As Sharon Hollamby was committing an armed robbery, she realised she had become someone she no longer recognised.

The Gawler, South Australia woman was in the grips of an addiction — to pokie machines.

"I became someone I didn't even know," Ms Hollamby says in the ABC documentary Ka-Ching! Pokie Nation.

"The machines had hijacked my brain and I just couldn't stop."

After an accident left her unable to work, garden and be active, Ms Hollamby began to struggle with mental illness that fed into a debilitating addiction.

"Beforehand I would have been able to cope, I'm a strong person," she recalls.

"But with the pokies, you come out of the pokie room and think now I'm worse off because not only have I still got those problems I've got no money either."

It started innocently enough.

The first time she tried the pokies, she was not even planning to gamble. At the pub with a friend, Ms Hollamby bought a drink and was given two one-dollar coins in change.

"I thought 'What the hell, it's only a dollar'," she says.

A bit of a win on the first play, then her accident, led to an addiction that took over her entire life.

"The longer I was there, the more I was hypnotised," she explains.

Ms Hollamby eventually pulled herself out of the addiction with the help of a psychologist and through speaking about her struggles at support groups.

She went on to co-found Communities Against Pokies in 2012, and now co-runs support group G-link.

But she says interventions along the way could have helped her sooner.

She wishes the judge who heard her case after the armed robbery had banned her from pokies for the rest of her life.

She also thinks pub staff could have made a difference.

"The cashiers don't have to be trained in responsible gambling services. That's disgraceful," she says now.

But most of all, she wants the machines gone altogether.

"We want those things out. They're dangerous, they're destroying communities, they're destroying society," Ms Hollamby said.

"Every dollar going into these machines, they're not going into the right pockets.

"I think the pubs and clubs need to think about a different business model."

Machines designed to tap into the brain's reward centre

$12 billion in losses go through Australia's poker machines every year ( Photo: Giulio Saggin, ABC News. )

Science backs up Ms Hollamby's feeling of being "hypnotised" or "hijacked" by pokie machines.

Like Pavlov's dog, who learned to salivate at the sound of a bell, pokie machine players learn to associate reward with the sound of the machines, gambling researcher Dr Charles Livingstone says.

"If you look at big poker machine venues where there are hundreds of machines, bells and whistles going off all the time, this partly explains why big venues make much more money per machine than smaller venues. Reinforcement is almost constant," he says.

Cultural anthropologist Dr Natasha Dow Schull says the brain activity associated with gambling addiction is almost identical to that of substance addiction.

"Slot machines have been called the crack cocaine of gambling, electronic morphine," she says.

"Some people have a hard time grasping that a machine could be addictive. They associate addiction with substances that are inhaled or put into the body.

"But the fact is most contemporary neuroscientists can tell you things like gambling and these process addictions are being taken as a pure form of addiction because they show us a direct window into the chemical changes happening in the brain."

Australia has more than 200,000 pokies throughout the country and it is the poorest communities who have the most machines and lose the most money.

Of the $12 billion in losses that pour through these machines annually, around half of it comes from addicted players.

That money goes to clubs, pubs, casinos, companies like Woolworths and Coles who own machines, and to governments, which rely on pokie taxes for 5 to 8 per cent of their state-raised revenue.