How to quit a quarter-trillion-dollar gambling habit

We legalized sports betting. Tens of millions are hooked. Now what?

Since being freed from federal bans, gambling sites like DraftKings and Kalshi have become an inescapable part of every sporting event. (Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images)

Americans are on track to gamble away a record-high quarter-trillion dollars this year. Since the Supreme Court stripped away federal bans on sports gambling, regulators have behaved like negligent parents: good enough to keep their charges alive, but only just.

Total losses have grown 67% since COVID-19 started and are up another 8% over the last year alone, increasing faster than at any point from 2000 to 2020. That’s excluding gambling-adjacent activities that happen via crypto, prediction markets, stock options, or other avenues.

America’s modern gambling boom really kicked off after the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA overturned the federal ban on sports betting; since then, 39 states and D.C. have legalized the practice in some form.

Then, during the pandemic, many consumers were stuck at home bored, isolated, and often with money to spare. This further accelerated gambling activity. Were it not for the two most populous states, California and Texas, holding out against the tide of legalization, an even larger supermajority of Americans would now have easy access to official sports betting.

Plenty of people can gamble without letting it ruin their lives. They can play blackjack and bet on their local team without expecting to win big or risking unwise amounts of money, similar to how most people can consume alcohol with no worse outcomes than a hangover. Nearly all vices imply some risk of addiction or self-harm; that doesn’t mean we should automatically ban them.

But it does mean we must take seriously and guard against the potentially life-altering consequences of sports gambling. One brutal finding shows just how devastating losses can be to families: In states where sports betting is legal, an NFL home team upset loss raises intimate partner violence by 10 percentage points more than in non-legal states.

The industry regularly produces addicts who bet to their own detriment, losing large chunks of their income and still convincing themselves to bet more. These are people who gamble a rent payment, credit card bill, or student loan and lose — just to come back next month and gamble more. Research by New York Fed economists Jacob Goss and Daniel Mangrum, looking at millions of credit reports, showed that debt delinquency rates increased as states legalized sports gambling, especially for men and people under 40.

Fundamentally, betting losses cannot continually grow 10% per year without bilking a growing well of problem gamblers.

The pro-gambler, anti-casino lane