Gambling treatment courts did not arrive with a statute. They were assembled over four decades out of a diagnosis, a certification board, two courtrooms and a long argument about whether a compulsive gambler who steals belongs in a cell or in treatment.
We revise a page when the statute, filing or report behind it changes: if the source is not in front of us, the figure does not go up.
What is on this page
This page keeps the dates.
Every entry below comes from the record published on this domain before it became a publication. Where that record gave a figure or a date, the figure or date is reproduced as it stood; where it gave none, none has been supplied.
1980 — the diagnosis
The American Psychiatric Association recognised pathological gambling as a disorder. Behind that recognition was the clinical work of two psychiatrists, Dr Robert Custer and Dr Rena Nora, who treated compulsive gamblers before there was a diagnosis to treat them under. Everything that follows — the courts, the certification boards, the state treatment budgets — rests on that single classification, because a court cannot divert a defendant into treatment for a condition that medicine does not name.
The criteria have been rewritten since, most recently as the nine criteria for gambling disorder in DSM-5, where the condition sits with the addictions rather than with the impulse-control disorders. What each of those nine criteria means in practice is set out at the nine criteria for gambling disorder.
1988 — the counsellors
The American Compulsive Gambling Counselor Certification Board was founded, the first body to certify clinicians specifically for gambling disorder. Dr Rena Nora was a co-founder and served on its board. In the same year the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey named her its Person of the Year.
A certification board matters to a court more than it sounds. A judge ordering treatment has to know that the provider on the other end of the order is qualified, and that the qualification means something specific. That line runs directly to the modern credential: internationally certified problem gambling counsellors, certified through the International Gambling Counselor Certification Board, are qualified mental health providers.
Dr Nora was a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada School of Medicine and the medical director of the Intensive Outpatient Program for Problem Gamblers at the Veterans Affairs Southern Nevada Healthcare System. She was a commissioner of the Governor's Commission on Mental Health and Developmental Services and a member of the Board of Examiners for the Nevada State Board for Alcohol, Drug and Gambling Counselors, and she served as chief of psychiatry for almost thirty years at the New Jersey and Las Vegas VA Medical Centers. She was a retired lieutenant colonel of the US Army Medical Corps. She took her degree in medicine at the University of Santo Tomas and her psychiatry residency at Bergen Pines County Hospital in New Jersey and the Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University in New York, and she published on suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, problem gambling and transcultural psychiatry.
She served on the board of the National Council on Problem Gambling for many years and continued until her death in 2008. The Council gave her the Herman Goldman Award for Lifetime Achievement, its highest award, for her work in the treatment of problem gamblers and their families; the certification board she co-founded gave her Certification #1. She was also the mother of Judge Cheryl Moss (Ret.), who twenty years later created the court in Clark County — a detail the record published on this domain kept, and the clearest line in it between the diagnosis and the docket.
The counsellors who carried it
A certification is a piece of paper until someone works under it. Arnie Wexler, a certified compulsive gambling counsellor, was executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey for eight years and has worked on gambling disorder for more than three decades; he works with his wife Sheila as a consultant and presenter. The record published on this domain lists the rooms that work reached: network television, including Oprah, Nightline and 48 Hours; workshops and training seminars nationally and internationally; gaming industry executives, Fortune 500 corporations, legislative bodies, college campuses; and training carried out for the National Football League.
That sequence — a diagnosis, a credential, a counsellor a judge can name — is the thing a treatment court needs before it can order anybody into treatment. The helpline the Wexlers ran, 1-888-LASTBET, is in the record on this domain, and their own site is at aswexler.com. Their published work on the subject includes a paper in the Journal of Gambling Issues.
2001 — the first court, in Amherst, New York
The late Honourable Mark Farrell (27 June 1947 – 26 August 2019) began the first gambling treatment court in the United States, in the town court of Amherst, New York. It took the structure of a drug court — supervision, mandated treatment, the case held open while the defendant complied — and applied it to defendants whose offending was driven by gambling.
The court is no longer active. Its design survived it: the sequence of intake, treatment phases, compliance review and completion that every later court copied started in that courtroom. Our account of how that sequence runs, step by step, is at how a gambling treatment diversion court actually works.
2013 — the field gets a name
Professor William R. Eadington (1946–2013), an American economist, founded gambling studies as an academic field and held the Philip J. Satre chair in Gaming Studies. He served as an advisor on the Subcommittee on Legal Issues of the Nevada Governor's Advisory Commission on Problem Gambling.
He also directed the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the record published on this domain credits him with helping the 2009 Nevada diversion law through — the statute that nine years later became the Gambling Treatment Diversion Court in Clark County.
The significance for a court is unglamorous and large: before gambling studies existed as a discipline, a judge weighing a diversion programme had almost no published evidence to weigh. A tribute published after his death is in Global Gaming Business.
2018 — Nevada
The Honourable Cheryl Moss (Ret.) established and presided over Nevada's first Gambling Treatment Diversion Court, in Clark County. Nevada's court runs under a statutory basis that most states still lack, and it operates with a dedicated court coordinator — the administrative post that decides, in practice, whether a specialty docket functions or stalls.
The argument that was made here
The case for these courts, as it was put on this domain, was made in four lines, and they are kept here as they were written: gambling treatment diversion courts are problem-solving courts; they save taxpayers' money; they ensure restitution to victims; and they save lives and families.
The case rested on one more claim, about stigma rather than cost: that those afflicted with gambling disorder routinely meet shame and stigma, and that disordered gambling is a disease rather than a moral failing. Whether the cost claims hold up is a question for the filings, and the figures are thin — which is itself the finding. What the research does and does not establish about the interventions these courts rely on is set out at do deposit limits work.
Internationally certified problem gambling counsellors, certified through the International Gambling Counselor Certification Board, are qualified mental health providers — which is the practical end of the argument: a court can order treatment only where somebody is qualified to give it.
A note on this page
The photographs, captions and credits on this page are the ones published on this domain before it became a publication, and they are reproduced as they stood, each with the credit it carried. Nothing here is our own photography and nothing here is licensed to us: where a credit names a photographer or a publication, that credit is the only claim being made.
None of the judges, clinicians or counsellors pictured or named is affiliated with this publication, and none of them has reviewed, endorsed or supplied anything on it. They appear because the record of these courts is their work. Personal social-media and video links that the earlier record carried alongside the photographs are not reproduced; professional addresses that the people concerned publish themselves are. A photograph is removed on request from anyone pictured, at [email protected].