in their battery packs,” he explained. “I have a freezer full of batteries.”

The story he told during a few minutes of “therapy” at the meeting was of a headlong dive into self-destruction out of which he is recovering only slowly.

Jeff said he was a trained economist and financial planner who bought a card room in San Diego about 10 years ago. He spent 14 hours a day at the card tables, justifying losses of $1,000 or more a day as promotional expenses for the business, he said.

When the card room closed Saturday nights, he would bundle a few customers into his car and drive to card parlors in Elsinore or Gardena. “We played straight through to Monday morning, when we came back and opened the card room,” Jeff said.

He has not placed a bet in more than 121 weeks, Jeff told the group--but only, he later confided, after wrecking three marriages, attempting suicide and embezzling from a client’s savings.

The lottery, Jeff said at this therapy session, is far more threatening than the card room he used to operate. “My card room was bad, but only for me, and only for the players who came in,” he said. “This damn thing can hit anybody.”

John S., a middle-aged former railroad engineer, said he used to blow $4,500 paychecks at a card room in a single night and return to his job the next day seeking an advance on his salary.

“It bothers me that every time I go into a store today, they say, ‘Do you want a lottery ticket?’ And they look at you and say, ‘What do you mean you don’t want one?’ ” John told the group of 12 men and 11 women--gamblers and the husbands and wives of gamblers.

“I try to live my life without tempting myself,” he said.

Avoiding temptation is one of the tenets of Gamblers Anonymous, spelled out in the booklet members read aloud at the start of each meeting.

“Don’t tempt or test yourself,” the guidebook says.

“Don’t associate with acquaintances who gamble. Don’t go in or near gambling establishments. Don’t gamble for anything. This includes buying lottery tickets, raffle tickets, flipping a coin or entering the office sports pool.”

The admonishments get a stiff challenge from a gambling opportunity as all-pervasive as a state-run lottery, according to Msgr. Joseph Dunne, president of the New York-based National Council on Compulsive Gambling.

“The first principle is that the increased availability of gambling in any form always increases the number of compulsive gamblers,” Dunne said. “Not only are you exposing people to gambling locally who haven’t been exposed before, in the sense of having it immediately available at the corner stationery store, but you’re also bringing pressure on people who are in fact recovering.”

Singer, director of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science Research at UC Riverside, said anecdotal evidence from the California Lottery’s first month of operation suggested that the pressures on the state’s gamblers have been strong.

“That big orange ‘L,’ ” he said, referring to the lottery’s ubiquitous emblem. “Everywhere they go, someone’s shoving one under their nose.”

However, lottery officials--who portray the lottery as a game, not a gamble--say studies in other states have found that pathological gamblers are not hurt by the introduction of state-controlled gaming.

“Generally, we believe it has little or no impact on so-called compulsive gamblers,” Lottery Commission spokesman Bob Taylor said.

“The logic is that since the instant game is a passive game, it takes little effort or planning on the part of the participant to play it, so it does not have an impact,” Taylor said. “The compulsive gambler usually wants to get very involved and wants to have control over whatever form of gambling it is.”

The simplicity of instant-winner games did not stop Walt L. of San Diego from being seduced when he lived in Ohio and that state introduced its lottery.

“I used to buy them $50 at a time and just sit and scrape them off,” the salesman and Gamblers Anonymous member said. He bet the horses too--at first to occupy himself during long weeks on the road, but later, he said, because he could not stop.

As of today, Walt has gone 1,087 days without placing a bet. But every visit to the checkout stand of the supermarket, every temptation to play California’s new lottery, is making each day a little harder, he said.

“I don’t have to walk in a card room,” Walt said. “I don’t have to walk in a bar. But a grocery store, I have to go in.”