Is Sports Gambling a Public Health Crisis?

“An illness, progressive in its nature, which can never be cured, but can be arrested.” Those words may sound like they describe some neurodegenerative disorder—but in fact, they’re how Gamblers Anonymous defines compulsive gambling. GA hosts more than 1,200 weekly meetings for the estimated 10 million Americans with gambling problems.

If you’re familiar with how other public health crises have been handled in America, you might expect this problem to be ignored by lawmakers. But the truth is, they’re making it worse. In recent years, legislatures across the country have broadly legalized one of the most habit-forming types of gambling: sports betting. Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia now authorize the practice.

That means it’s currently easier to wager a month’s salary on the NBA Finals than it is to get an abortion.

This wave of legalization has ripped through the country with minimal murmuring from progressives—perhaps a reflection of a broader laissez-faire approach to matters of the personal life on the left. After all, it’s ordinarily a compassionate instinct to let people do what they want with their time and money. And yet a categorical gulf exists between, say, the right to marriage and the freedom to entangle yourself in an inherently exploitative scheme. That’s why the truly progressive approach to sports betting might be a national intervention.

As with more than a few of our current systemic woes, the sports betting craze originates from a Supreme Court decision aimed at safeguarding states’ rights. In 2018, Elena Kagan joined the court’s five conservative justices to overturn a federal sports betting ban. The suit was brought by Democratic New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy over gambling legalization passed by his predecessor, Chris Christie. It took an inspiring bipartisan effort to kick-start this spiral.

The six years since that ruling have seen Americans lose at least $245 billion on sports wagers. And given that rates of gambling addiction are highest among the unemployed, the elderly, and the poor, these losses have been disproportionately borne by those who could least afford them.

Figures like these upend the classic pro-gambling argument that its legalization benefits society by raising revenue for services like public education. According to research on gambling’s economic impact in New Jersey, online casinos have indeed generated hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. But that influx is canceled out by hundreds of millions of dollars in gambling-related costs, like welfare and homelessness. In reality, vulnerable people are losing more than they’re gaining.

This is by design. And entire industries have conspired to exacerbate the crisis. Tune in to any game today, and you’ll find yourself watching not just the points on the board but also the point spread that broadcasters like ESPN continuously update. Betting magnates have bought up teams: The Adelson family, which operates the multibillion-dollar Sands casino corporation (and bankrolls everyone’s favorite convicted felon president), now owns the Dallas Mavericks. Even the players—and their interpreters—can’t resist the allure of winning big off the field. Sports and sports betting are becoming one and the same.

Maybe most alarming is another convergence—sports betting with smartphones. Valiantly named apps like FanDuel and DraftKings have taken the algorithmic addictions of the perpetual scroll and combined them with the retro fixation of rolling the dice. Dr. Tim Fong, the director of UCLA’s Gambling Studies program, has described these apps as creating a “casino in our pockets.” And they haven’t even fully integrated AI yet.

By far, the most vulnerable are the most online. More and more young people are making wagers in their pajamas, in between classes, and, yes, in the shower. In targeting the youth, betting moguls have successfully future-proofed their industry, if you ignore the fact that their customers will endure an increased risk of suicide for the rest of their lives.