Gambling has exploded in the last 40 years as an acceptable social activity

The number of states in the United States with some form of gambling increased from 2 in 1972 to 48 in 1999.

In a 1999 report  by the National Opinion Research Center, 86%of adults in the United States reported some gambling in their lifetime and 68% reported some form of gambling in the past year.

Research has found that Native Americans are 4 to 6 times more likely to have pathological gambling problems than the non-Native American population.

As a child growing up in the 50s, gambling was considered a vice and immoral. Today, gambling is a major governmental and church fund raiser.

Times have changed and so has the incidence and prevalence of pathological gambling as a public health issue.

The statistics in this article come from "Implications of American Indian Gambling for Social Work Research and Practice, Social Work,, Volume 55, No. 2, April 2010, pp.139 - 146. For the abstract, click here.