Find a meeting in Mississippi.

Gambling in Mississippi: a brief history

Mississippi authorized riverboat casino gaming in 1990 under the Mississippi Gaming Control Act, becoming the second state in the country to permit commercial casinos. The Tunica corridor and the Gulf Coast developed in parallel through the 1990s. Hurricane Katrina destroyed the Gulf Coast casino fleet in 2005, and the legislature responded with a 2006 statutory revision allowing land-based casinos within 800 feet of the water. In-person sports betting at licensed casinos became legal in 2018; statewide mobile sports betting remains illegal as of 2026. Tribal gaming on Choctaw lands runs under a 1994 federal compact and includes Pearl River Resort, Silver Star, and Bok Homa. The state's recovery infrastructure has grown alongside the industry, with Gamblers Anonymous as the dominant peer-support program and a smaller presence for SMART Recovery, Recovery Dharma, and Gam-Anon.

Recovery Dharma in Mississippi

Recovery Dharma has a very small in-person footprint in Mississippi. The program is built on the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, meditation practice, and peer-led inquiry, applied to compulsive behaviors of all kinds, including gambling. There are no sponsors in the 12-step sense; Recovery Dharma uses mentors and small wise-friends groups for one-on-one support. Meetings are explicitly secular and do not require Buddhist belief. As of 2026, Mississippi has roughly one in-person Recovery Dharma meeting, located in the Jackson metro, with occasional gatherings on the Gulf Coast. Most members in the state rely on the program's robust online meeting schedule, which includes groups specifically focused on gambling and process addictions. Practical access to Recovery Dharma in Mississippi is essentially online for the vast majority of residents. The program pairs naturally with therapy or licensed clinical care and is not a substitute for either.

State-funded recovery resources

The Mississippi Council on Problem and Compulsive Gambling at 1-888-777-9696 is the central referral point for problem-gambling support in the state, regardless of which peer program a caller prefers. State-funded outpatient gambling treatment is administered through the Mississippi Department of Mental Health and delivered through Community Mental Health Centers. The Mississippi Gaming Commission operates the statewide self-exclusion list honored by all licensed casinos. Choctaw tribal casinos maintain a separate self-exclusion registry under the federal compact. Recovery Dharma itself is volunteer-run and not formally integrated into state referral networks, but licensed clinicians in the state will sometimes refer clients with an existing meditation practice or interest in Buddhist contemplative tradition.

What recovery looks like in Mississippi

Mississippi's religious landscape is overwhelmingly Christian, and Buddhist-informed peer programs are not part of the dominant cultural vocabulary in most of the state. That can make Recovery Dharma feel less locally rooted than GA or Gam-Anon, both of which have decades of history in Mississippi church spaces. At the same time, demand for a secular, contemplative recovery option is real, particularly among people who have a personal meditation or yoga practice, healthcare workers concerned about anonymity in small communities, and people who have tried 12-step programs and not found the format workable. The online-first nature of Recovery Dharma in Mississippi is, in practice, an asset: a member in the Delta, the Pine Belt, or the northeast counties has the same access to meetings and mentors as a member in Jackson or Biloxi. The program's emphasis on urges as transient mental events rather than character defects also lands well with people who have done cognitive behavioral work in clinical care.

1 Recovery Dharma meetings in Mississippi

See the live meeting map filtered to Recovery Dharma on the live meeting map, or open the full Recovery Dharma hub at /meetings/dharma/.

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