THE day that Marilyn Lancelot won the biggest jackpot of her life, she left the casino in Yuma, Ariz., with every penny of the $4,000 that had poured out of the slot machines. This time she knew that she would never gamble again.
She was right, although not for the reasons she thought. The next day, seven police cars appeared in her Phoenix driveway and she was taken out of her house in handcuffs. The 61-year-old grandmother had embezzled more than $300,000 from her employer to support her gambling addiction.
"I had something wrong with me," says Lancelot, now 75 and living in a retirement community in Phoenix. "Some people can't think that gambling is an illness but maybe it is. I know that I couldn't stop. My head wouldn't let me."
Lancelot's turn of phrase contains clinical truth. Researchers are learning that the heads -- or to be more accurate, the brains -- of pathological gamblers are biologically different from those of most of the estimated 73 million Americans who are able to play bingo, pull the arm of a slot machine or flip some aces and then simply stop. Not only does the research shed light on how this addiction is both similar and distinct from other addictive disorders, it also could contribute to new treatments.
The need is undeniable. With legalized gambling in 48 states, 40 states with lotteries and online gambling available in any home with Internet access and a credit card, the triumph of the occasional big win has been accompanied by a rich yield of individual lives in shambles.
About 1.6% of Americans have a full-blown gambling addiction and an additional 2% have a serious problem with gambling, says Jon Grant, assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown Medical School and author of "Stop Me Because I Can't Stop Myself," (McGraw Hill, 2003). By these estimates, nearly 4% of the population experiences a mild to severe gambling problem -- and as the number of gamblers goes up, so does the number of those with a gambling problem.
In California, "We think that virtually everyone knows someone who has a problem," says Bruce Roberts, executive director of the California Council on Problem Gambling, who has experienced the frightening trajectory of gambling addiction. Officially, about 1 million Californians are considered problem gamblers.
