Amid the throngs of gamblers in Atlantic City, Debra Kim Cohen stood out. A former beauty queen, she dropped thousands of dollars at blackjack tables. Casino managers acknowledged her lavish patronage by plying her with the perks commonly accorded VIP customers: free limo rides, meals, even rooms. Cohen, after all, was a high roller. It apparently did not disturb casino officials that she was also a teenager and — at 17 — four years shy of New Jersey’s legal gambling age. Finally, Kim’s father, Atlantic City detective Leonard Cohen, complained to authorities. Kim was subsequently barred from casinos. But by then the damage had been done. “She was an addicted gambler,” Cohen says of his daughter. Moreover, Kim had squandered all her money, including funds set aside for college. Officials at the five casinos where she gambled claimed that her case was an anomaly. On the contrary, Kim’s sad case is only too common. Gambling researchers say that of the estimated 8 million compulsive gamblers in America, fully 1 million are teenagers. Unlike Kim, most live far from casinos, so they favor sports betting, card playing and lotteries. Once bitten by the gambling bug, many later move on to casinos and racetrack betting. “We have always seen compulsive gambling as a problem of older people,” says Jean Falzon, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling, based in New York City. “Now we are finding that adolescent compulsive gambling is far more pervasive than we had thought.” Just 10 years ago, teenage gambling did not register even a blip on the ! roster of social ills. Today gambling counselors say an average of 7% of their case loads involve teenagers. New studies indicate that teenage vulnerability to compulsive gambling hits every economic stratum and ethnic group. After surveying 2,700 high school students in four states, California psychologist Durand Jacobs concluded that students are 2 1/2 times as likely as adults to become problem gamblers. In another study, Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John’s University in New York, found eight times as many gambling addicts among college students as among adults. Experts agree that casual gambling, in which participants wager small sums, is not necessarily bad. Compulsive betting, however, almost always involves destructive behavior. Last fall police in Pennsauken, N.J., arrested a teenage boy on suspicion of burglary. The youth said he stole items worth $10,000 to support his gambling habit. Bryan, a 17-year-old from Cumberland, N.J., recently sought help after he was unable to pay back the $4,000 he owed a sports bookmaker. Greg from Philadelphia says he began placing weekly $200 bets with bookies during his sophomore year in college. “Pretty soon it got to the point that I owed $5,000,” he says. “The bookies threatened me. One said he would cut off my mother’s legs if I didn’t pay.” Still Greg continued to gamble. Now 23, he was recently fired from his job after his employer caught him embezzling.
