We can now gamble walking down the street buying lottery tickets. We can phone in our bets, whether it's to the race track or whether it's to the bookie. We can mail in our subscriptions to the lottery. Another environmental factor is that of gambling advertisement, gambling advertisement definitely is directed to our young children and that is imprinting on the young mind. There is easy access to cash and credit cards.
Credit has also been extended to casinos, that certainly contributes to the ongoing addiction.
And, last, but by no means least, and I do hope that this is something that the Commission will study very carefully and do something about, and that is the lack of health care, the lack of insurance, the problems that have been generated by managed care companies, and the lack of trained professionals who can possibly treat pathological gamblers. Pathological gambling, while it is its own illness in its own right, is always a function of underlying factors and cognitive disorders, and these become a major focus of treatment. Consequently, over the many years that I, as a researcher, or a clinician, have looked at treatment programs across the country, and across the world for that matter, we have at this point developed a treatment program which does lead to a high success rate, which is very different from the kinds of successes that we see, or failures, for instance, that we see in the alcohol or substance abuse field. Our patients today are much more seriously, psychiatrically disturbed than they were ten years ago or 15 years ago. Back then, perhaps, Gamblers Anonymous alone would have been sufficient.