I was deeply disturbed by the story told on 1er February by Ariane Krol1 of this 26-year-old young man (nicknamed Jacques) who killed himself after playing on an online gambling site. Because this young man could have been me at the time when I was devoured by this pernicious demon called compulsive gambling.
The game appeared in my life in a very insidious way as it almost always and often does at a tender age. I was very young, only 17, and I accompanied my father on a trip to Puerto Rico where almost every hotel at the time had its own small casino. We were then at the end of the 1970s. That evening, when I went alone for a little walk around our hotel, I succumbed to the lure of the gaming tables. dollar at blackjack, I left the casino with nearly 100 times that amount in my pocket. I didn’t know it yet, but I had just experienced my first rush. But above all, the casino had become for me a magical theater, the place of all possibilities.
In the years that followed, the urge to play intensified. I watched for these traveling casinos organized by NPOs, the only ones authorized to hold this kind of event at the time. I won, I lost, but there always remained the magic substrate of the game, the intense feverishness. One of the most remarkable and symptomatic adventures of my “career” as a gambler was a trip to Atlantic City and back, where I was convinced that I would strike it rich, having discovered a perfect martingale to win at blackjack. You speak…
My martingale worked so well that I spent about an hour at the gaming table before I got plucked. The next day I was back in Montreal. Broke.
Despite this disappointment, the thirst for gambling remained in me and I continued to visit mobile casinos. Then came THE big day: the birth of the Casino de Montréal in 1993. Now I had the opportunity to fully satisfy this unquenchable thirst for gambling. one evening before losing them again the next day.
The desire to redo
All players will tell you the same thing about their addiction. It culminates when you think about it from morning to night and the losses are inevitably followed by the desire to recover. After one of those days of great bad luck (they are inexorably becoming more and more numerous), when I had gone back and forth between my apartment and the casino, I realized that I had put my finger in an infernal gear.
It was shortly after this experience that I made one of the best decisions of my life: I excluded myself from the Casino, which, in short, was tantamount to denouncing myself as persona non grata from the casino because of total addiction to gambling. I did it at the right time, before I became a lost casino soul. These lost souls, you have probably heard of them before. They cling to their gaming table or their slot machine like a buoy, convinced that the jackpot awaits them or simply because there is nothing left to do in a life that has lost all its meaning. sense. They wouldn’t leave their machine for anything in the world, neither to eat nor to go to the bathroom. As if they were chained to it.
As I write these lines, I stopped playing decades ago and got through it without too many consequences.
I did what specialists advise all victims of addiction: I moved away from the source of the problem which, at that time, was for me the casino.
Healing, however, is often more complicated: it requires shrinks, support groups; you often have to give up on people, your gambling or drinking friends and sometimes even on your own neighborhood, when it is for example infested with bars full of slot machines.
Obviously, the Jacques of Ariane Krol’s story will have had less luck than me. He will only have become acquainted with the game briefly, the space of a single rush. A rush titanic sum of 100,000 fine dollars which were never paid to him. A rush which was fatal for him. Like the one who dies from his first dose of heroin. However, the classic path of the compulsive gambler is quite different from that of Jacques. Gambling as practiced by compulsive gamblers resembles Balzac’s skin of grief. The more you use it, the less effective it is. The more you play, the less you earn. With gambling, the first dose is rarely lethal, but it often heralds a long fight.
Few people around me knew me to be a compulsive gambler, even when I was wasting my time and money in casinos. Those who suffer from addiction are often masters in the art of hiding their slavery. I was. If it is always possible these days to hide one’s addiction from others, at least for a time, it seems that it is however more difficult today to hide oneself from gambling. Computers, laptops, tablets track tireless players. Loto-Québec’s slot machines are still deployed throughout the territory today. The advertising of the sites is omnipresent on all the platforms and fed by the dubious complicity of stars (often sports) highly paid2. Worse still, companies dedicated to trapping their customers (located abroad for the majority) adopt a criminal mode of operation. One of them is spattered with Jacques’ blood. I hope she will be accountable.
In such a context, fleeing the game has now become almost impossible. The game looks more and more like a prison whose key has been thrown away. I am thinking of this remark by a professor from Concordia University quoted in the text of The Press “A player once told me: ‘I carry my casino in my pocket.’ »
Our governments absolutely must tackle this scourge, which targets young people in particular. It has claimed too many victims for too long. I was just 17 when I fell into the poisonous pot of gambling. Jacques was 26. But he didn’t have the chance to exclude himself from a casino. Rather, he will have excluded himself from existence. An unspeakable tragedy.