HOOKED ON GAMBLING: Gambling treatment slow to emerge

Treatment for problem gamblers has lapsed behind the industry’s growth in Niagara County

Gary Fryza spends long days selling lottery tickets at Ted Mars convenience store on Packard Road.

He’s got it all: Take Five, Pick 10, Lucky 7’s, Win for Life, Mega Millions. And if you have trouble picking the right numbers, he’s got a guide that will help choose a few based on your dreams.

For 30 years, Fryza has seen regular customers play their lucky numbers at his family-owned corner store. He has seen lines swell with Mega Millions jackpots and shrink after local casinos opened. He has also seen the dark side of gambling. It’s a subject few people talk about.

“Anybody can get addicted. It’s like smoking,” Fryza whispered across his counter last week. He is a good-natured man who wears a mustache and knows his customers by name. “I don’t want to see nobody get addicted to anything.”

Niagara County has changed rapidly outside the doors of Ted Mars since Fryza’s parents, Ted and Maria, opened up shop in 1960, seven years before the New York Lottery began.

Today, people can legally place a bet 24 hours a day. That worries those that have seen evidence that the number of problem and pathological gamblers has grown along side availability.

“We have casinos. We have Lotto. We have sports betting,” said Amherst Town Court Judge Mark Farrell , who set up the first gambling treatment court in the nation. “There’s a lot more opportunities for people to be involved, and that being the case, the existence of this problem is beginning to manifest itself geometrically.”

Renee Wert, director of the gambling recovery program at Jewish Family Service of Buffalo and Erie County, has been working for the addiction center since 1994. When she started, most of the people who sought help were struggling with the lottery, followed by illegal sports betting and off-track betting parlors. Women tended to develop problems with the lottery. Men typically got hooked on sports betting.

More than a decade later, the scene has dramatically changed. Today, Wert said, the majority of the clients who seek help through the program’s sites in Niagara and Erie counties are battling addictions to casino gambling or lotteries.

Wert was startled to see the number of problem gamblers seeking help increase by 50 percent the year the Seneca Niagara Casino opened in 2003. That came after an initial spike when the first casino opened its doors in Niagara Falls, Ont.

“It surprised me given that the casino in Ontario had been opened for, at that time, what would have been four or five years,” Wert said.

Seneca Gaming Corp. spokesman Phil Pantano says the Seneca Niagara Casino takes steps to address problem gambling in its facilities, including training 100 employees each year to identify the signs of a problem. The casino also supplies brochures with contact information of the New York Council on Problem Gambling.

Like many casino operators, the Seneca Niagara Casino maintains both voluntary and involuntary exclusion lists in which patrons can ban themselves from gambling on the Seneca’s sites. Pantano declined to release the number of customer on either list.

“There are any number of gaming opportunities available to local residents, not withstanding casino gaming. There’s OTB, lottery, bingo. There’s racetracks in the immediate area,” Pantano said. “We can only take care of what happens in our facility, and it’s something that we strongly believe in and have taken steps to prepare for it. It’s a yearly commitment.”

Outside the casino, providing treatment services often falls to the public.