Nineteenth-century Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin said of gambling: “Play interests me very much, but I am not in the position to sacrifice the necessary in the hope of winning the superfluous.” For more than 2,000 years, gambling was considered just such a vice — perhaps a tolerable sin compared to murder, theft, or adultery — but still a destructive failure of character. Until recently, wagering on chance was illegal unless reserved for cordoned zones such as casinos on Native American lands, horse-racing tracks, Atlantic City, or Las Vegas.
The 21st century and its proliferation of smartphones now makes legalized wagering all but immediate. That reality offers easy indulgence for those already hooked on gambling, and the 24/7 availability threatens to create a new generation of addicts.
Rachel Volberg is a professor with the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences and principal investigator for the Massachusetts Gaming Commission’s Social and Economic Impacts of Gambling in Massachusetts (SEIGMA) study. She details the gradual process that transformed gambling from a taboo, illegal activity to a widely accepted way to generate income.
“It started in the late 1970s when a number of states started legalizing lotteries,” Volberg said. “Federal funding was being cut back, and those states were facing serious budget problems. Lotteries seemed like a way to raise revenue without raising taxes.”
Volberg sets the next wave of gambling legalization in the wake of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. The bill established federal standards for gaming activity on Native American lands and set up the National Indian Gaming Commission within the Department of the Interior.
“States were faced with Indian casinos going live within their borders and saw opportunities to fill budget gaps and revenue shortfalls by legalizing commercial casinos wherever possible,” Volberg adds.
Finally, while online gambling was open for business in Europe, the U.K., and Australia by the early 2000s, it gradually morphed into legal sports betting within the U.S. by 2018, when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for Nevada to be the only state allowing sports wagering. Statistics reveal the end result.
The American Gaming Association sets total gambling revenue nationally at $66.5 billion for 2023. Internet gaming grew by more than 22 percent to $6.1 billion, while sports wagering boomed more than 44 percent to $10.9 billion. The Gaming Industry News reports that more than 60 percent of Americans surveyed say they gambled in the past year.
To keep that momentum building, industrialized betting keeps the noise up, increasing the amount of money spent on gambling promotions year to year. A late 2023 study by MediaRadar reports casinos, online betting sites, and fantasy sports services spent about $734.8 million on advertising during that calendar year. A similar 2022 report in Barron’s states it more practically: “To put [betting advertising numbers] into context, gambling companies now spend three times as much on ads as cereal companies do.”
The ads obviously pay off as the gaming industry continues to celebrate record 2023 revenues for corporations such as DraftKings ($3.67 billion), Caesars Entertainment ($11.5 billion), BetMGM ($1.96 billion) and FanDuel ($3.3 billion). The proliferation of legalized betting threatens to grow the number of gambling addicts.
Timothy Fong, clinical professor of psychiatry and co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, also treats addicts in his practice. While the affliction doesn’t involve ingesting drugs or alcohol, the action produces its own mind-altering cocktail.
“This is nature’s addiction, and its chemicals come from our own brain,” Fong says. “Just like when we enjoy a good meal or fall in love, our brains react by releasing neurotransmitters providing joy, pleasure, or euphoria.”
Fong adds that the brains of people with a gambling disorder (about two percent of the general population) react differently, with parts of the brain either underreacting or overreacting to betting’s win-or-lose stimuli. According to research by the University of Nevada-Reno, more than 23 million Americans suffer from gambling addiction and lose an average of $55,000 annually to the affliction. The National Council on Problem Gambling sets the annual national cost of the disease at $14 billion.
Fong points out that financial damage doesn’t include the harm done to families, the ruining of careers, or the criminal activities that befall addicts.
“There’s a great concern that we’re at the beginning stages of a gambling crisis — comparable to where we were with opioids around 1995,” he says. “No one recognized that problem then. Fast-forward 15 years later, and 100,000 people are dead.”
According to Volberg, it’s the gaming industry that favors that two percent addiction rate to demonstrate the limits of gambling’s harms. To counter that, she cites SEIGMA’s 2013 study (done prior to Massachusetts’ legalization of casinos and sports betting) that showed 10 percent of state residents met addiction criteria or otherwise reported an inability to stop betting regardless of harm.
Fong realizes there are voices in the gambling industry that say addiction concerns are overblown. He disagrees.
“As a clinician, I have 25 years in this field,” he adds. “I can say we know with increased access to something that is addictive, when you don’t regulate everything about it tightly, you’re going to have problems.”
The major professional sports leagues — including the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL — seem to have little motivation to confront those potential problems. While each of them publicly supports gambling regulations and addiction awareness in boilerplate statements, the organizations all make significant money allowing, promoting, and advertising betting on their own games.
For example, the American Gaming Association reports the NFL collects an additional $2.3 billion annually off its relationship with sports betting. The same organization lists the profit margin at $585 million for the NBA, $1.1 billion for MLB, and $216 million for the NHL.
Media representatives for the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL failed to respond to emailed requests for comment. Likewise, representatives of DraftKings, BetMGM, FanDuel, and Fanatics Sportbook either declined to be interviewed or didn’t respond to information requests. However, those companies are all part of the Sports Betting Alliance (SBA).
According to the SBA’s mission statement, its members “offer safe and legal online and retail sports betting to customers with critical safeguards in place to keep minors from betting.” Its four companies operate only in the 25 states where online sports betting is legal and the 34 states where retail sports betting is approved.
Scott Ward, Vice President of the SBA, praises the thoroughness and advancement of technology used to keep underage individuals from entering the sports-betting realm.
“Legal operators use the same age and identity verification services as those in the highly secure banking and financial services industries to ensure that customers are 21-plus,” Ward says. “Unlike illegal offshore operators, legal American sports books take aggressive proactive action to ensure their platforms provide safe gaming experiences for all customers.”
Ward lists multiple services the SBA provides to fight gambling addictions, such as giving users the option to block themselves from accessing their platforms, funding independent responsible gaming research and incorporating findings in efforts to educate customers, giving players the ability to set limits on the amount of time and money they spend on a platform, and including problem gaming and help messaging in their marketing.
Ward adds, “Across the country, SBA members have long supported efforts by state legislatures to guarantee revenue generated by sports betting is used for problem gaming education, treatment, and research.”
He refutes any insinuation that the SBA’s collective efforts are a way for the big gambling firms to fend off criticism or diffuse blame for potentially creating problem bettors.
“We are an industry trade group that advocates for safe, regulated, and legal sports betting,” Ward explains. “Our members are actively working to ensure products provide safe entertainment only for responsible adults.”
Ward reminds critics that legal sports-betting operators are some of the most closely scrutinized and regulated companies in the country, with 38 different sets of state regulators analyzing legal sports books offerings.
Back in Massachusetts, Volberg welcomes any safeguards the big gaming companies put in place either voluntarily or via regulations, but she wants the industry to do more to protect potential addicts.
She says, “If you’re spending $2 billion per year pushing online advertising to get people to gamble, spending $1 million a year telling people where to get help only gets lost in the shuffle.”
