‘I was sick. I didn’t care about anything but gambling. It was like I had to gamble--I had no choice.’ : Addict Beats Odds, Pulls Herself From Abyss of Gambling

Karen was nursing a cup of coffee, afraid to go home.

She had told her family she was going Christmas shopping one Sunday, but as soon as she got on the freeway, she headed straight for the poker parlor in Gardena, about an hour’s drive from her home in Arcadia.

She had planned to leave no later than 5 p.m., when the shopping mall closed, but she could not quit while she was winning.

By 8 p.m., it didn’t matter. By then it was too late to go home and try to convince her husband that she had been shopping.

By 4 a.m., she was broke and sitting in the poker parlor lobby, trying to devise some sort of excuse he would believe.

He had heard them all.

Karen, who asked that her surname not be used, was a compulsive gambler--a condition that the U.S. Department of Public Health estimates afflicts as many as 9 million Americans.

Most compulsive gamblers are men, but Dr. Robert L. Custer, director of the U.S. Veterans Administration program on addictive behavior and the leading expert on compulsive gambling, thinks there may be as many as 2 million women in the United States who gamble compulsively.

Custer believes that as women’s earning capacity increases, there will be more women gamblers. He called compulsive gambling “probably one of the purest forms of psychological addiction. Compulsive gamblers are stimulated by gambling, get high on it, and have withdrawal symptoms when they stop.”

In an interview, Karen, 40, said it seemed that she had been gambling all her life. She couldn’t even remember learning to play cards; it just seemed like she had always known how.

After she married Mike, money was tight, and for fun, they would invite another couple over to play cards. Vacations were weekends in Las Vegas with friends. The others would gamble a little, take in a show, and bask in the sun.

Karen never left the casino.

She played blackjack, roulette, the football cards. Poker was her favorite, and most of the time she won. Usually they would come home a couple of hundred dollars ahead.

Then a girlfriend took her to Gardena, where poker is legal. She loved it.

“Once I found Gardena, I was hooked,” Karen said.

She would wait until her two children had left for school, and then head for Gardena. Her husband thought she was shopping, or having lunch with friends.

Sometimes he was suspicious but feared that she might be having an affair and didn’t ask questions he was afraid to have answered.

Once, she told him the reason she was so late was that she had suffered a blackout. He was so concerned that he insisted she see a doctor.

On another occasion, she beat her hands on the pavement until they bled, then told Mike she had been accidentally locked into a gas station restroom at closing time and had banged on the door until morning.

Because Karen handled the family finances, for a long time Mike didn’t know that the bills were not being paid.

“I always had to race to get the bank statement when it came in the mail,” she said.

When medical insurance payments came directly to the house, she cashed them and used the money to gamble instead of paying the doctor. Then she would tell her father she needed money for the doctor, and use that to gamble too.

“I was sick,” she said. “I didn’t care about anything but gambling. It was like I had to gamble--I had no choice.”

Finally, near the end of 1978, after she had been compulsively gambling for nearly three years, creditors started calling Mike at work, and he confronted Karen. For a while, she tried to keep the gambling under control.

She got a part-time job, and the access to cash was too much temptation. She went back to Gardena.

Then, on that December Sunday in 1979, she told Mike she was going Christmas shopping. When she finally walked into the house the next morning at 6:30, Mike was packing the kids’ lunches for school.

“I love you,” he told her, “but I can’t take this anymore. . . . If you don’t get help, you aren’t going to be spending Christmas with me and the kids.”

That morning, Karen called Gamblers Anonymous.

Earlier this month, she celebrated seven straight years as a recovered compulsive gambler.

“If I had kept on the way I was going, I would be dead or on Skid Row by now,” she said.

Founded in 1957 in Los Angeles by two compulsive gamblers, GA has 600 chapters and 12,000 members nationwide. Organized along the lines of Alcoholics Anonymous, it is a self-help group where men and women get together to share their common problems.

Members believe that compulsive gamblers can never again gamble normally. The first small bet to a problem gambler is like the first drink to an alcoholic, they say.

“I can’t say I’ll never gamble again,” Karen said. “I just know I’m not going to gamble today.”

In the last seven years, the family has moved to a new home, adopted a baby boy, and Karen began working as a secretary.

“I still think about gambling,” she said. “But I could see a better way of life.”