I know there’s a ton of things going on, what with the dumbest old man at the Thanksgiving table/diner counter and the President of the United States being the same person and all. But there is a huge addiction crisis happening right now that is more or less being ignored.
It turns out that enabling people to bet on sports at any time and anywhere is not a triumph of technology, but really bad! My first clue that this could be a really terrible thing that hurts people’s lives was when back in 2019 I was in a grocery store and overheard one Penn State college student excitedly tell his buddy that he just dropped 50 on the Monday Night Football game right there in the produce section.
What could go wrong?
Well, in the good old days, if you wanted to be a degenerate gambler, you had to go to a horse track, an off-site betting joint, or know a guy who could get you one of those super-sketchy gambling cards (probably mafia-related) that enabled you to bet on football games. Now with smartphones and apps, you can bet on just about anything from the comfort of your own bed before you fall asleep. What a world.
This seems bad.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, nearly 40 percent of men and 20 percent of women gamble online daily. Two percent of those bettors gamble more than ten hours a day. Sports bettors have wagered over $600 billion since 2018. The National Council on Problem Gambling notes that about 2.5 million Americans “meet the criteria” for a severe problem; five to eight million more have mild to moderate issues.
As the country’s affordability crisis deepens, individuals and entire families can slide into cycles of addiction and debt. Bank of America warned in a November research note that gambling is creating “emerging credit risks” across the economy; an April paper from UCLA and USC found that credit scores in states that have adopted online sports betting are down, and bankruptcy rates and auto loan delinquencies are up. Eight U.S. studies found that 1 in 5 problem gamblers have tried to commit suicide, the highest rate for any addiction disorder.
Most bettors are men. They’ve gotten younger and younger as sports betting companies gamified gambling. Pokémon, the trading card and video game mega-franchise, co-opted slot machine and casino imagery in the 1990s, and technology companies latched on, eager to bring in young gamblers to replace the old heads. Public schools see problems with boys, and sports betting stokes some school officials’ fears of it becoming as ubiquitous as cellphones and as poisonous as social media.
Thankfully, our politicians are on it. Or not.
State politicians have largely looked the other way: The attractive tax revenues from the relative handful of bettors reduce the need for broad-based taxes. Conveniently ignored are the profound contradictions between safeguarding the public welfare and the mental health and financial problems gambling can exacerbate. “It’s a system of taxation by exploitation, and it’s been an epic public-policy failure,” says Les Bernal, the national director of Stop Predatory Gambling, a national advocacy group.
So, we have a growing population of people, including a lot of young men, who are ruining themselves financially to the point where suicides are increasing. I should point out that this is nothing new. In fact, digital slots have been nothing more than addiction machines for a while now. But online gaming has driven this through the roof, and extended the disease of gambling addiction to a younger crowd.
Two companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, control over 70% of the online sports betting market and use sophisticated tracking and marketing tools to keep people betting, especially those most at risk of addiction. A small subset of bettors, often those with addictive behaviors, generate the majority of the sportsbooks’ profits. I have read and heard on podcasts accounts of people who try to quit gambling on the apps, and they get constant texts and emails from the company with offers of “free money” to come back.
Even if you are thinking, “then just block the emails and texts,” if you are even a casual sports fan, you get inundated with advertisements for gambling apps. These are not just limited to commercials but also a big part of any pre-game show, and are brought up constantly during the game itself. And you are no longer limited to betting on game outcome against the spread, the popularity of prop bets enables a person to bet on just about anything, from whether a particular player will score a touchdown or which team will score first. These prop bet cues come up during the game as well. Will Lebron James score more than 10 points in this quarter? Why not drop 100 bucks on it?
Beyond the harm they are doing to individuals and their families, there is a growing number of scandals related to betting that are harming the sports themselves. But like with politicians, the cash flow is too attractive for leagues to do anything about it.
In an ideal world, DraftKings and FanDuel would be viewed on the Villain Scale as on par with Purdue Pharmaceutical during the opiate crisis. That is perhaps giving them too much of a break. At least Purdue Pharma didn’t have an app that caused a pill to drop out of your phone at any time or run constant ads for pills and black tar heroin.
This all started with the Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) was unconstitutional back in 2018. It went downhill from there. I know there’s a lot to worry about at the moment, but a lot of lives are being ruined, and as a society, it feels like our reaction is a shrug.
The last word goes to Ray Charles.