He Lost $500,000 Gambling. Now He Helps Others Who Can’t Stop.

Virginia gambling-recovery counselor Sean Fournia sends a text message to 150 of his closest contacts nearly every day.

“We are miracles that are making a difference by recovering from gambling today!” he said. “No bet, no spin, no scratch, no whammies, no losses.”

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Fournia, 53 years old, stopped gambling three years ago after decades of financial ruin and personal pain. Now, he is on the front lines of fighting the harmful side of America’s booming gambling industry: addiction.

He counsels more than a hundred people struggling with betting habits in Virginia, where gambling’s rise has been swift. Online sports betting, casino resorts and gambling halls with machines similar to slots have all been legalized in the commonwealth in the past six years.

Virginia’s expansion of legalized gambling in recent years is among the fastest of any state, part of a nationwide explosion in gambling and online sports betting. Following the growth is an increasing number of people seeking help for gambling addiction, a struggle that receives no dedicated federal funding, some note, unlike substance abuse.

Virginia has dedicated 2.5% of sports-betting tax revenue to a problem-gambling fund and 0.8% from casinos.

“Gambling came too quickly without really looking at how we wanted to establish it and set it up,” said Virginia state Sen. Bryce Reeves, who largely opposed efforts to legalize gambling and is helping to lead a bipartisan effort to better regulate it.

Sports-betting revenue in Virginia has doubled since sports wagering launched in January 2021 to about $560 million last year, according to consulting firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming.

A state coalition that includes the Virginia Council on Problem Gambling, Virginia Commonwealth University and the state’s behavioral health agency has trained and deployed five people recovering from various addictions, including Fournia, as peer recovery support specialists.

Those counselors shepherd gambling-hotline callers into mental-health treatment and recovery, assisting people in the program officially for up to one year. More than 100 mental-health clinicians have been trained to treat gambling problems through the program.

Calls to Virginia’s problem-gambling helpline increased to 10,608 in 2023 from 989 in 2019. Those numbers include calls unrelated to gambling problems. The number of callers who moved forward with screenings for gambling problems increased to 898 from 311 during that period.

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‘I should be long dead’

Fournia, who had a career as a network engineer in the 2000s, estimates he gambled away about $500,000. Now, he witnesses the steady inflow of people who are struggling to find their own way to quit.

His addiction has mirrored Virginia’s adoption of gambling. The commonwealth had just launched a lottery when he turned 18, and he said his thrill-seeking nature as a child, including outdoor sports, attracted him to the unlikely chance at winning big.

Scratch-off lottery tickets soon became an obsession, he said, and his floors were covered in silver dust from tickets. Years later, a racetrack opened outside Richmond, and he took to betting on horses. He got entangled with illegal bookies, turned to drugs and alcohol, and committed a string of nonviolent felonies, including theft and forgery.

He had been in recovery from substance abuse for about two years and was working in a recovery center when, in 2018, he started scratching lottery tickets again. During the pandemic, he found himself homeless, living in a tent in the woods or the occasional hotel room, panhandling to fund his substance-abuse and gambling habits.

He started spending on historical horse-racing machines, a form of gambling Virginia legalized in 2018. Machines give the experience of playing slots but are based on the results of past races.

He and his fiancée scraped by with donations from strangers. By 2021, Fournia no longer wanted to live. He returned to the recovery center where he had received help before and quit gambling on June 18, 2021.

“I should be long dead or locked away in a prison as a direct result of my problem gambling,” Fournia said.

Today, Fournia counts about 120 people on his formal caseload, staying in touch on the phone and through Zoom, in group meetings and one-on-one conversations. With football season under way, he is hearing from people struggling with online sports betting.

“I see the despair, the desperation, the financial disaster. I see the marriages and the kids get split up.”

Fournia said spirituality has guided his own recovery, and he tries to help the people he counsels by encouraging them to embrace activities from their youth and telling them that setbacks are learning opportunities.

‘The least, the last and the lost’

The program has shown early signs of success. More than half of the 677 people referred to the program from July 2023, when peer counselors were hired on staff, through early September moved forward with ongoing treatment or peer recovery services.

Program leaders compare that with a 2022 study in Canada that found only 7.7% of problem gamblers ever accessed treatment.

Carolyn Hawley, president of the nonprofit Virginia Council on Problem Gambling and director of the program, said they knew it was important to help callers access treatment quickly because “it may be a long time before they ever reach back out to us.”

Of the participants who the program could reach after one year, 95% said they had decreased or quit gambling.

Rob Nease, 43, first started gambling while stationed in Japan in the Army, playing on slot machines on the military base, and it later became a life-altering addiction.

Nease, who connected with Fournia last year, and has since stopped gambling, helped establish a weekly in-person Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Richmond. “He knew what he had to say to me, but he also knows that you have to take it in chunks,” Nease said.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers are trying to create a Virginia Gaming Commission to regulate gambling in the commonwealth, a process expected to take two years. Gambling is now regulated by three separate entities.

“We have got to take care of the least, the last and the lost among us in this industry,” Reeves said.

Write to Katherine Sayre at katherine.sayre@wsj.com

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