Orville Dash sits in a recliner with a clipboard. Tall and broad-shouldered, with wispy white hair where a pompadour once rose, the former statistical engineer for Caterpillar removes a sheet of paper, clicks on the flashlight he uses for reading and goes over his numbers.

One spin every six seconds. Ten spins a minute. Six hundred spins an hour.

The 81-year-old widower estimates that, at his worst, in 2015 and 2016, he spent about $2,400 a week on video slot machines, which he played at a hotel and a handful of restaurants and bars around his hometown of Maroa, a farming community of close to 1,700 people north of Decatur in central Illinois.

Looking over his handwritten calculations, Dash figures he lost more than $25,000 in that time.

“It hurts to lose that money,” he said. “I’m addicted to these machines, and I’ve been working hard to understand why for a long time.”

Orville Dash, of Maroa, Ill. said he spent about $2,400 a week on video gambling machines at the height of his addiction in 2015 and 2016. (Whitney Curtis, special to ProPublica Illinois) Orville Dash, of Maroa, Ill. said he spent about $2,400 a week on video gambling machines at the height of his addiction in 2015 and 2016. (Whitney Curtis, special to ProPublica Illinois)

In the 6 ½ years since video gambling went live in September 2012, some 30,000 video slot and poker machines have been installed at 6,800 locations around Illinois, more than in any other state. Gamblers here have lost over $5 billion playing the algorithm-driven machines, which have been described as “electronic morphine” and “the crack cocaine of gambling.”

Yet the state has failed to address the issue of gambling addiction in any meaningful way. Lawmakers introduced and passed the 2009 Video Gaming Act in less than 48 hours, without holding a single hearing or conducting even a cursory study of the potential impact of the massive gambling expansion. Despite promises to increase funding for gambling addiction, Illinois spends less today than it did before legalizing the machines, a ProPublica Illinois/WBEZ investigation has found.

Over the past decade, the number of people receiving state-funded treatment has declined. The state has allocated inadequate amounts for marketing campaigns to encourage people with gambling problems to seek help. It has spent no money to conduct research to measure the prevalence of addiction or to gauge which treatments are most effective.

What’s more, the state has failed to adopt basic prevention measures, such as a self-exclusion list that would allow individuals to bar themselves from playing the machines or safeguards to ensure underage people don’t gamble on the devices.

Instead, Illinois lawmakers have fixated on how much money video gambling has brought into state coffers, though a ProPublica Illinois/WBEZ investigation in January found that the revenue has fallen far short of the legislature’s projections, even as video gambling saddled the state with unfunded social and regulatory costs.

The Bad Bet: A multi-part investigation examining the legalization of video gambling in Illinois. Read Part 1: How Illinois Bet On Video Gambling And Lost

Now, some lawmakers and the gambling industry are pushing another expansion that would include sports betting, new casinos and even more video slot and poker machines. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for legalized sports gambling, and other states have begun to explore gambling expansions in hopes of tapping potential revenue streams.

Of the eight states that have legalized video gambling outside of casinos, Illinois is one of two — the other is West Virginia — that have chosen not to track the rate of gambling addiction, a decision a leading gambling researcher calls “mind-boggling,” considering the number of video gambling machines in the state and the amount of money being wagered.

A conservative estimate, using what most researchers set as a national average for gambling addiction — 2.2 percent of people 18 or older — would suggest about 217,000 Illinois residents are addicted to gambling. (Like substance abuse, gambling addiction is generally defined as behavior that jeopardizes someone’s financial security, relationships and emotional well-being.)

The number of people afflicted is likely higher, however, because studies show the rate of gambling addiction tends to increase with the number of gambling options, and Illinois has more locations to place a bet than Nevada.

Yet even as video gambling expanded, state spending on addiction fell nearly 20 percent between 2012 and 2017, according to the most recent figures available. The number of people assessed or treated for gambling addiction by state-funded providers declined nearly 37 percent during that time.

While Illinois’ highways are dotted with billboards advertising video gambling, little money has been spent to raise public awareness of gambling addiction or market what few resources are available to combat it. The most prominent, the state’s 1-800-GAMBLER hotline, received 2,324 calls in 2018, according to state records. Of those, 837 callers were seeking help; the rest were wrong numbers or people calling for other reasons.

Video gambling revenue reached $1.2 billion in 2017, yet the industry is required to contribute little to the state’s efforts on gambling addiction. That’s because, unlike at least three other states with legalized gambling, Illinois does not set aside tax money from video gambling to fund addiction services.

“With gambling, the social impact is just not visible until it affects you or your family,” said Anita Pindiur, executive director of the Maywood-based treatment center Way Back Inn, which treats about 80 people with gambling problems a year. “Our state is so driven by the money video gambling brings in, we don’t see the people it impacts.”

Go to a pizza joint in Springfield or a gambling parlor in Elmwood Park, a motel in the central Illinois town of Clinton or a string of bars in Berwyn, and there’s ample evidence of the problem. Whether it’s mid-afternoon or after midnight, you’ll see people robotically feeding bill after bill into flashing, ringing games.

“To me, it must have been the urge for some big win. Something for nothing, perhaps,” Dash said. “For other folks, they’re trying to get the money to pay the rent. Because they spent that money yesterday. And the food money goes. And the hand-wringing. And the crying. I’ve seen it all.”