Carlsbad Beach Recovery was recently featured in The Athletic, in a story examining how online sports card “breaks” have come to share many of the same mechanics, and many of the same risks, as gambling.
The article follows a collector whose spending on live card-selling platforms pulled him back into addiction, even after he and two others won a one-of-a-kind LeBron James card that later sold for $2.4 million. For the clinical perspective behind that story, The Athletic turned to Marc Lefkowitz, our director of gambling recovery.
Lefkowitz brings an unusual vantage point to the subject. Before he specialized in treating gambling addiction, he spent more than a decade owning trading card shops, and he has watched the line between collecting and compulsive spending blur for years. He told The Athletic that many of the people he treats for sports betting “end up having a connection with sports cards,” often without realizing it is part of the problem. He also pointed to a newer and more troubling pattern: parents calling about teenagers who are spending money they do not have on live-break platforms.
That kind of insight is at the heart of how we approach care. Our gambling addiction program treats gambling as the serious behavioral health condition it is, offering partial hospitalization (PHP), intensive outpatient (IOP), and sober living, all based in downtown Carlsbad just minutes from the beach. Treatment is led by clinicians like Marc Lefkowitz who understand how today’s forms of gambling reach people directly through their phones, and how lasting recovery can be built around that reality.
You can read the full story at The Athletic, and learn more anytime about how we help people recover from gambling addiction.
