A study found that more people are looking for help with gaming addiction online as the number of sports betting sites grows.
They say that public health warnings are “essential to stop the harm caused by gambling and its long-term effects from getting worse.”
The number of people looking for help for gambling addiction online has “increased substantially” over the past few years as more states have made sports betting legal. A study that came out Monday says this means that more teaching about public health is needed.
“The results strongly suggest that sportsbooks are a major health concern,” wrote researchers from Bryn Mawr College and the University of California, San Diego in the medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
“A paradigm shift in how regulatory frameworks and health organizations collaborate to address the complexities of gambling harms is needed,” they said.
The 2018 Supreme Court ruling ended Nevada’s monopoly on sports betting and let other states offer sports gambling. The study comes at a time when sports betting has become a huge business worth billions of dollars.
The American Gaming Association said that people in the US were going to bet around $1.4 billion on the Super Bowl this year. They bet more than $1.25 billion on the game in 2024.
At this point, 38 states and Washington, D.C. allow some kind of sports betting, either in person or online. Few states get less than one hundred million dollars a year from taxes.
When the COVID pandemic stopped sports events in 2020, the number of people looking for help with gaming addiction on the internet either went down or stayed the same. But every year since 2021, when sports betting began in 32 states, more people have looked for those things.
In the past month, people across the country have searched Google for terms like “gambling addiction hotline” and “am I a gambling addict?” 23% more often than expected. This is because of the Supreme Court’s decision.
The study shows that between 6.5 and 7.3 million people looked for “gambling addiction help-seeking” in the 73 months following the event. In June 2023, the most searches happened, with 180,000 per month.
Another set of tests were done by experts in eight states where there were “significantly more searches than expected.” The states in question were Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.
To their minds, the fact that there were more searches in those states was “highly unlikely to be due to chance.”
“Each state’s cumulative increase in searches was higher than the aggregate national model and their peak month typically occurred during 2024, suggesting that searches are continuing to rise following the opening of sportsbooks,” the study says.
Matthew Allen, co-author of the study, says that a lot of companies advertising on TV and social media, as well as big casino chains changing their names to highlight their sports betting choices, have made something that was once frowned upon acceptable.
They found that the rise in online searches shows that the problem of gaming addiction needs to be watched closely by people in charge of public health. To do this, we could study this more and make sure that everyone who needs health care gets it.
“Prompt measures are essential to prevent the escalation of gambling-related harm and its long-term consequences,” the study showed.
This month, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Andrea Salinas (D-Ore.) reintroduced a bill that would give the first-ever direct government funding to attempts across the country to treat, prevent, and study gambling addiction.
The bill has the support of the National Council on Problem Gambling, a non-profit organization that runs the national helpline 1-800-GAMBLER. If it passes, half of the money from the federal sports excise tax would be set away to study and treat gambling addiction.
“The growing legalization of sports betting coupled with the ability to place bets from your phone whenever you want have created the perfect storm for gambling addiction — resulting in a severe public health crisis,” he said.
“With this legislation,” he said, “we work to stop addiction and save lives.”