Organizations: Gamblers Anonymous

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The day that Fred, a Las Vegas jazz pianist, drew his first weekly paycheck, he immediately lost it in a poker game. "It seems as if I've been trying to get that week's pay back ever since," says Fred now, a quarter of a century later. As he floated from jazz joint to jazz joint around the U.S., Fred became a regular at the race tracks, crap tables and poker games. But he never won the week's pay back, succeeded only in blowing $75,000 more. He became hooked on alcohol and drugs, stole money from his wife, rifled his children's piggy bank, went through an $8,000 inheritance from his father in three months at the gaming tables.

Once a friend volunteered to help bail him out of his debts if he would stop gambling. Fred's resolve lasted until he got his next paycheck, which he promptly lost in a crap game. "I was on a one-way train that had only two stops—suicide or death," says Fred. But he managed to jump off the train with the help of an organization called Gamblers Anonymous.

The Low Rollers. Frankly modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous now has chapters in 23 cities across the U.S.; G.A. estimates that there are 6,000,000 compulsive gamblers in this country who drop $20 billion a year. At weekly meetings, stories like Fred's are heard every week (as in A.A., members are referred to only by their first names). An hour before his wedding. Businessman Danny fled a raided crap game, scrambled over a barbed-wire fence, tore his wedding clothes, and gashed his hands; he finally made the church in borrowed clothes and with bandages decorating both hands up to his wrists. Joe, a former minor-league baseball player, kited $100,000 worth of bad checks, went to prison, where he promptly began to make book. After Henry was cleaned out, he slugged himself on the back of the head with a lead pipe so he could tell his wife he had been mugged on the way home.

As in A.A., members of Gamblers Anonymous confess and reconfess their compulsion at each meeting, starting off each purgative session with the statement: "My name is— —; I am a compulsive gambler." Prayer plays a large part in the rehabilitation process. G.A.'s are guided by the society's Twelve Commandments ("We admitted to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs." "We made a list of all the persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all"). Some chapters place small newspaper ads on the day of a scheduled meeting, but G.A. does not solicit members; compulsive gamblers must seek out G.A. Though some members are deeply in debt, G.A. chapters make no effort to help them pay off their debts. But when a G.A.'s hands itch for a hot pair of dice, a rush call to the local G.A. chapter will bring two or three fellow members on the run to talk the weakening high roller out of placing the fatal first bet.