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Ed Yeates ReportingColleen Swase: "I want to sit there in front of that slot machine and do nothing else. I don't even want to talk to anybody."
The difference between Colleen Swase and a routine gambler? She can't stop. It's a diagnosed illness scientists believe may be turned on through defaulted chemistry in the brain. But researchers are now going to try turning off that switch in a most unusual experiment.
Casino Games here in Salt Lake leases out poker tables and roulette wheels for groups just wanting to have fun. But there are some, predisposed to an illness, where the fun has ended. It's those people researchers hope to "unhook."
Most people can gamble in Las Vegas, Wendover or other gaming towns and walk away. But for some, like Colleen Swase, they can't. Colleen's addicted, so much so, she needs more and more to satisfy the craving.
Colleen Swase: "I gamble all night long. Sometimes I gamble two days. I don't go to bed. I stay up. If I get a room, I don't go to the room."
And it's not just now and then. Colleen repeats this lifestyle every weekend, losing entire paychecks and more.
Colleen Swase: "Then I go to my credit cards an debit cards. I write checks. I do everything - ask somebody to borrow me money. Whatever it takes, I do it."
The pattern is familiar to members of "Gambler's Anonymous" who've been there. To protect his identify, "Harold," as we'll call him stands partially behind a tree.
Harold: "I was just living from paycheck to paycheck, always looking for money to pay or money to play, and just looking for a way to win big money so I could go to Vegas."
Doctors Fares Arguello and Richard Shingleton say in those who may be genetically predisposed to the illness, the triggering mechanism is most likely a chemical imbalance in the brain. It begins with an urgency, then later a "rush."
Fares Arguello, M.D., Radiant Research Group: They also get euphoric while they're gambling. So they have a euphoric, a rush that they get, a high that they get while gambling."
The urgency to get that fix becomes stronger and stronger as the compulsive gambler builds up a tolerance.
Colleen Swase: "I've even got up in the middle of the night and gone gambling. Just like 3:00 in the morning, get up, get ready, go gamble. I don't even want to talk to anybody. I'm not out there to do anything else, but gamble."
It's this compulsion that brought Colleen Swase to a Salt Lake testing center for a first of its kind clinical trial. She hopes to take an experimental drug every day that will defuse the overactive switch or regulator in her brain. It's a revolutionary approach to an illness people didn't believe had a biological trigger. But new research shows otherwise.
Dr. Richard Singleton, Radiant Research Group: "You have to realize in our brain, we have our own little pharmacy, that every medication out there that affects the brain is already in the brain. When you have a gambler you have chemicals in the brain that mimic narcotics."
Fares Arguello, M.D.: "When you block those regulators, people seem to get less cravings, less urgency to do this kind of disruptive behavior, and that's what this is all about."
It's only a tool, but one that could help these folks diffuse a lifestyle pattern that's way out of control.
If your are interested in participating in the clinical trials, contact Radiant Research at 801-261-9093.
To contact Gamblers Anonymous, call 1-800-522-4700.
