Society’s bad bet

With gambling ad avalanche, hike in addiction isn’t far behind

Las Vegas, Nev. –  I never thought I would become downright nostalgic for lite beer commercials that once dominated the football broadcasts (remember “tastes great, less filling”?) In the last year, after hearing hundreds of haranguing ads from Draft Kings, Caesars, Sportsbook, Fanduel and yelling at the TV over the industry’s predatory tactics, my son began to call me Carrie Nation. But unlike the 19th century temperance crusader, the only ax I swing is verbal. 

In December a conference brought me to Vegas.  I remembered the area well from 2001, when I criss-crossed the country to write a newspaper series on the spread of legal gambling. Then I worried about the potential for addiction. I thought the sky was falling. A federal commission to study the impact of gambling found that problem gambling doubled within 50 miles of a casino. Connecticut, where I live, had two casinos. How could it get much worse? I wondered.

[Here we pause for prolonged, ribald laughter from readers]. 

Now, anyone with a cell phone can have a casino in his pocket, feeding the nearly $55 billion sports betting and online gambling industry.

One of my best interviews back then was with Carol O’Hare, the executive director of the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling. Despite my being late for the interview, and tired from the 108-degree temperature that afternoon, we talked so long that eventually, a night cleaning crew began to vacuum around us. 

O’Hare’s last bet was in 1991 and today, more than three decades in recovery, she still leads the Nevada Council while planning to pass the torch later this year to Ted Hartwell, a member of the Council board.  I walked into her office in late November, on time, and found her searching her files for my long-ago series. I promised to rifle through my attic and mail her a copy.  

Twenty years fell away. I found, unsurprisingly, that O’Hare is still a warrior for good. 

“When you and I last talked, the gaming industry was at a crossroads. The industry feared federal regulation,” O’Hare said. Gambling interests knew they could become like the alcohol Industry, acknowledge that some people get addicted and invest in prevention, or it could be like Big Tobacco, and take a see-no-evil approach. The industry, O’Hare said, chose to acknowledge some negative consequences, but it’s been a scattershot approach. Casino gambling spread to many more states.  Then the Supreme Court in 2018 legalized sports betting when it struck down a 1992 federal law that said states could not, “sponsor, operate, advertise… or authorize by law” wagering on sports. The floodgates opened.

“We’ve seen a lot of progress, but it’s like whack-a-mole,” O’Hare said. “Kids today have grown up with the idea of gambling. It’s just normal,” she said, unlike in years past. “And it isn’t just normal – there’s almost nowhere to go to get away from it.”

The industry, she said, complained for years that it would love to do more to help problem gamblers, but didn’t have enough scientific data to intervene. But that’s not true, O’Hare and Hartwell pointed out; the industry tracks every betting move of gamblers through player cards and uses the data collected to lure customers into more spending. Surely they could use it to help addicted players slow down.  

O’Hare has been adamant that the problem gambling field should work with, not boycott, the industry. “We can’t take a stance for or against,” O’Hare said. “Problem gamblers won’t stop gambling even if you close all the casinos. They will gamble on anything.” There is more public awareness of problem gambling today. “Twenty years ago, I couldn’t even get a problem gambling commercial on PBS,” she said. Still, she said, there is a reluctance on the part of government to measure the downside. “Nevada hasn’t done a study to measure the prevalence of problem gambling since 2000,” she said. It’s not alone. My state of Connecticut, which vowed to do a prevalence study every 10 years, hasn’t done one since 2008.

Keith Whyte, whom I interviewed later, agreed that there is little eagerness to address gambling problems. He’s the executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. “Gambling is expanding on a very shaky system.” The NFL, locked in a deep French kiss with gambling interests, nonetheless has given the Council a donation of  $6.2 million. The Council will use part to beef up its nationwide hotline to help more people with gambling problems. The federal government, which rakes in around $8 billion from taxing gambling winnings and sports betting, has not spent a penny on either gambling treatment or a hotline. Yet last year, the feds spent $282 million to establish a vital nationwide suicide hotline, 998. 

One solution comes from Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-NY. She might be an election denier, but her proposal, the GRIT Act (Gambling addiction Recovery, Investment and Treatment), is a good one: She wants half of the federal excise tax of 0.25 percent now collected on every sports bet to go for gambling treatment and research. Doesn’t sound like much? Think again. From Fiscal Year 2020 to FY21, the revenues from the excise tax alone soared from $38.7 million to $110.7 million. The need for treatment will only grow.

In 2018, Whyte’s organization surveyed 28,000 people - hundreds in every state - and again in 2021, and found there was a 30 percent increase in the risk for problem gambling in that three-year period.  It was the only nationwide prevalence survey in decades, and states lag too. “Most state governments are willfully choosing not to look at evidence of harm to their own citizens,” Whyte said. New Jersey is one exception, requiring casinos to provide data to the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University. It enabled the center to do a prevalence study that found New Jersey’s problem gambling rate is 6.3 percent, triple the rate of other populations. 

So with the latest expansion of gambling, are we still waiting for a tsunami of addiction, or is the tsunami already looming over us? “I still think we are still two to three years ahead of the first wave.” Whyte said.  “There is no question that there will be a spike in gambling problems. The only question is how high. There are two theories - people could moderate their betting behavior after the initial surge, or people will just keep betting after  the initial surge.”  Either way, it seems pretty clear we are on our own. Maybe we all need axes.