One Gambler's Story

We spend billions of dollars a year dealing with it. We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about it

- Melissa L. Dale

The Prairie Meadows casino in Altoona, Iowa, has more than 1,700 slot machines. The machines are in an 85,000-plus-square-foot gambling hall that looks and sounds like something out of Vegas. The action is 24 hours a day. No matter when you go, you’ll find people hunched in front of screens, punching buttons with a hungry look in their eyes.

I used to be one of those people. The first time I went to Prairie Meadows, I was young and carefree, out for a good time with my husband and some friends. The last time I went, I was a forty-something gambling and methamphetamine addict, who sold drugs to support my addictions. I’d lost jobs and mortgaged my house and my father-in-law's house to pay gambling and drug debts. I’d been arrested for dealing and had thoughts about killing myself. Now I was on probation and my driver’s license had been suspended.

Late one night, I was running low on meth. I drove to the edge of the city where one of my dealers lived.

I was on an unlit back road, driven by the same bottomless need I always felt. The need for more drugs, more money, more something to fill the emptiness.

Tonight I felt a new need. I wanted out of this dead-end life. To be clean. Free from those hypnotizing slots and the financial chaos they caused. Free from debt, addiction, crime, and shame.

Out of nowhere, I spoke a prayer into the night sky. “God, I can’t go on like this. I need help.”

I was not a praying woman. Why should I be? My mom was an alcoholic when I was a kid, then died of emphysema soon after she sobered up. My dad left our family when I was four. I reconnected with him as an adult, and we grew close. Then he died of cancer. I loved my husband, but drugs became a bigger priority for him than I was.

Everything and everyone I cared about got taken away. No reason for God to start listening to my prayers now.