Sunday, May 01, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

PROBLEM GAMBLING: Lost in the shuffle

Gambling addict struggles to retake control of life after money, job, reputation lost to video poker machines

"Money doesn't mean anything to a gambler," says Chris Drew, shown here at the Fremont Street Experience. "You lose sight of what it's worth. A couple hundred bucks in a machine? No big deal. Paying bills, buying things doesn't matter." Photo by Jeff Scheid. Drew remains in Las Vegas despite the constant enticement to gamble. "I have to be able to live here like I would live anywhere else," she says, "like the way I lived when I was in New York." Photo by Jeff Scheid.

For most of a decade Chris Drew searched and prayed for a way to be free of the enemy.

It cost her homes and relationships, a career and, for a time, the will to live. It etched lines of sorrow and worry on her face.

Yet she suffered largely in secret.

Only when the enemy had pushed her to the brink did Drew muster courage equal to her shame and tell her closest friends. And even then she couldn't bring herself to say the words, choosing instead to write a letter:

"I am your mother, your sister, your best friend, your neighbor or your co-worker. I am the person that you think you know well, but you do not know my shameful secret that I cannot share with you because I fear your scorn. I am a pathological gambler.

"I live to gamble. I work so that I can get money to gamble. I sometimes go without food so that I can gamble. I don't pay my bills so that I can gamble. I have no money in the bank. I do not buy anything for myself. I do not go on vacations so that I have money to gamble. My life is consumed by gambling. After I've gambled away the last nickel in my purse, I go home and cry and pray that God will help me, that someone will help me to stop."

'No one questioned me'

This is how Drew finally stopped.

Before moving to Las Vegas in 1991, Drew had visited a casino only once, on a short and unmemorable one-day bus trip to Atlantic City from Long Island, N.Y.

But when she and her husband relocated to Las Vegas from New York, with her son and her husband's two daughters, they quickly became regulars at local casinos. Drew had landed a job as an auditor with the city of Las Vegas. And she and her husband hoped the change of scenery in Las Vegas would save their troubled marriage.

When they divorced soon after the move, Drew began gambling more often.

After three years living in Las Vegas, she had gone from risking a few dollars on nickel video poker and blackjack as a Friday night diversion to taking the maximum cash advance on six credit cards to feed a quarter video poker habit.

A $1,000 jackpot in 1994 changed how she thought about gambling. Drew, whose annual salary was $35,000 at the time, thought: "This is easy. Think of all the money I can make."

In the mid-1990s, Drew landed a job in the city's Planning Department.

She used her accounting skills to rework the department's budget, which long had been in disarray. She also established a petty cash fund of a few hundred dollars.

Her work caught the attention of supervisors, who praised her in annual evaluations. She was rewarded with raises and more responsibility.

Before long she oversaw the department's finances and human resources operations, and her salary climbed to more than $60,000 a year.

Co-workers said she ran the department without the title of director.

Those co-workers didn't know that their colleague, so skilled in managing budgets, had an addiction that was wreaking financial and emotional havoc on her life outside work.

"Here I am making all of this money, and I never have any money," says Drew, now 50. "Nobody connected the dots. I was Chris Drew, and no one questioned me."

No one saw Drew slip into the El Cortez or Gold Spike to spend her lunch hours gambling. She made sure of that.

A long downward spiral

Each trip to the casino began with the same thought: "I need money."

The idea of gambling brought with it an illogical confidence. Drew was sure the next $5 bet would transform into $10. That, in turn, would multiply into a $1,000 jackpot. And so on until all her problems were solved.

No matter how many times reality disproved that reasoning, it almost always proved irresistible.

Drew declared bankruptcy in 1995 with $40,000 in credit card debt.

She promised herself she would quit. A couple of days later, she was back playing video poker. She was up to half-dollar and dollar machines now.

For Drew, the game was like a numbing narcotic.

When she played the world would disappear, taking with it her sinking depression, the lingering pain of a failed marriage and her deepening financial mire.

She didn't have to interact with anyone. She just rhythmically put dollar after dollar into the machine.

With her credit gone, she used the ATM. She'd pull out the $500 daily maximum amount of cash her bank allowed. Sometimes, after losing the money, she'd wait until midnight, pull out the next day's limit and continue gambling.

By 1996, she had pawned nearly all of her jewelry and anything else of value and stopped paying bills.

She took out a second mortgage and began to gamble it away.

A counselor later would say that Drew's entire life was occupied by either work or gambling. When she wasn't gambling, she was thinking about it or about how to get money to gamble.

Her only remaining credit account at this point was a Sears card. Using it, Drew purchased a $3,000 diamond ring and immediately pawned it for $1,000.

One of her ex-husband's daughters had received a small inheritance. Drew borrowed it, promising to repay it with her tax refund. Drew lost the money, and when her refund arrived she gambled it away.

Later that year she took out another mortgage.

By 1997 she had fallen so far behind financially that she sold her home and moved, with her son, into a small apartment.

Beyond 12 steps

For three years Drew had sought help.

A psychiatrist on the city's health plan had prescribed anti-depressants for her but offered little help for her gambling addiction. There were exchanges about her problem:

"Did you gamble this week?" the doctor would ask.

"Yes," Drew would replied.

"How did you feel about it?"

"Pretty poor," she would say.

But she left the office believing the doctor didn't understand gambling addiction or how to treat it. Nor did it seem to her that the doctor knew where she could get help.

It was a pattern that would repeat itself over eight years, with other doctors and treatment programs.

She read every book on the topic she could find.

She tried Gamblers Anonymous, but by that point her addiction had progressed too far for a 12-step program alone to be effective.

She enrolled in a research trial at UNLV for an experimental drug to treat gambling addiction. Researchers told her to take one pill each day and keep a diary of her gambling activities.

She swallowed the pill and gambled away her paychecks. She later learned she had been taking a placebo.

Dipping into petty cash

Drew always had another employee manage the Planning Department's petty cash fund. "I just didn't want it around me," she says.

But she reluctantly took control of it in 1999 after the employee who managed it quit the department and her replacement complained that she was too overwhelmed by other tasks to keep track of it.

Drew had just purchased a home with money borrowed from her mother. Two years of throwing money away on rent was long enough, she decided. Drew also hoped working on the fixer-upper would give her a focus outside work and the casinos.

"I won't gamble anymore because it'll give me something to do," she told her son.

But she hadn't finished wallpapering before she resumed gambling and continued the downward financial spiral.

She turned to payday loans. She soon had six of the high-interest loans and had only enough money to meet the interest payments, which consumed nearly her entire paycheck.

While at Wal-Mart one day Drew purchased a receipt book that she then used to submit bogus receipts for reimbursement through the Planning Department's petty cash fund. Using her office computer she generated fake invoices, which looked like the ones employees turned in after attending luncheons sponsored by a professional planning organization.

She submitted $500 worth at a time under fictitious names, such as Tim Rawlins. The money came to Drew by courier.

Each time she promised herself she would repay it. Each time, she promised it would be the last.

"It's the gambler that's the thief," she told herself.

Sometimes she did put money back into the fund by reimbursing expenses out of her own pocket. She plotted other ways to repay the money. Perhaps she could send an anonymous money order to the city or cash donation.

She questioned her sanity and prayed for help: "God, help me. Somebody's got to help me. How much longer? God, help me stop."

At times she wished she'd get caught, figuring it was the only way she could stop gambling.

Out of a job

Drew stayed home from work one day in January 2003.

Checking voice mail from home, she heard a message: "Chris, this is the auditor. Give me a call when you get back."

On a routine check, auditors had picked up the petty cash fund and taken it to the treasurer's office to be opened and counted.

Drew knew the pouch was empty.

February and March passed. She went to work praying to keep her job.

Then in late April, Drew saw on an internal calendar that Planning Department Director Bob Genzer had an appointment with the city auditor and other officials.

The morning of the April 29 meeting, she walked into Genzer's office and handed him the letter acknowledging the addiction she had kept secret for the past decade and apologizing for taking the funds.

"I am truly sorry for what I have done. I am not sorry that this situation has arisen because this experience is what will enable me to turn my life around," she wrote. "I am most humbly asking that you show compassion and mercy and give me a chance to redeem myself and make restitution."

Genzer recalls jumping out of his chair in shock and heading to Drew's office.

"What exactly are you trying to tell me?" he recalls asking her.

"I wanted to hear it from her mouth, not read it on a piece of paper," he says. "We weren't just co-workers, we were friends as well. I was very disappointed after putting the trust in her that I did (to handle the department's budget). I had no clue there was a gambling issue."

Later that day, city officials placed Drew on unpaid leave from her $85,000-a-year job.

Marshals questioned her that week, reporting that she confessed to stealing between $10,000 and $15,000 over about two years. Investigators described her as cooperative throughout their probe.

"I even told them which receipts were real and which were made up," Drew recalls.

Despite her cooperation and pleas for understanding and a second chance, Drew received a call a few days later from Genzer telling her she had been fired.

Genzer told Planning Department employees not to talk about the case. It's standard procedure in theft investigations, according to city officials.

"We told everyone to use their own judgment, but they shouldn't be delving into the personnel side of it," Genzer says. "I told them that's something between her and the city."

But Drew, and some of her co-workers at the time, believe it was vindictive.

"When she needed a friend most, she was not allowed any support system," a former co-worker recalls. "The only people she knew were afraid for their jobs.

"I don't condone what she did, but when you have a sickness you're supposed to be able to come to your employer and get treatment for it," continued the former co-worker, who still works for the city and asked to remain anonymous. "She came forward and said, 'I did this and I admit it and I want to make provisions to pay it back,' and instead they assassinated her character."

Isolated from her closest friends and recognizing her career was over, Drew became suicidal.

"Everything seemed hopeless," she recalls.

She checked into Montevista Hospital for several days.

In late July marshals came to her home and arrested her. She spent a humiliating night in a holding cell.

Drew, who had no prior criminal history, eventually pleaded guilty to one count each of theft and conspiracy to commit a crime. District Judge Donald Mosley gave her a six-month suspended sentence and ordered her to pay $7,445 in restitution.

Help finally found

At the same time Drew's life was falling apart, she was, for the first time, getting effective treatment for her addiction.

A few days before she was fired, Drew had stumbled across a newspaper article about a local attorney caught embezzling $100,000. It mentioned that the attorney had found help at Problem Gambling Consultants.

She began attending 2 1/2-hour group counseling sessions four days a week. The sessions were led by the center's founder and clinical director, psychologist Dr. Rob Hunter. She later began weekly one-hour sessions with Hunter.

The sessions forced her to examine her life, own up to her illness and pause long enough to assess the destruction that gambling had done to her life.

And knowing she had to face each day a roomful of people struggling against the same addiction gave her the strength to quit.

Getting caught had, in fact, finally helped her to stop gambling.

"I was in hell for 10 years," she says. "I was gambling away all my money and wondering 'How am I going to pay my bills?' 'How do I pay this back?' Then I was gambling to try to get the money back and losing more. It was a constant circle. It was just hell. ...

"Now, I can put it out of my mind. I can say, 'I'm going to take the dogs for a walk instead.' "

Hunter, who has treated thousands of Southern Nevadans dealing with gambling addiction, describes Drew's case as "very typical."

Setbacks and struggles

In December, Drew finished paying restitution and completed probation. But she still feels she's doing time.

Her criminal record, she says, has made finding a job impossible. Potential employers will show interest until they learn of her brush with the law.

A recruiter called recently offering her choice jobs with two local governments. Considering her experience, Drew easily could get either post, the recruiter told her. There was just the small matter of the background check.

"If there's a background check, don't bother," Drew said before hanging up.

Increasingly depressed over her job prospects and dependence on friends and family for financial support, Drew had relapsed last summer.

"Gambling got me into this, maybe it can get me out," she told herself.

Using cash from the sale of her home, she gambled for two weeks.

"I really think some higher power was telling me something because I couldn't win anything," she now says. "It felt horrible. It was such desperation."

Drew maintains she hasn't gambled since. Still, the empty hours that once were filled with work are a concern. She volunteers at Hunter's clinic and mails out 15 resumes a week.

For a time, she thought seriously about leaving Las Vegas and putting the temptations and painful memories in the rear-view mirror.

Maybe people would be more understanding somewhere else. Maybe they'd give her a second chance.

But like others who have shared her addiction, Drew realizes there's nowhere to run where she can't gamble.

Plus, all of the reasons she chose to keep living during those dark days in the summer of 2003, when it seemed for a time like taking her life was the only solution -- they all live in Las Vegas.

"I've thought a lot about moving. But I have a son, a grandchild and, now, a mother here. This is my home, and I have to be able to beat the addiction."

NEVADA GAMBLERS

	Problem gamblers	Nonproblem gamblers
Gamble alone	43 percent	29 percent
Lost more than $1,000 in a day	39 percent	9 percent
Earn more than $50,000 in a year	40 percent	49 percent

Source: "Gambling and Problem Gambling in Nevada" by Gemini Research Ltd.