Important disclaimer: nothing on this page is intended to be recommending any particular medication for any patient or person reading this page. At this time there is no universal medication for gambling addiction that can be recommended across the board. Every situation needs to be assessed by a medical physician. This information is provided to you as it is available widely in the general literature on gambling addiction and is educational only in nature. Again I want to reiterate very strongly that I'm not advocating the use of medications in the treatment of gambling addiction and I'm only providing this for your general information and consideration any decisions regarding medication need to be carefully discussed with the physician. Medications often cause very serious side effects including most likely all the medications listed here were discussed here. In addition, but it's important to note that I think everybody wishes that there was a magic pill that would make this problem go away, to date we have not found it. My experience in treating gambling addiction over the past nearly 20 years now is that medications coming in and out of favor and what is recommended today will not be recommended tomorrow in fact that is exactly the case as I can think of several medications that work widely and excitedly discussed in the media and are no longer recommended having proven themselves to be ineffective. In addition any information posted here should be considered based on the date of the information as it may become rapidly out of date to the extent that it is not currently viewed in the way it is listed on this website. With that said here are two articles I think at least worth reading and hopefully the links will still be active when you try to read them. Please note that these are very technical articles or at least the last one is in may be difficult to understand without a bit of background.

First Article : Click on the blue link to the right of this comment to read the article. This article is about the use of naltrexone which has been used now for several years with gambling addiction with mixed results. I have had a few patients try it and there was some success with it although there were difficulties with cost and side effects noted.It might be especially worth considering this for a patient to is also struggling with excessive alcohol use or abuse.This article is easy to read.

Second Article:  This is a highly technical review article that discusses all of the different psychiatric medication classifications and how they might pertain to the use in the treatment of gambling addiction. It's a very excellent review article but so technical it may not be readable by the general population. I wanted to provided to you for your consideration where you to bring it to a physician to read if you're having trouble understanding it. It is written by Dr. Grant who was widely respected in the field of gambling addiction treatment and medication.The main drawback with this important article is that it's already old given that it was published in 2006.So I provided a more recent update that I think should also be reviewed if you're going to read this article. See third article below.

Looks like the link is dead but you can do some research here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/?term=gambling+addiction



I need to reiterate to you that there is no specific recommendation for medications that is being provided in this information. I have treated hundreds and hundreds of persons with gambling addiction and only a very few of them have tried any of these medications less than 10 in total. The vast majority my patients have not been interested in trying medications. In those the were interested were not able to follow through due to costs or other reasons. At least one or two patients that I know and treated had significant side effects. 

Ask a patient  Whenever I consider a medication for myself or for patient I try to do research online to see what are some of the potential problems. This website I have found particularly helpful.There are others as well that are good for utilizing reviews of medications and I typically use more than one of these types of websites.  It is a review of medications written by people that have taken the medication. The website itself must be carefully considered in terms of how many people have actually taken and reviewed the medication. In addition you must consider that people are posting information on his website are, in my view, going to be more often than not tpeople that have had problems with the medication rather than people and had great experiences. There are horror stories with every single medication that I've ever read about and you can easily get dissuade from actually taking any medication based on some of these were stories and that would be a mistake. I typically found that almost no medication on this website is rated higher than something in the 3 range. Medications in the low 2 or1 in particular should be considered carefully.

If you find anything incorrect in this page please notify me directly using the contact Dr. Geffner page on this website or if you have any feedback for me I would always appreciate that.