Go Retire Psychiatrist

Last Friday night I heard a song by Iowa’s own blues star, Catfish Keith on the Ed English Big Shoes Friday Blues Show. It was Gambler’s Blues.

Remember that line, “Oh, the ponies are at the gate!” (or something like that)? Of course not, especially if you didn’t play the Casino game by Hoyle. No kidding, we had those games way back in the early 2000s. I even found a YouTube video of what looks like the exact game, Hoyle Derby 2000, which brought back memories:

But we never lost any money on those games because it’s not real gambling. Just the same, gambling is a thing in Iowa. According to a Wikipedia article, gambling is Iowa’s biggest tourist attraction, raking in $1.474 billion (that’s right, with a “B”) a year.

A Daily Iowan news story revealed that online gambling grew in Iowa during the pandemic, which was probably not a big surprise. Iowa has pretty permissive gambling laws.

One of my colleagues, Dr. Donald Black, has made a career of doing research on gambling, in which he found that pathological gambling can run in families. On the other hand, another one of his studies published in 2017 found that pathological gambling may not always be chronic and progressive.

Black DW, Coryell W, McCormick B, Shaw M, Allen J. A prospective follow-up study of younger and older subjects with pathological gambling. Psychiatry Res. 2017 Oct;256:162-168. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2017.06.043. Epub 2017 Jun 13. PMID: 28645075; PMCID: PMC5603391.

We’ve been to Las Vegas a couple of times, but we never gambled. As everyone knows, there’s a lot to do in Vegas and not all of it is about gambling.