Some Are Drowning as Wave of Gambling Fever Crests in U.S. : Betting: With binge over, one man had gone through his credit cards, written rubber checks and had no funds to get back home.

“Fast Eddie” Felton thought he’d found a gold mine when, as a kid, his father took him to the racetrack.

“My dad went nine for nine that day. He won every race,” the 28-year-old East Hartford man recalled.

As soon as Felton was old enough, he picked up his own gambling habit. He was “‘in remission,” he says, when the Mashantucket Pequot Indian tribe opened the Foxwoods High Stakes Bingo and Casino last February.

“I took $100 down to Foxwoods and ran it up to $8,000. I was feeling invincible,” he said. “I was going to make a million dollars.”

He didn’t.

When the binge was over, he had gone through all his credit cards, written some rubber checks and didn’t even have enough money to make it back home.

Felton’s is a familiar story at a time when a wave of gambling fever is cresting across the nation. Many are drowning.

In the decade since Atlantic City, N.J., joined Nevada as a casino mecca, gambling casinos have sprung up in South Dakota, Colorado, Iowa and Illinois. Riverboat gambling now is available in Iowa, Illinois, Mississippi and Louisiana. New Orleans is getting ready to open a casino, and efforts are under way to build casinos in Chicago and Hartford, Conn.

“We’re in the midst of an extremely rapid shift in availability and acceptability of legal gambling in this country,” said Jean Falzon, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling in New York City.

“In addition to problem gamblers, many of whom have gotten caught up in illegal sports betting, we’re beginning to get a lot of calls on our national hotline from clinicians who are seeing problem gamblers for the first time. They don’t know how to treat them, so they come to us for help.”

She said her organization, which acts as an information clearinghouse, is constantly holding clinics for mental health professionals who are beginning to see people like Eddie Felton, people ruining their lives because they can’t control their compulsive gambling.

As did Felton, many desperate gamblers wind up at Gamblers Anonymous, which now has some 800 chapters around the country.

“To give you an idea how fast the problem is growing, we had roughly 550 meetings in 1989,” said Karen H., a spokeswoman at the national service office of Gamblers Anonymous in Los Angeles.

Rachel Volberg, a sociologist who specializes in problem gambling, said problem gambling tends to be most prevalent in cities and states with large concentrations of young, undereducated males.

“The stereotype is that problem gamblers are middle-aged men, but I’ve found that women and young people also are very susceptible,” she said.

No area of the country is immune from gambling fever. In Iowa, for instance, authorities were unprepared for the horde of gamblers that showed up when a low-stakes casino opened New Year’s Day on the Mesquaki Indian Reservation at Tama, midway between Des Moines and Davenport.

“They were estimating 18,000 people the first week, and 42,000 showed up,” said Mary Ubinas, manager of Iowa’s gamblers’ assistance program.

At the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, gamblers took numbers and waited in line to get to the poker and blackjack tables. Eddie Felton remembers the rush of excitement when he first entered the casino last spring, and the depths of his despair when he had finally exhausted his last shred of credit.

“I finally got sick of my lifestyle,” he said as he sat in a small room at Connecticut Valley Hospital with two other compulsive gamblers.

One of the men, a spokesman for Gamblers Anonymous, said lots of “Fast Eddies” have been hitting rock bottom at Ledyard.

“We thought it would take a couple of years after the casino opened, but they’re beginning to pour in now,” said the man, who like others in Gamblers Anonymous would consent to be interviewed only if he could remain anonymous. “And, some of them are so young. There’s a lot more women than there used to be too.”

Chris Armentano, the director of the state’s Compulsive Gambling Treatment Program, has watched this growing tide of uncontrollable behavior.

Armentano said he hopes and prays that the Connecticut General Assembly does not vote to legalize video slot machines or expanded casino gambling during this year’s legislative session.

“I see us moving so rapidly away from moderation and into a dream world,” he said. “Putting in video slots or adding more casinos will just increase the amount of temptation and make it more difficult for my clients to remain abstinent.”

Armentano said he has seen the magnetic pull of Foxwoods. He said one of his clients gambled away her daughter’s $5,000 college loan, and others have gone on ruinous binges that left them broke and suicidal.

Felton and George X., a middle-aged Hartford area resident who is a member of Gamblers Anonymous, both said they found Foxwoods an irresistible lure when it opened last year.

And both said they think opening more casinos in Connecticut would be disastrous for problem gamblers who, according to a state-sponsored study, include 6.3% of Connecticut’s adults.

“For a compulsive gambler, a casino is the worst,” said George X., a longtime horse player. “For one thing, it’s open all the time. At least the teletrack at Windsor Locks closes once in a while. Plus, at a casino, you have the glitter and the fast action of roulette and craps. I’d usually win at poker, but then I’d always go lose it all back at the dice tables, because the poker action wasn’t fast enough for me.”

The Connecticut native said he wound up losing his inheritance, his wife, his children and his self-respect before finally coming to Gamblers Anonymous last spring.

Armentano contends that gambling has reached epidemic proportions in Connecticut. He tells of people so addicted to the lottery that they bet thousands of dollars a week, of high school betting operations and of teen-agers who formed burglary rings in order to get money to pay off their bookies.

“There are so many ways to gamble in Connecticut,” he said. “We have the lottery and the casino. Then, there is the dog track and all the OTB parlors and jai alai frontons.”

The Foxwoods Casino is expected to gross up to $140 million in its first year.

George X. shook his head. “You put in more casinos and you’ll be sorry. Believe me, you’re playing with fire here. I know from experience.”