Senate urged to fund gambling addiction studies

WASHINGTON -- Leonard Tose made millions from his trucking business, lived lavishly in a mansion on Philadelphia's Main Line and owned the most coveted sports franchise in his hometown, the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles.

But Tose also liked to gamble. When casinos came to the New Jersey shore in Atlantic City, he squandered millions at gambling tables and was forced to sell the Eagles for $65 million in 1985.

And still, he kept losing. Today, the millions are gone. He was evicted from his seven-bedroom French mansion. What remains is his story.

"Gamblers like to forget what they lost. They say, 'I'll get even tomorrow.' But you don't," the 83-year-old Tose told a Senate panel Wednesday during an informational hearing on gambling addiction. "I don't know how much I've lost. Something like $40 million, $50 million. Probably more. It's obvious compulsive gambling is a sickness."

"But I don't know if there's a cure."

At the hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, a panel of experts -- including some who spent two years studying gambling at Congress' behest -- urged senators to fund more research into gambling-related problems. They testified that more analysis is critical into gambling's spread into America's neighborhoods and its toll on millions who become addicted.

Estimates vary on problem gamblers. Experts Wednesday said there are about 15.4 million adult and adolescent problem and pathological gamblers in the United States, according to a 1997 industry-funded study by the Harvard Medical School Division of Addiction.

"We need to understand why certain people seem to lack the mechanisms necessary to regulate their behavior with regard to gambling," said Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "Perhaps these mechanisms -- or lack of them -- are the same as those involved in better understood mental disorders or in addictions to alcohol and drugs."

"We need to find these answers in order to make real headway in developing a solid scientific foundation for understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing pathological gambling through research of high quality."

The hearing came on the heels of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission's report -- released June 18 to Congress, the White House and other government officials -- which urged communities nationwide to consider a moratorium on new gambling operations and recommended a federal minimum betting age of 21. The two-year study -- the first national examination of gambling in two decades -- also included numerous research recommendations on gambling addiction unanimously supported by the commission's nine commissioners.

Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., a gambling opponent who authored the legislation creating the commission, has pledged to push legislation that would establish 21 as a federal minimum gambling age and enact a slew of the commission's recommendations.

"Americans now wager about $600 billion a year, which is more than is spent on groceries," he told the subcommittee. "In 1992, it was $329 billion a year. In 1974 it was just $17 billion."

Those figures reflect what people bet, not what they lost, which in 1997 totaled nearly $51 billion, according to industry estimates.

Timothy Kelly, executive director of the national gambling commission, said gambling addiction and related problems have been woefully under-researched. He said about half of the commission's $5 million budget was spent on research in this area.

"However, after two years and many research reports, it became clear to the commissioners that we have only scratched the surface of what needs to be done," he said. "Americans deserve this research."

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