The Center for Addiction Science, Policy, and Research, or CASPR, released a nationwide report ranking states based on their ability to protect residents from online gambling harm.
Oregon received an “F” grade — among the bottom 10 states for its lack of gambling harm reduction methods.
Gambling is often regarded as an invisible addiction due to its lack of visible physical symptoms or side effects — and it has become more accessible than ever.
As people have begun to participate in sports betting, online poker, casino games and lottery from their mobile devices, guardrails protecting against harmful gambling activity have seldom kept pace.
We’ll discuss the problem of gambling in Oregon and recovery methods with Kitty Martz, the executive director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery, and Brian Ward, a certified gambling recovery mentor with the state of Oregon.
Note: If you or a loved one is experiencing gambling harm, Oregon’s Problem Gambling Resource call helpline is available at 1-877-695-4648
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Geoff Norcross. Earlier this year, the Center for Addiction Science Policy and Research came out with a nationwide report ranking states on their ability to protect residents from harms due to online gambling. Oregon is in the bottom 10 states, and it got a grade of F. The report noted, among other shortcomings, that online sports gambling apps are legal here, and residents can use credit cards to gamble.
We’re going to talk now about problem gambling in Oregon with Kitty Martz, executive director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery. Kitty, it’s good to have you.
Kitty Martz: Thank you, Geoff. Glad to be here.
Norcross: Brian Ward is a certified gambling recovery mentor with the state of Oregon. Brian, welcome to you as well.
Brian Ward: Thanks, Geoff.
Norcross: Kitty, I assume you’ve read this report.
Martz: I have seen the report, yes. And it’s no surprise, gambling is quite prevalent here in Oregon. We also have pretty robust services to help folks with it, and we like to always make sure that people know that treatment is free, effective and confidential. There’s bus placards and billboards that abound. 877-MY-LIMIT – if folks need help, we want to make sure that people know that’s available.
Norcross: We’ll get deeper into the resources in a bit, but tell me a little bit more about, from your perspective, [what] Oregon is doing wrong here, especially compared to other states.
Martz: There’s a lack of awareness of how we’ve gotten some drift from back in the ‘80s, when we voted as constituents of Oregon to have a robust lottery. We deliberately said we want to have what we call more traditional products, scratch at tickets, Powerball and that kind of thing, and we would like that to go towards schools, parks and economic development. And since that time, that’s expanded into the video lottery terminals and the online sports gambling that’s managed by DraftKings with the Oregon Lottery.
I don’t think that people realize the bottom line for what happens economically with gambling, that it’s really a redistribution of wealth, that it’s disproportionately impacting specific demographics: BIPOC individuals, older adults, younger adults, veterans. And it’s not very talked about. There’s a sense that it’s lagging behind other addictions. With substance use disorder, there’s been a lot more awareness that the opioid epidemic isn’t an ethical failing. I don’t know that gambling has caught up with that.
Norcross: You mentioned online sports gambling, or online gambling of any kind, it’s allowed here in Oregon. And that seems to be the big factor. The states that score higher on this report just don’t, they don’t allow it at all. That seems to be just the thing that seems to drive a lot of this.
Martz: It’s the sports gambling, but the more relevant part of that is that it’s the online. It’s so connected with access. It used to be that you had to put on shoes, drive somewhere, go to a brick and mortar casino, supported a mom and pop restaurant, a venue that had a handful of lottery machines. Now, with DraftKings being on our phones, it’s 24/7. There’s no friction. There’s a de-currencyification. I know that’s kind of a funny made up vernacular, but it doesn’t feel like money when you transfer from credit card account into your sports app to play the game. And there’s no natural stop to it. It can be done in isolation.
So more than it being a sports issue, we think of it as an accessibility issue with a digital handheld technology and not having guardrails for it.
Norcross: Brian, I’d like to hear a little bit more about your work as a gambling recovery mentor. How did you get into that?
Ward: Well first and foremost, I’m somebody who experienced a lot of gambling harm myself. I’m in sustained long-term recovery from a gambling disorder. “Certified gambling recovery mentor” is the certified peer support in the state. It’s a trained position that allows me to use my experience to support other people through their journey, and what it’s like to kind of grow into a life that they’re not trying to escape anymore, what it looks like to change their behaviors and gear more towards healthful lifestyles.
Norcross: Can you talk a little bit more about your experience?
Ward: I’m happy to. My journey started in 2017, as far as my recovery journey if that’s what we’re calling it. I was one of those people that … There were so many behaviors that went against my core values. And that’s how insidious this addiction can be, is that it kind of hijacks the system. It hijacks your autopilot functions and it just utilizes all of your strengths against your best interests. So for me personally, that looked like taking money from a protected demographic and then turning myself into the police because I was a mandatory reporter at that time. And all of the cascading effects of watching my family get ripped apart by it, seeing my name come up in news and media, and all of the wonderful comments online about it, talking about the moral deficit and that I must just be an awful person.
And I didn’t believe that that was true. But even in those early stages, it was hard for me to argue it, because I felt horrible, I felt awful and I felt like a terrible human being. So nobody was saying anything that I wasn’t already thinking about myself. And it took getting into services like mentoring – my mentor happened to be Ms. Martz, who’s sitting with us today – to show me that not only wasn’t I alone, but that this addiction has so many people behave in ways that would go against their better judgment or their sense of values. So now I utilize that experience to be able to show other people what Kitty was able to show me in those early days.
Norcross: Kitty, how does that resonate with you personally?
Martz: My life has so much meaning now. Sometimes people that have gone through compulsive behavior addiction talk about how grateful they are, and it can read as a little disingenuous. But I would not be able to have found something I’m so passionate about in saving people who are worth saving, who are not having an ethical failing, who are experiencing harm at scale by products operating the way they were designed, if I hadn’t been through this myself as well. I so often hear folks saying, “I don’t enjoy my corporate role.” I come from the corporate world too, I went to grad school to work for a Fortune 500 company. I was miserable. I just didn’t feel like it contributed.
So now I’m positioned to be at the cutting edge of what we believe – and I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, but literally – an epidemic, much like the opioid epidemic, of what folks are going to go through with having digital handheld access to gambling platforms with almost no guardrails in place. So it’s incredibly profound. And also, with that comes great responsibility, a little bit of, “I’m never doing enough,” or “I’m not doing it right,” because it’s so incredibly important to try to find ways to make the biggest impact as possible. And that’s why I focus on the advocacy end of it. As much as I want people to be able to reach out for services, get to work with folks like Brian and find some relief from the harm one at a time, I would really love to see some way to appeal to legislators – not just on a state, but national level – of realizing that allowing gambling revenue to just be unfettered is not what they think it is. It’s really a regressive tax on people that we’re here to supposedly take care of and protect.
Norcross: How did the landscape of gambling change after the COVID-19 pandemic?
Martz: It had a vertical trajectory of the technology. We were some of the first folks in this landscape that immediately hopped online and offered services to the folks we support by Zoom, phone and text. We had to fight pretty hard to get to do that in terms of HIPAA and having safe systems in place to do that.
Meanwhile, for example, the Oregon Lottery said we’re losing revenue here by people not being able to go to our brick and mortar retailers. And we have an obligation to meet these bonds for schools, parks, economic development. We got to have a plan here. And they do a great job. One of the ideas they had was having virtual sports, like the gamification of gambling, which is another direction we’re headed. And we thought, no, we don’t think that’s a good idea to do in this kind of state of emergency, to just start having more availability to gambling technology around the clock, with no guardrails. So we did everything we could to intervene with that.
In the meantime now, we see things like prediction markets that are coming out and CFTC, basically a skeleton crew of one individual, not many plans in place…
Norcross: You’re talking platforms like Polymarket, where you can bet on literally anything.
Martz: Anything. Although, now Polymarket and Kalshi United States have removed loss of life.
Norcross: That’s progress, I guess.
Martz: But still war, war’s fine. Kidnappings, those are great.
Norcross: But all these new technologies, they’re making the problem worse from your vantage point?
Martz: They’re making it exponentially worse. They’re appealing to younger demographics, to women. They’re making it very user friendly. It’s not a complicated thing to do, there’s not a lot of friction. It used to be they would say, “There’s overseas digital gambling and we’re concerned about those black market companies.” Brian and I were just saying we’ve collectively been in this field 20 years and we can count on one hand how many people we have worked with that. had overseas black market digital gambling.
But Polymarket and Kalshi have just decided to do this “move fast and break things” way of launching themselves, and are now being sued by a number of states, and effectively so, that they can’t just come in and offer this non-geo fenced product that’s actually going to compete with the Oregon Lottery’s DraftKing platform. And it’s really going to be interesting to see what happens. That’s why we very much want to help inform our legislators and try to make it, with everything else that’s going on, something that’s going to help them get excited about putting some regulation in place.
Norcross: Brian, what are some common misconceptions around gambling addiction and people who have it?
Ward: Right off the bat, a common misconception is that it’s some sort of willpower or moral, value-based issue that people run into and not a mechanism for chemical responses happening in the brain. A lot of people think of most process use as like, “well, it’s not like you’re introducing chemicals into your system.” But you are getting more dopamine out of these activities than almost anything else on earth.
Norcross: And the apps are engineered to release that dopamine in your brain.
Ward: Right. They’ve written books about it, “Addiction by Design.” It’s meant to be very stimulating. And when it works in that capacity, the brain recognizes that reward system and is willing to do almost anything to continue that. So when people talk about “just stop,” it’s like saying, “stop blinking.” It takes a lot of energy and a lot of intention to create the cognitive effort needed to be able to change a pattern of behavior that your brain is really trapped in. And that pattern is rewarding that brain center as often as it’s occurring, as well as in the lead up to it. So, it’s not just pushing a button or getting on your phone, it’s the thinking about it [which] starts that dopamine release. It’s this long gratification that’s happening. And the crash afterwards is relatively short before the system starts over again.
There’s also misconceptions around what constitutes a gamble, what sorts of activities are releasing those kinds of dopamines. When you go to school and you see that they’re hosting raffles for their students, that shows how ingrained gambling is in our society without even really recognizing how in those formative years, that sort of dopamine boost is telling the brain, “hey, this is rewarding and this feels really good to be able to do.”
Norcross: I never thought of a raffle as a gateway before.
Ward: Certain programs, the 12-step program Gamblers Anonymous, specifically mentions raffles as one of the behaviors that’s associated with gambling.
Norcross: How is it different than drug or alcohol addiction? You’ve been very clear about how they’re the same, but what are the differences?
Ward: Some of them have to do with how the side effects of it are less known. It’s harder to see when somebody is high on the gambling, it’s really hard to see the physical impacts. You might notice some physiological things like weight loss, weight gain associated with the stress and the cortisol levels that are happening while this behavior is ongoing. But it’s not like you can look at a person and say, “Wow, that person looks like they gamble a whole lot.” So one of the biggest differences is how easy it is to shroud itself in your life and how easy it is to blame things that are happening because of the gambling on life stressors. That’s probably one of the biggest differences that are noted, just how easily the gambling can hide.
Norcross: Well, Kitty, here we are in Oregon, where there’s a serious problem with gambling here. Yu’ve been talking with lawmakers about changes that could possibly have that could possibly be made. What is the lowest hanging fruit? What could lawmakers do in the next session right now?
Martz: I would love to see us have a bona fide gambling commission, because we’re quite fragmented between the OLCC that controls card rooms [and] the Oregon Racing Commission. They have “totalizers,” it’s kind of a funny workaround. There’s databases of historic horse racing numbers, Secretariat won in the ‘70s or something. And have you ever seen binary code, 1010, that kind of thing? Those results from horse races are converted to a new kind of number system and that becomes the random number generated data that machines can operate from. And there can also be instant or live racing that looks like a slot machine, but is actually considered more like sport, because it’s based on what’s happening live with horse racing. It can be a combination of people betting against each other called parimutuel.
In any case, there’s a lot of these workarounds that aren’t consolidated into one regulatory body. I think the Oregon Lottery is put in an awkward position to have to self-regulate, and that’s not quite fair to them. Mike Wells, the Lottery director, is put in a position … There’s something called the Casino Prohibition Act, where no more than 50% of the revenue from gambling should be happening at delis and local bars. You see them in strip malls and so forth. They’re supposed to actually be delis where people go and get food. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been in one and been like, “this kind of seems like a small casino to me.”
That points to the Oregon statute that basically says it should have more than 50% of its revenue from gambling, but if it doesn’t and the Lottery director determines that they’re working on it, that’s OK. And there’s an incredible percentage of those where that’s happened, that they went, “they’re still contributing to our revenue that we need,” something like $1.5 billion per biennium. Puts him in a bad place to have to oversee that.
So if we could have one gambling commission that addresses all of this, and particularly gets in front of what’s going to be happening with the prediction markets, I think that would be a huge step in the right direction.
Norcross: Excellent. Thank you both so much. I learned a lot in this conversation.
Ward: Thank you.
Norcross: Kitty Martz is the executive director of Voices of Problem Gambling Recovery. Brian Ward is a certified gambling recovery mentor in the state of Oregon. If you or a loved one is experiencing gambling harm, Oregon’s Problem Gambling Resource Helpline is available. It’s 877-MY-LIMIT. That’s 877-695-4648.
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