Florida Accountant Blames Adderall for $1.4M Gambling Embezzlement, Gets 10-Year Prison Sentence
Image: Lance Reis/Unsplash
Florida resident Philip Sullivan has blamed taking Adderall for the development of a gambling addiction that led to him stealing over $1.4 million from his employer. On October 16, a judge sentenced him to 118½ months, almost 10 years, in prison after he pleaded no contest to six felony charges.
Sullivan served as chief financial officer at Royal American Companies, a real estate developer in Panama City. As part of the sentencing, Judge Tim Register also ordered the 43-year-old to repay the $1.46 million he embezzled from the company over 11 months.
Speaking on a podcast before his sentencing, Sullivan said he devised a scheme to purchase gift cards with company funds and sell them for crypto. He then used the proceeds to gamble online.
Gambling Escalates After Taking Adderall
Sullivan said he started gambling casually in his early 20s, betting on football and March Madness. Then in 2020, a friend started giving him Adderall to help with his monotonous accounting job.
“I felt like it helped me get my work done and it was pretty easy to get a prescription,” he said. “I didn’t really notice it at the time, but I felt like getting on the Adderall was the last real clear choice that I made.”
In late 2020, he says his gambling escalated.
“I became very fixated on gambling,” he recalls. “I know it was changing aspects of my personality. I started pulling out beard hairs, so I had to basically trim my beard off, and I began gambling more and more.”
When football season finished, he began gambling on tennis, even though he knew nothing about the sport. It did not go well, he says. He started racking up debts and took out loans, using his truck as collateral, then using his wife’s name.
In court, his wife also testified that the Adderall had caused him to spiral out of control.
“If it weren’t for this medication, he would not have done that,” she stated.
Family Intervention Fails To Stop Destructive Gambling
His wife became aware that he was racking up debts and confronted him when it had reached $150,000. At that stage, it could have been managed. He was making a decent wage at Royal American Companies as Vice President of Accounting. His wife was a nurse practitioner.
But the intervention failed to make any impact.
“I didn’t want to quit gambling,” he said. “I can’t explain what it was that made me just find some way to do it.”
He came up with the gift card scheme in April 2023 and began embezzling funds to fuel his habit. Around October, he managed to win back some of the money, enough to return the funds to the company.
“But the compulsion to gamble was always much stronger than any compulsion I had to come up with a plan to replace the funds without being caught,” he says.
Gambling Manically Consumed Life
Within days, everything he had won was lost again. In the following months, he said he became “manic”.
“I had almost resigned myself to the fact that I couldn’t stop. My family was probably going to be better off without me around. I was not a good spouse. I was not a good father. I was angry whenever I had to do anything other than gamble,” Sullivan said.
“It had to have occupied 90% of my waking thoughts at that point.”
He would go to the gym just so he could gamble on his phone away from his family. At that point, he was betting on anything and everything.
“I was pretty disgusted with the person that I had become. I never even tried to repay any of my personal debt from winnings or anything like that. I had to continue to gamble it.”
The Day It All Caught Up With Him
Eventually, he exhausted the funds in the company’s account in March 2024. His boss confronted him. One of his boss’ catchphrases was “the truth will set you free,” says Sullivan.
But he could not be honest. “I was so ashamed of the fact that I was a compulsive gambler,” he said.
His boss was trying to figure out what was going on and asked if he was being extorted.
“Somehow I thought just going along with that and making up a story about someone extorting me was better than me admitting that I had a gambling problem,” said Sullivan.
He was escorted out of the office and taken to a hotel. Even there, he continued gambling at an offshore sportsbook. They had given him bonus funds, and he managed to generate $40,000.
“I actually started to take some of the money. I was like, I need to check myself into rehab. I thought that I would just drive back into town and go to a rehab,” he says.
But on the way into town, he was picked up on traffic cameras and arrested. He spent 38 days in jail, and the truth eventually came out. He admitted to his wife that it was all the result of his gambling. He expected her to leave him when he came out, but she did not file for divorce.
“I can’t explain why she didn’t, other than just the grace of God,” says Sullivan. The couple also have two children together. Before his sentencing he planned to talk to his two boys to prepare them for life without their father.
Adderall Linked To Compulsive Gambling
While in jail, he stopped taking Adderall. About six months later, he said his brain started to feel like it was functioning again.
Some studies have found a positive correlation between Adderall use and gambling. The same is found with other substances.
Prescott House, a men’s addiction clinic in Arizona, notes that patients are frequently reporting gambling problems along with taking Adderall.
“There is a conversation that happens in our admissions office more often than people would expect,” the clinic stated in a blog post last week. “A man calls about a gambling problem. Somewhere in the first twenty minutes, almost in passing, he mentions that he also takes Adderall.”
“Once you have had this conversation a few hundred times, you stop thinking of gambling and Adderall as two separate problems that happened to land in the same person. You start thinking of them as a pattern,” it adds.
Adderall and Gambling Create Dopamine Spikes
Adderall increases the availability of dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, neurotransmitters involved in attention, motivation and reward.
Sullivan said he would go for days without sleeping. Outside of gambling, he recalls spending 36 hours straight learning how to solve a Rubik’s Cube that his son got as a Christmas present.
“I was just locked in on that, hyperfocused,” he says. The combination of Adderall and gambling heightens the dopamine spike that a gambler gets from wins and near-misses, says Prescott House.
“Every near-miss, every push of a button on a slot app, every live-bet tick on a basketball game is engineered to produce a small, unpredictable dopamine spike,” the clinic stated. “That unpredictability is the whole point. It is what keeps a person pulling the lever long after the rational mind has left the building.
“Put a stimulant on top of that system and you are not adding two things together. You are multiplying them.”
The focus on dollars instead of dopamine may be harming any efforts to address problem gambling.
Recovery and Helping Others
Sullivan’s recovery started when he reached rock bottom in jail. He stopped taking Adderall and found a faith-based community. He then got a job with the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling and became the helpline director after a year of no gambling.
He says he has now helped over 460 people struggling with gambling problems. His advice to anyone experiencing gambling harm: “You’ve got to let someone in.”
He joined a church community that he says has been incredibly supportive. But there are many different groups, including Gamblers Anonymous, that have both in-person and virtual meetings.
Many of the different groups are currently divided, arguing over funding and whether to accept money from gambling companies. For Sullivan, the most important thing for the gambler is to connect with others.
“Whatever the case may be, you’ve got to let people in on this. Gambling addiction thrives in secrecy.”
His work at the helpline will be on hold for the foreseeable future as he serves his prison sentence.
Players trust our reporting due to our commitment to unbiased and professional evaluations of the iGaming sector. We track hundreds of platforms and industry updates daily to ensure our news feed and leaderboards reflect the most recent market shifts. With nearly two decades of experience within iGaming, our team provides a wealth of expert knowledge. This long-standing expertise enables us to deliver thorough, reliable news and guidance to our readers.
Latest News
