“The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.”—Jon Stewart
While it seems like only yesterday, it was over 20 years ago. I was sitting in an office in Las Vegas drafting a suicide note, or I should say notes, for I just couldn’t seem to arrive upon one that had the tone and message I wanted. After all, it is important to leave a good suicide note.
I then walked down the hall to the office of a friend of mine, who coincidentally was the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. I mentioned to him what I had been doing. He suggested that I was not being too smart and then wrote down the name and number of a well-known and respected psychiatrist who lived in Laguna Beach, California. He then suggested I get in my car and drive there immediately.
I did.
When I arrived in Laguna Beach, the doctor had me checked into a hospital and that was a bit of a unique experience. I was standing there thinking of myself as a seemingly important person and as someone who had been quite successful in my own small pond. Apparently the staff at the hospital did not understand my importance (they were not Vegas people) and I was given plastic eating utensils that were designed to be terribly inefficient tools should I decide to use them in some act of self-harm. I also had to surrender my shoelaces for the staff feared that I may hang myself, or some such thing.
The strangest part about all of this was how relieved I was to be there. What I felt was that I would finally be able to understand why my brain sometimes did what my brain sometimes did.
In fairly quick order my doctor and I discovered I had an issue that had a technical name, but suffice it to say I suffered periodic bouts with severe depression. Through a transition period of pharmaceutical intervention, lots of therapy, the love and support of many friends, and quite a bit of work on my own, for the last two-plus decades I have not occupied myself with drafting suicide notes. Life is pretty good these days and when Churchill’s Black Dog visits, I generally know what I need to do.
I mention this all because when I was writing those suicide notes several decades ago, I was in a mental health crisis and I needed help—and what I came to believe from that experience is that when a person is in a mental health crisis and needs help it is incredibly important that the help is simple and convenient. I often wonder what my path may have been had I not been just a few doors down from my dear friend’s office who gave me great and loving advice.
Let me state this one point again—I am a firm believer that when a person is in a mental health crisis and needs help, the help needs to be very simple and convenient.
I tell this story to talk about problem gambling for I was recently looking at a printed advertising piece from a betting operator and noticed a great deal of very small print that included seven different phones numbers to call if an individual was struggling with a gambling issue. The main criteria for what made a phone number relevant seemed to be the state where the individual was located, and God help it if he or she was from a state not listed. I suppose the people from these states are just SOL, so to speak. In a word, I thought having all of these different numbers was ridiculous.
I can only imagine the small print that will need to accompany a televised Super Bowl advertisement if a betting company decides to buy an ad in the future. It will be like those prescription drug ads that spend about one-half of the ad time with all of the legal and side-effect caveats. I do hope the betting viewers who are sitting watching a future Super Bowl will have a pen and pad handy to record these many problem gambling phone numbers from the television screen should there be a betting company that buys an ad.
It is hard to imagine that Amazon would choose to reconfigure how it interfaces with the public by having a different website address for the different states in the U.S., and try and list all of these options in its ads. It is hard to imagine a hotel chain coming up with a different 800 reservation number dependent upon the state where the prospective guest’s call originated. These examples are hard to imagine because businesses make a strong effort to avoid doing foolish things.
Hell, imagine you are out and about and you meet someone interesting and ask for their digits. How would you respond if he or she wrote seven different phone numbers on your hand?
I have been hanging about the gambling scene for a pretty long time and I have been blessed to meet a great many people who specialize in research, treatment, and awareness in the area of what I will loosely call problem gambling. My general impression of these people is that they are very smart and very committed to what they are doing. This confuses me for I cannot believe that any group of really smart people addressing the treatment of a disease would suggest that it is somehow appropriate to have a whole array of different phone numbers to provide to a person who may be in crisis and needs help. I am sorry to rain on the problem gambling parade, but I will say this again—I think this is ridiculous. Having all of these numbers makes no sense—try harder.
I have also had the opportunity to work within the industry and have been given the opportunity to work for people like Mr. Harrah, Mr. Cashell, Mr. Wynn, Mr. Adelson, Mr. Boyd, Mr. Berman, and a few others. I knew these people and their firms to be incredibly smart, yet if they really believed in the problem gambling message, they had to have understood that having all of the numbers was foolish. If the gaming operators really do care about such things they would be able to help solve this challenge. They should try harder.
I really do hate to be dissing the problem gambling effort during problem gambling awareness month, but this is not the only area where I believe the problem gambling initiative has potentially lost the plot.
I get annoyed when I see the National Council on Problem Gambling having to compete for funds with the International Center for Responsible Gambling, and vice versa. It seems that this separation does nothing more than to divide and conquer. It is certainly not efficient and this inefficiency wastes money—and now is not the time to be wasting problem gambling dollars.
I get annoyed when I see people who I consider to be brilliant researchers in the field who appear to be writing articles for one another and that is that. Peer review is cool, but simply communicating with peers cannot be the end-game. It seems that someone needs to cause this body of research to be drug out from behind the paywalls and the academic journals and be presented in intelligent bits for the rest of us, otherwise the operators, politicians, regulators, and a whole bunch of need-to-know people cannot use this insight and knowledge to help shape an appropriate public policy and regulatory approach for problem gambling. When it comes to delivering the message of what is what in the area of research to the many, we need to try harder.
I get annoyed at the incredible enthusiasm that has surfaced this March for discussions of problem gambling when compared to the reasonably quiet approach for the rest of the year. I really worry about the end-users of the problem gambling efforts for the other 11 months of the year when the problem gambling message seems much more muted. Somewhat related to this, it is my sense that the problem gambling area has a lot more talkers than doers. The challenge of problem gambling will not be conquered by sound bites—we need to try harder—with action.
I also worry that the problem gambling effort is becoming technologically obsolete. The fact that this article owes its inspiration to an 800-number issue suggests that we have fallen behind. We should have numerous touchpoints available to the individual in crisis that go well beyond reliance on a phone call—and these should be simple and convenient. The digital revolution has been around for a long time and is certainly not a new thing. We need to use this technology smarter and better to be there for people in need. In other words—we need to try harder.
My last concern about problem gambling is what I call my Stardust concern. Many years ago, I was brought in to take over the casino operation at the Stardust, a casino that was the basis for much of the movie Casino. From my first day on the job, I came to understand that there were a number of other independent businesses taking place within the building, be it comp scams, bartenders running girls, the normal nonsense out of the bell desk, something of an issue with key controls, and so on and so forth. The problem was that these efforts did not contribute to the mission and financial statement for which I was responsible. This craziness also presented something of a regulatory risk, these were not the type of things I wanted to be explaining to a Gaming Control Board field agent, or that I wanted to include on my resume. Through time, I was able to whittle down this entrepreneurial breeding-ground to a much smaller number of free-agents operating within that property.
I bring this up for it is my sense that there are a whole bunch of new efforts and programs opening up in the problem gambling space. Many of these seem to be well-intended efforts, it just seems that there are a whole bunch of different things being launched that are untethered to each other.
I am cool with a lot of folks under one umbrella. I do believe, however, that something needs to hold that umbrella steady with a clear mission, and that something has to be anchored to an evidence-based science with a demonstrated historical commitment. This adds clarity to the message and efficiency to the sourcing of funds.
Much of what takes place presently seems to be based between the two extremes of corporate image-cleansing and the glorification of victimhood. Moreover, the degree of virtue signaling at these extremes is neither constructive nor pretty to watch. This all needs to change to give the appearance that the problem gambling effort has adult supervision. In short, I think we all need to try harder.
