Opinion | The Sports Gambling Gold Rush Is On. Should We Be Concerned? – The New York Times

Most adults who bet on sports can do so without getting themselves into trouble. But according to Timothy Fong, a director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, about 1 percent of American adults have a gambling disorder, the core symptom of which is the continuation of gambling despite harmful consequences. (Gambling is the only addiction unrelated to substances in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.) More than 20 percent of compulsive gamblers end up filing for bankruptcy, according to Debt.org, a debt-help organization.

With sports gambling now accessible to a much larger audience, some commentators worry that the number of gambling addicts is set to surge. The easier it is to gamble, the more unhappy outcomes youll get, the Times columnist Ross Douthat argues. The more money in the industry, the stronger the incentives to come up with new ways to hook people and then bleed and ruin them. And all that damage is likely to fall disproportionately on the psychologically vulnerable and economically marginal, the strong preying on the weak.

And indeed, there appears already to be good reason for concern. In 2021, the National Problem Gambling help line (1-800-522-4700) received an average of more than 22,500 calls a month, up from 14,800 per month the year before.

Is this a natural consequence of human nature unleashed from the law, or is there something particular about Americas economic and cultural life that might make people here especially susceptible to problem gambling? In The Atlantic, Stephen Marche attributes at least some of the newfound interest in gambling of all kinds to a widely shared feeling of economic precarity, which feeds off ever more desperate attempts to escape it: Gambling expresses, through entertainment, the basic truth of the moment: Everything every little thing can be converted into a marketplace with winners and losers, and the house always wins. The only vice left is being broke.

And left broke many are. Last month, the Times sports columnist Kurt Streeter reached out to nearly a dozen people as old as 82 and as young as 17 in recovery for sports gambling addiction. I heard horror stories, Streeter wrote. They told me about shattered families, lost jobs and foreclosed homes. They spoke of arrests, convictions, jail time and suicide. I heard how dangerous this time of the year is: the end of the college football season, the N.F.L. playoffs, all the money that can be won on the Super Bowl, or, more likely, lost.

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Opinion | The Sports Gambling Gold Rush Is On. Should We Be Concerned? - The New York Times