Colleges Buy-In For the Latest Student Addiction

Whenever the topic of online gambling comes up, I think about the time the president of my college graduating class robbed a bank to pay off the thousands of dollars of debt he acquired playing online Texas Hold ‘Em. So, when I read that Barney Frank (D. Mass.) was at the World Series of Poker on July 5th, rallying support for his recently introduced bill aimed at overturning the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), I was brought back to the exact moment I found out that our class president had done the unthinkable.

It was mid-December 2005, finals week, and the first semester of my sophomore year at Lehigh University was drawing to a close. Sitting in our cramped, triple-person room inside a mountaintop sorority house, my roommate Jill and I were recapping the past months and discussing how much exams sucked. Suddenly, a third roommate, the recording secretary of the class, burst through the door with an exasperated groan. She explained that she was trying to study in the library but the entire student body and the press were hounding her with questions. Greg Hogan, sophomore class president, had been arrested for robbing a nearby Wachovia. As we’d soon learn, he was $7500 in hole from playing online Texas Hold ‘Em.

Hogan was one of the first people I met at college. He went to an all-boys high school in Ohio and I remember him having this innocent “OMG I’m going to college with girls!” look on his face when we introduced ourselves at an orientation session in the spring of 2004. We were placed in the same freshman dorm, but ended up in different social circles. Although I didn’t know much about him beyond a reputation for being very involved—he was in a frat, was class president, worked for the chaplain and played in the orchestra—I’d never have thought this friendly, doe-eyed guy was capable of stealing anything, let alone robbing a bank.

Before he was sentenced, Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times Magazine sat down with Hogan and wrote a piece entitled "The Hold-Em Holdup," which appeared in a June 2006 edition about debt in America. I read the article and remember getting chills as Schwartz described spots on Lehigh’s campus that I had been to hundreds of times. As Hogan confessed to Schwartz and later to the judge, he and several other friends were en route to see The Chronicles of Narnia when he asked his friend Kip to pull over at a nearby Wachovia so he could withdraw money. Inside the bank and in broad daylight, Hogan slipped a teller a note saying he had a gun and to give him everything she had. He left with $2871 and got back into the car headed for Narnia, inadvertently making his friends accomplices to a federal crime. Some time after the movie, Hogan’s friends dropped him off at orchestra practice and returned to their frat, which had already been infiltrated by the FBI and local police. Hogan was arrested at practice and immediately confessed, leaving the class of ’08 without a president and the orchestra short a cellist.

Naturally, the MSM ate the story up. By the end of the week, national news networks had spun a “privileged, preppy class president robs bank” tale, which was not entirely accurate. Adding to the sensation, Hogan’s father was a Baptist minister involved in Ohio politics. As the facts began to surface, sensation and outrage dissipated somewhat and the story became more sorrowful and tragic than anything else. Hogan had been suffering from a serious and secret addiction for over a year. Like many people, rich or poor, he had sought professional help, attended therapy sessions, and had boundless support from his family, but his addiction won in the end. Sadly, when classes started up again the next semester, Facebook groups like “FREE HOGAN” and bank-robbing jokes had all but eclipsed the distinguished reputation Greg Hogan had been building for himself at Lehigh. Worse still, the judge did not let him off easy.  The one-time class president ended up serving 22 months in Pennsylvania state prison.

During the time of Hogan’s sentencing in 2006, Congress was reviewing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), the same bill that Barney Frank and many lobbyists are now hoping to overturn. Before the passage of the UIGEA, the legality of online gambling was essentially a “gray area,” as no federal law against it existed. However, once enacted, removed clauses and unclear language within the UIGEA led to confusion about penalties and the law’s application to sports betting only. The result has been that many online gambling firms operate using offshore banks and millions of Americans are able to play on their sites every day. An increasing number of these players are college students, and as Schwartz points out, universities have done little to combat this growing problem:
Administrators who would never consider letting Budweiser install taps in dorm rooms have made high-speed Internet access a standard amenity, putting every student with a credit card minutes away from 24-hour high-stakes gambling. Online casinos advertise heavily on sites directed at college students like CollegeHumor.com, where students post pictures of themselves playing online poker during lectures with captions like: "Gambling while in class. Who doesn't think that wireless Internet is the greatest invention ever?”
After the Hogan debacle, I wondered for a long time how someone as intelligent and clean-cut as Greg Hogan could become addicted to basically sitting at his computer all day. Was online gambling more addictive than regular gambling? Why did so many people I know play online poker? Why was it not really legal to do so? Finally, it dawned on me during a weekend at the Borgata in my senior year: the Internet completely changes the whole experience of gambling. By nature, playing cards is a social experience that involves interaction with people at a casino or some other location. You see and feel the chips that represent your money. At a casino, aural and visual senses are constantly stimulated—there are flashing neon lights, there are drinks, there are people dressed glamorously all around you. When you make a bad bet and lose a lot of money, you feel the presence of other human eyes watching you, judging you. You might wonder what they’re thinking of you and feel ashamed. When you’re gambling online, no one is with you at your laptop clicking little rectangles lined with spades and clubs—it’s just you and the screen. There’s no one to laugh at you when you lose miserably and thus there is much less shame involved and a diminished sense of reality. This is what makes online gambling different and more dangerous than regular gambling.

Despite these dangers, online gambling should not be illegal. As history has proven, prohibition doesn’t work; the people always manage to find a way to indulge their vices despite their government’s best efforts. Barney Frank’s bill should and probably will be passed, but its implications worry me. The likelihood of an increased number of people getting in over their heads while mindlessly clicking away on their PCs seems inevitable as many Americans are unemployed and looking for extra money. Back in 2005, Hogan may have been an anomaly, but in this climate, online addicts could become increasingly common. If passed, the legislation would likely not take effect until 2010 when economic conditions may or may not have improved. As for the growing problem of online gambling at colleges, Schwartz puts it best: “Never before have the means to lose so much been so available to so many at such a young age.” Once it’s legalized, the only thing that will protect those prone to a dangerous and devastating addiction will be foolproof regulation—and a lot of it.