An advertising ban would solve 80% of the problem. This stuff has always been around for those who want it, and (arguably) in a free society should be. But shoving it down people's throats in every channel imaginable has to end.
As a professional advertiser: yes. Gambling ads should be illegal. Big issue is supreme court said states cant ban gambling ads due to first amendment.
Funnily enough cigarette ads were banned in 1970 before the Supreme Court regime that says you can't ban ads for a given legal product. If someone were to take the case to the Supreme Court, they could probably get cigarette ads un-banned.
It's still shocking to me that there are so many California Lottery advertisements (I'm sure other states have these too). They're spending taxpayer money to make poor people poorer...
Watching some new shows on Amazon this past month, Kevin Hart can fuck right off with those draft kings commercials. I swear there are at least 10 gambling ads per 1 hour show. It's disgusting.
Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
How do we determine at what point something is “too addictive” to be allowed?
There are many people who can gamble responsibly and enjoy it. I love playing poker, and play in a tournament every few years. Lots of people are compulsive gamblers, though, and lose it all.
Do I have to give up my hobby because some people can’t handle it?
What about drinking? I enjoy a happy hour once a month or so, and have a couple of drinks when I do. Others drink 10+ drinks a month. Do we ban it because of the people who can’t stop? (We know how well that works)
I am not saying we do nothing, but I don’t think it is as easy as “just pass legislation”
We know how full 100% alcohol prohibition in 1920's worked in the USA, but what's missing is that it doesn't have to be a full 100% for it to benefit society. Laws restricting sales, like no selling alcohol past a certain hour, or on Sundays, still exist on the books in many places, and while I can't speak to how well they actually work, given that we'd just stock up on Saturdays anyway, there's also no Al Capone levels of violence in places with those restrictions. So let's not say "we know how that goes" hinting at 1920's prohibition, which was over a century ago now, and just leave it at that.
For a counter example, I like driving fast. Really fast. Should I be banned from doing that because other people can't handle that responsibly? Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
Why should gambling or alcohol be treated different from that?
What would a gambling liability waiver cover? Your losses/damages are not in a confined circuit or ringfenced from your general finances. Are you just agreeing not to sue if you lose your house/wife/job?
> Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
So can I still drink and gamble in private if I sign a waiver?
Sorry, but alcohol prohibition did not work and was instrumental in fueling the rise of organized crime (does that ring any bells?).
I happen to believe the War on Drugs (prohibition v2) is an even bigger mistake than the first one, which also ignores why it came to be: v1 prohibition enforcers needed something to do and there was a growing problems with an "uppity" segment of society that needed to be put in its place. The history of it is horrifying; and the current implementation of it is horrifying as well.
So legalize it all. Regulate the advertisement/promotion/access/purity, etc. It's going to happen one way or another and pushing it into the shadows only makes it worse.
So let the gambling happen but keep it on a short leash.
I was playing fast and loose with the word, but you know what I meant.
I'm all for individuals to choose their own paths and mistakes and don't want a true nanny state, so I'd be ok with banning advertising of those services, as well as independent audits to ensure that they are not letting minors in.
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
Specifically the part where a variant of this protein seems directly implicated in the specific self upregulation that leads to changes in the brains reward pathways that seem to directly cause the sort of "Drug seeking" and other addiction seeking behaviors that are so harmful in addiction.
I especially love the part where we tried inhibiting this protein expression with simple chemicals administered orally in rats and it significantly improved their addictions, and we did that in 2015, and we have not touched it since
Gosh, wouldn't it just be the best if we had spent $4 trillion on bioscience instead of GPUs? I feel like we understand circuits pretty well by comparison.
That's crazy that the whole reward system might just come down to one protein and how long you crave another reward is literally just the time until that protein decays.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil? Why does the government get to do it if we can't? It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it. The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)
Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.
Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.
Harm reduction. In the US, state lotteries have reduced illegal gambling. Illegal gambling would increase under a total ban.
Some markets fail. If the government can step in and provide a service that doesn't end in a failed market, that's not an imposition on anyone's freedom.
I think of it is the level of regulation I'd require / desire in an endeavour.
On one side there's things with very little regulation required, private companies go crazy (and they will!:).
On the other hand, there's things I want high regulation on - use of violence (army / pokice / security), medicine, key infra utilities, alcohol/drugs/gambling, etc.
We can discuss whether we agree those things need regulation, and if so, what form that regulation takes.
(To me, some things I want so highly regulated there's no benefit in private ownership, just risk of runaway loop exploitation)
> This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
It makes a lot of sense. Here in Idaho, hard alcohol can only be sold in state run liquor stores. The stores aren't advertised and the staff is all well trained. People that want booze can still get it, but at the same time it's not being ran like a business (It still turns a profit). That is to say, there's no advertising or marketing for it.
> If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil?
People are going to gamble if they want to. Making it illegal just pushes them to underground gambling. Making it state ran allows the state to better control the gambling, including doing things like having the ability to provide recovery options and interventions.
> Why does the government get to do it if we can't?
The government isn't motivated by (just) money. They don't have to advertise for gambling and they don't have shareholders to make happy. They could even operate the gambling at a loss if they wanted to.
> It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it.
Completely the opposite. The government doing it happens to stop underground gambling from happening. You can sue the government and expect them to treat you fairly. Underground gambling, on the other hand, has no reason or motivation to treat it's participants fairly.
>It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
So no nation in history should have been allowed to have a military to defend its loot or to acquire more loot.
Some things are better left in control of the government _because_ they are dangerous. You either:
* Outlaw gambling, and gamblers will just go towards shadier options, putting their own lives in even more risk.
* Allow private operators whose goal is to extract as much money from possible from gamblers as possible and ensure that you will inevitably have people abusing the system up to the limits to which it can go and testing out if they can go further, over and over again
* Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Only one of those options is sensible.
>The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
HAHAHAHAHA. No. Absolutely not. Some people are truly as caricatural as movies and books make them appear, and casino owners truly live up to it. I worked for them, for "betting rooms", anything you want: they are thieves, mafias, manipulators and bring nothing but misery on the world. They're not "fighting for their freedom", they have found a legal way to abuse human misery and addictions.
> Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Please list any state lotteries that offer any of these things. All I've seen is an 800 number to call, listed in the fine print at the bottom of the advertising. And they advertise everywhere, and though many were established with promises to "fund education" or something that sounds noble, money is fungible so it just gets sloshed around in the state budgets.
"My country that is hostile to public healthcare doesn't offer public healthcare" no shit sherlock, the US's healthcare system is a shitshow. Look at anywhere in Europe where those lotteries are publicly ran. The entire post is about changing the law, that doesn't include closing your eyes on how it's currently shit.
Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
Practically any entertainment product is going to have problem users(food products too, along with alcohol and other drugs).
There are people who play video games to excess or watch tv to excess and it is harmful to them, but that really needs to be balanced against the vast majority of users that exercise reasonable restraint. Its just not a fair justification to ban things that 99.9%+ of users are about to operate responsibly.
Well firstly, specifically in gambling, self-reported statistics from the NCPG indicate that of the 60%-ish of the population that will engage in gambling, about 5-7% develop problems around that gambling. So it isn't 99.9%, it's more like 95%.
Secondly, let's take this out of percentages: That 60%-ish slice is 150 million people, so your conservative 5% number of people who will have problems amounts to 7.5 million people. So like, if you were being a bit hyperbolic but not terribly, you could say your fun hobby of gambling which you do responsibly, is still responsible for 7.5 million people's addiction. Which I agree isn't a reason to BAN it, but I would say is a reason to, I dunno, not make it so you can do it on your phone? Which was the status quo for the majority of the time we've had smartphones. Like a major deterrent to sports gambling being addictive, even where it's permitted, was that you had to actually go to a bookie's and place bets, and collect your winnings there, not just sit on your sofa doing it on your phone.
Thirdly if you want to expand this into video games, I think addiction there is pretty problematic too, and has gotten substantially worse in the last ten years or so, specifically with the advent of micro-transactions. When I was a kiddo if you were "addicted" to something like Grand Theft Auto, the worst thing that would probably happen to you is your parents taking away your XBox and telling you take a fuckin shower and/or go outside. Or coworkers telling you you smelled, if you happened to be older. The worst thing you could say from that era would be something like WoW subscription fees, and while that's definitely ethically gray for me, I think they can make an argument on the fact that you just buying the game can't offset the costs they face in keeping it updated, maintaining the online services to enable it, the moderation of that platform, etc. etc. etc. However modern Gacha games especially have taken a LOT of heat for flagrantly predatory monetization practices that greatly affect people with certain kinds of neurodivergencies, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on them, oftentimes against the wishes of their carers or spouses. That certainly sucks, and I don't think there's any kind of ethical argument one can make in favor of it, it's just straight exploitation of vulnerable people.
TV addiction is gonna be it's own paragraph but most of the people in my parents generation think the Democrats are communists and are so utterly brain-rotted from the idiot box that they can't even answer basic questions about the reality they live in, so I'm gonna say that's kind of "enough said" there.
There's always going to be an element of addiction in anything, you're correct, because addiction is really just getting hooked, to a problematic degree, on the sense of pleasure you get from doing or consuming a thing, and that thing can be basically anything. That said, a whole lot of very large, very valuable businesses, including many that are owned and operated by the State, take advantage of that to push predatory products onto vulnerable populations, and that's kinda fucked, no?
> In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is ± 3k. A lot to spend on a hobby, but the total is often misleading.
I was just coming to say the prediction markets are probably way, way worse for society; sports or otherwise. For one thing, they'll be around a trillion dollar market in a few years[1]. How is that in any way a good thing? For another, every bettor on a prediction market is incentivized to use insider information at best, or even to influence the outcome at worst. This is a low point of civilization.
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
Sportsbooks typically pay back more like 90%, brick and mortar casinos 90%-99% depending on the game. I don't know what Ontario mandates for regulated online casinos, but I'd guess they're at the high end of that and focus on volume, return custom and dark patterns rather than extreme house edge.
If it's 98%, the average household loses 0.2% of their income gambling.
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
I’ve traded over a million dollars of equity volume this year but my brokerage account has less than $50,000 in it. You can wager the same dollar more than once.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
> The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
> And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
So gambling will be limited to anyone with AnyDesk?
> What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment?
Banning cryptocurrency as a concept,
banning fantasy sports betting (shown as credits, settled in dollars in person or out-of-band),
banning Tor,
I could go on.
But the real lever would be to make it illegal! Which, it was, in many jurisdictions. Now it’s splashed all over every NFL broadcast, as you alluded to with your advertising portion.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
Maybe, maybe not. Our system is based on triage so if you are in dire need you go first.
A few years ago I thought I broke some ribs in a snowboarding accident (turns out it was just 3 cracked ribs). Got to the ER, was given some pain medication and help breathing and was waiting for treatment when someone ran over 2 elderly people in front of the hospital. Their need was greater than mine so they took priority while I spent about 6 hours waiting.
Last week I had my first heart attack. In this case I was the one that was immediately helped, stabilized, transferred to another hospital where they installed 2 stents and then back to my local hospital ICU all within 2 hours. If it weren’t for our system I would not be here today.
Most stories about hours in ER waiting rooms simply don't take the severity of the issue into account and just generalize.
Not saying that there are not issues, but I am so tired of the blanket anecdotal complaints
Dang. You're young and healthy enough to do intense snowboarding, and then a few years later suffer a heart attack? Glad you're doing better now, and thanks for the reminder to try to take care of my health.
The ERs I'm familiar with would look at you, see that you're not bleeding out or having a heart attack or stroke, and then you'd sit in the waiting room for six hours to finally be seen by an intern who would send you out with a psych referral (probably booked out months in advance).
I had the same question. I'm guessing that they tried to commit suicide or something but didn't think we could handle hearing that so they didn't mention it in the article.
Vegas was such a great solution to gambling for Americans. We had it contained to a specific place, making it easy to access but also easy to avoid.
Cryptocurrency, which turned into just another form of gambling, seems to have been the corrupting influence that allowed it to spread into people's homes. I hope we can reverse it somehow.
Totally helpful and I believe accurate. I find the times where I’m actually most productive with coding agents are not super fun, instead it’s iterative manual qa and code review hell. But while that actually results in good, usable code it’s not addictive, quite the opposite it feels like work. Whereas starting from scratch vibe coding a whatever-ma-jigger sure feels like a blast until I actually start pushing at edge cases.
So there is more awareness of the problem, gambling ads are required to publish a helpline number. Most of the gamers have other psychological disorders. Thus it's awareness + more consistent asking for help + regular naming of gambling among other problems.
What is the number of non-gamblers that started gambling and ended up in ER and would not have eneded up in ER if gambling wasn't available?
I was passively watching the NFL pregame last weekend, and they straight up had gambling-sponsored segments where they showed live odds for all sorts of events/stats for the day's games. It's become completely pervasive in the span of a couple years. But I live in the US, aka Biff Tannen's Pleasure Palace.
Back when legalized gambling was on the ballot for my state, I was enthusiastic supportive, even though I don’t enjoy gambling personally. I conflated these bans with a sort of religious and social nannying, an affront to individual liberties and denying a legal livelihood for something people will do anyways. Legalizing gambling was a step in liberating society from churches and the state. Considering I had no skin in the game, I ignorantly downplayed mental health claims. Years later, I not only regret my support but am deeply embarrassed by it.
Since then, I’ve watched an alarming number of friends and coworkers slip into erratic and reckless patterns of anti-social behavior and self harm. People I never would have expected. No economic or social renaissance has followed as proponents might have claimed back in the day. The casinos around me are large, costly, seedy, hopelessly depressing dumps littered with equally depressing people that stink of desperation and delusion.
The expansion, normalization, and corporatization of traditional gambling and prediction markets is accelerating degeneracy and letting low rent hucksters strip mine countries where they are legal and leave the rest of us paying the bill. I think they are a genuine risk to the health and safety of society.
The study addresses it. You don't walk into an ER and say "Doctor I have a gambling addiction.", rather you typically present as having a suicide attempt, intoxication or drug overdose, psychosis, or panic attack. During the assessment the treating team identifies the main contributing reason for one of the above listed conditions and there are two specific codes available if gambling is one of the primary contributors.
> "More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
> An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
> In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress
reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
I’m confused, are these suicide attempts due to gambling addiction or is it mental health ER patients looking to enter a gambling addiction treatment program?
I’m having a hard time thinking of any other reason that a gambling addiction would cause someone to visit the ER.
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
That's because parkisons drugs can upregulate a certain protein that is implicated in all forms of addiction that feature that kind of "seeking" behavior and modification of the reward system!
We found that if you give an addicted rat a chemical which suppresses the expression of this gene, it will improve their addiction situation, reduce seeking behaviors, etc.
I find the "normal" forms of gambling very boring: going to a casino, sports betting, lottery tickets, prediction markets, etc. I just assume I'll lose money because that's what tends to happen, so I have no interest in playing. As a result I thought I was a higher life-form, immune to gambling.
Then I played some mobile JRPGs that had gacha (gambling) elements. New fancy unit (big damage numbers or skimpy clothing or both) comes out every week and you get them by spending scarce resources on slot machine-like animations. Somehow I fell for this, despite knowing all about how gachas work, spending hundreds of dollars over the course of a few years. Now I realize I'm not a superior life-form. I just needed to be gifted a few wins of something that mattered to me, and then I'm throwing away money on pull after pull just like a casino gambling addict.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely.
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I think that I would get more enjoyment dropping $20 in the parking lot at a casino and seeing somebody excited to find $20 than going inside to gamble it away.
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
>I fail to empathise with gamblers [...] because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
Consider the possibility that your brain chemistry is different from that of other people, and that this could affect the level of responsibility people bring to bear here.
Sure, but you can say the same about alcohol, drugs, sweets, red meat, sex, motorcycles, base jumping... pretty quickly we're going to end up in a pretty milktoast world.
I met someone recently who filed bankruptcy over tens of thousands of dollars of debt incurred obsessing over baseball cards (!) There is always going to be someone.
I think if you could drink alcohol through your phone, people would probably pause on whether that's a good thing.
Surely you can use your imagination a bit and imagine the difference between baseball cards and connecting your bank account to a gambling app, especially with all the paid endorsements from companies and celebrities telling young people they will make a lot of money using these apps.
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
I haven't looked much into the Canadian levels, but I assume they are similar to the US. Some stats might not be quite right, but...
Something like .15% of the US population skydive a year. Almost none of them die.
I've seen estimates that over 5% of the US population gamble at a "problem" level and about 0.5% to 1% are outright addicted. About 20% of those addicted have a suicide attempt.
Americans who skydive in the US will be about the same number of Americans who attempt suicide due to gambling issues. Skydiving is quite safe so the death rate is so minimal.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
All gambling should be state owned. It is a strict societal loss anyway, we can at least soften the overall blow.
Losses can be redistributed and cover for the externalities of gambling. And we will be able to control the knob on how addictive we make them.
For profit companies have the target to maximize their profit, so of course they will ramp up any method that can bring in more revenue.
An advertising ban would solve 80% of the problem. This stuff has always been around for those who want it, and (arguably) in a free society should be. But shoving it down people's throats in every channel imaginable has to end.
As a professional advertiser: yes. Gambling ads should be illegal. Big issue is supreme court said states cant ban gambling ads due to first amendment.
Certain porn is illegal despite the first amendment existing - the court merely invented a "nuh uh" exception, called "obscenity".
Current precedent is that states can ban almost anything they want, but if something is legal, you cant ban ads for it.
Is it legal to advertise cigarettes in the US?
Point is the supreme court can just "nuh uh" anything they want to
Cigarette ads have a ton of restrictions despite that first amendment existing
Funnily enough cigarette ads were banned in 1970 before the Supreme Court regime that says you can't ban ads for a given legal product. If someone were to take the case to the Supreme Court, they could probably get cigarette ads un-banned.
With a sufficient endowment to the Trump family, one can get anything they want from this supreme court
It's still shocking to me that there are so many California Lottery advertisements (I'm sure other states have these too). They're spending taxpayer money to make poor people poorer...
Watching some new shows on Amazon this past month, Kevin Hart can fuck right off with those draft kings commercials. I swear there are at least 10 gambling ads per 1 hour show. It's disgusting.
Pretty much agree. But even then, the state should not be incentivizing its use (looking you, CA lottery and friends).
Gambling is a drug, and should be recognized as such.
Adrenaline is the drug, ain't it ... And gambling is just one way to leverage it.
However once you realize that gambling is not the drug, and merely something that triggers your body to create a rush... Then can you really call it a drug? At least any more then any other of those activities?
Eg Skydiving and basically any other extreme sports.
And once you're there, you should really realize that it's not worth the sacrifice.
This is a societal issue and should not be addressed with legislation.
The only thing that can be safely regulated are things like disallowing marketing.
Why wouldn't it be addressed with legislation? What is legislation for if not to solve societal issues?
Also, gambling is empirically much more addictive and leads to worse outcomes than extreme sports - hence why many feel it needs to be limited.
How do we determine at what point something is “too addictive” to be allowed?
There are many people who can gamble responsibly and enjoy it. I love playing poker, and play in a tournament every few years. Lots of people are compulsive gamblers, though, and lose it all.
Do I have to give up my hobby because some people can’t handle it?
What about drinking? I enjoy a happy hour once a month or so, and have a couple of drinks when I do. Others drink 10+ drinks a month. Do we ban it because of the people who can’t stop? (We know how well that works)
I am not saying we do nothing, but I don’t think it is as easy as “just pass legislation”
We know how full 100% alcohol prohibition in 1920's worked in the USA, but what's missing is that it doesn't have to be a full 100% for it to benefit society. Laws restricting sales, like no selling alcohol past a certain hour, or on Sundays, still exist on the books in many places, and while I can't speak to how well they actually work, given that we'd just stock up on Saturdays anyway, there's also no Al Capone levels of violence in places with those restrictions. So let's not say "we know how that goes" hinting at 1920's prohibition, which was over a century ago now, and just leave it at that.
For a counter example, I like driving fast. Really fast. Should I be banned from doing that because other people can't handle that responsibly? Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
Why should gambling or alcohol be treated different from that?
What would a gambling liability waiver cover? Your losses/damages are not in a confined circuit or ringfenced from your general finances. Are you just agreeing not to sue if you lose your house/wife/job?
> Society has looked at that and decided that, yes, no one should be allowed to do that on public streets. So I keep that behavior to the race track and sign an extra liability waiver in order to do so.
So can I still drink and gamble in private if I sign a waiver?
Sorry, but alcohol prohibition did not work and was instrumental in fueling the rise of organized crime (does that ring any bells?).
I happen to believe the War on Drugs (prohibition v2) is an even bigger mistake than the first one, which also ignores why it came to be: v1 prohibition enforcers needed something to do and there was a growing problems with an "uppity" segment of society that needed to be put in its place. The history of it is horrifying; and the current implementation of it is horrifying as well.
So legalize it all. Regulate the advertisement/promotion/access/purity, etc. It's going to happen one way or another and pushing it into the shadows only makes it worse.
So let the gambling happen but keep it on a short leash.
> Sorry, but alcohol prohibition did not work
That's what GP said too, albeit poorly.
Dopamine, and many drugs trigger it in the same way as gambling.
I was playing fast and loose with the word, but you know what I meant.
I'm all for individuals to choose their own paths and mistakes and don't want a true nanny state, so I'd be ok with banning advertising of those services, as well as independent audits to ensure that they are not letting minors in.
We should try GLP-1s. It patches the brain's reward center.
GLP-1 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280797 - March 2026
GLP-1 medications get at the heart of addiction: study - https://medicine.washu.edu/news/glp-1-medications-get-at-the... - March 4th, 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907422 (citations)
There is a fentanyl vaccine approaching human trials, but I don't believe its mechanism works close enough to the reward center. Maybe gene therapy is a long term fix as it relates to the reward center dysfunction, to be determined.
HN Search: fentanyl vaccine - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Resetting the Brain’s Reward Pathway: Gene Therapy’s Breakthrough in Alcohol Addiction - https://scitechdaily.com/resetting-the-brains-reward-pathway... - August 20th, 2023
I have recently found the following article interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB
Specifically the part where a variant of this protein seems directly implicated in the specific self upregulation that leads to changes in the brains reward pathways that seem to directly cause the sort of "Drug seeking" and other addiction seeking behaviors that are so harmful in addiction.
I especially love the part where we tried inhibiting this protein expression with simple chemicals administered orally in rats and it significantly improved their addictions, and we did that in 2015, and we have not touched it since
Gosh, wouldn't it just be the best if we had spent $4 trillion on bioscience instead of GPUs? I feel like we understand circuits pretty well by comparison.
That's crazy that the whole reward system might just come down to one protein and how long you crave another reward is literally just the time until that protein decays.
Social media is also a drug. So is television.
State owned, no advertising, and your last year's tax return to prove income.
As they are now, even state level gambling is used as a tax on the poor, because they're the people desperate enough to do it.
It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil? Why does the government get to do it if we can't? It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it. The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
Because any addictive thing is on a spectrum and you don't want the people with incentives to go all the way up the spectrum to be the operator of the harmful thing, a là the dose makes the poison. (See alcohol, cigarettes, any class of drugs etc.)
Some things are just wholly harmful where no small amount provides any benefits, some are harmful in large doses, but not so harmful in small doses that they cannot provide other uses.
Governments (ideally) don't exist to maximize profit so they are (generally) not incentivized to increase the addictions of their populace.
Which is to say, total prohibition doesn't work, so they need to provide a some release, just not a total free for all.
Harm reduction. In the US, state lotteries have reduced illegal gambling. Illegal gambling would increase under a total ban.
Some markets fail. If the government can step in and provide a service that doesn't end in a failed market, that's not an imposition on anyone's freedom.
I think of it is the level of regulation I'd require / desire in an endeavour.
On one side there's things with very little regulation required, private companies go crazy (and they will!:).
On the other hand, there's things I want high regulation on - use of violence (army / pokice / security), medicine, key infra utilities, alcohol/drugs/gambling, etc.
We can discuss whether we agree those things need regulation, and if so, what form that regulation takes.
(To me, some things I want so highly regulated there's no benefit in private ownership, just risk of runaway loop exploitation)
> This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
It makes a lot of sense. Here in Idaho, hard alcohol can only be sold in state run liquor stores. The stores aren't advertised and the staff is all well trained. People that want booze can still get it, but at the same time it's not being ran like a business (It still turns a profit). That is to say, there's no advertising or marketing for it.
> If it is bad and yet the government is allowed to use it to make money then is the government evil?
People are going to gamble if they want to. Making it illegal just pushes them to underground gambling. Making it state ran allows the state to better control the gambling, including doing things like having the ability to provide recovery options and interventions.
> Why does the government get to do it if we can't?
The government isn't motivated by (just) money. They don't have to advertise for gambling and they don't have shareholders to make happy. They could even operate the gambling at a loss if they wanted to.
> It just makes the whole thing seem ridiculous and makes underground betting seem like I guess it isn't really that bad since the government is allowed to do it.
Completely the opposite. The government doing it happens to stop underground gambling from happening. You can sue the government and expect them to treat you fairly. Underground gambling, on the other hand, has no reason or motivation to treat it's participants fairly.
It reminds me of state-run liquor stores in some US states.
>It should either be illegal or not. This idea that the state has a monopoly on getting money from doing a thing that you are saying is bad doesn't make sense.
So no nation in history should have been allowed to have a military to defend its loot or to acquire more loot.
Some things are better left in control of the government _because_ they are dangerous. You either:
* Outlaw gambling, and gamblers will just go towards shadier options, putting their own lives in even more risk.
* Allow private operators whose goal is to extract as much money from possible from gamblers as possible and ensure that you will inevitably have people abusing the system up to the limits to which it can go and testing out if they can go further, over and over again
* Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Only one of those options is sensible.
>The operators are just people fighting for their freedom to operate the same business the government operates.
HAHAHAHAHA. No. Absolutely not. Some people are truly as caricatural as movies and books make them appear, and casino owners truly live up to it. I worked for them, for "betting rooms", anything you want: they are thieves, mafias, manipulators and bring nothing but misery on the world. They're not "fighting for their freedom", they have found a legal way to abuse human misery and addictions.
> Government ran gambling organisations that can ensure they also offer proper systems to wean yourself off, offer healthcare, and make use of the money "made" from operating it to improve your health care systems.
Please list any state lotteries that offer any of these things. All I've seen is an 800 number to call, listed in the fine print at the bottom of the advertising. And they advertise everywhere, and though many were established with promises to "fund education" or something that sounds noble, money is fungible so it just gets sloshed around in the state budgets.
"My country that is hostile to public healthcare doesn't offer public healthcare" no shit sherlock, the US's healthcare system is a shitshow. Look at anywhere in Europe where those lotteries are publicly ran. The entire post is about changing the law, that doesn't include closing your eyes on how it's currently shit.
Our incredible brains are easily high-jacked. Another concerning trend in global/societal mental health that stresses different parts of it (e.g. increased ER visits). If the entirety of humanity is a connected mind let's say, and more and more parts of it are being damaged by companies that capitalize on "flaws" in the human brain -- which means our shared mentality keeps weakening and can be exploited more and more. It's just so much easier now because there is a machine in your pocket full of endless ways to high-jack your mind and attention.
We live in really crazy/fascinating times, accelerating human problems at "internet scale".
There is also the direction of influencing those in charge of creating laws and orders and ways to prevent society from collapsing. Law makers who give in to lobbying -- I mean some of these prices points are quite low: $XX,XXX to get someone to vote "yes" for a thing that impacts millions of constituents and earns the lobbying orders of magnitude more than the payout. That is excellent ROI.
Yeah it is so absurd. The going cost of a politician in local California politics is on the order of $30-60k a year. Very inexpensive when they vote on policies shaping billions of dollars worth of sales.
Prices were higher when the risk was more than a spicy blog post making fun of you, when you sold out your entire town/county/State/country.
It is interesting how we actually ended up forming societies and cultures with how many little broken things occur in our minds. I guess as the saying goes "What doesn't kill you leaves you a hollow broken shell to pump out more copies of your DNA".
maybe its the other way around. my wife and I are pretty 'special', but when we step in to try to make up the different for each other we're a little more basically functional.
Organizing into communities and societies is absolutely what has allowed humanity to prosper beyond the sum of its parts. Our propensity for both idealism and shame, while being deeply intertwined with our vulnerability to highjacking, are also things that allow us to imagine something better and strive to achieve it. There's nothing that brings out shame better than the presence of other people, and nothing more inspiring than working well together with others towards a common goal.
Because these problems have never been dealt with. We scold victims and sell this "individual responsibility"/"bootstraps" bullshit to avoid doing so. Some of us create these products that actively fuck with people's ability to make decisions well, and then we yell at those people and tell them to act right.
The only difference now is the Internet both makes it frictionless and therefore so much easier to do, and the Internet also then let's us see into the lives being ruined in the process. But the problem remains exactly the same: if you, as a person, have no ethics and see no issue in causing misery at scale, you can make a LOT of fucking money in our society. And not only will you likely not be charged, now they'll probably call you an innovator and put you on a magazine.
And then we wonder why everything is getting worse all the time.
And before anyone tries the gotcha with me, no I do not work at any firm like this. No gambling, no social media, no recommendation algorithms. The company I work at comes by it honestly: we sell solutions to problems people actually have. And no we're not worth 66 trillion dollars but, we can all sleep at night. And that's not so bad.
Practically any entertainment product is going to have problem users(food products too, along with alcohol and other drugs).
There are people who play video games to excess or watch tv to excess and it is harmful to them, but that really needs to be balanced against the vast majority of users that exercise reasonable restraint. Its just not a fair justification to ban things that 99.9%+ of users are about to operate responsibly.
Well firstly, specifically in gambling, self-reported statistics from the NCPG indicate that of the 60%-ish of the population that will engage in gambling, about 5-7% develop problems around that gambling. So it isn't 99.9%, it's more like 95%.
Secondly, let's take this out of percentages: That 60%-ish slice is 150 million people, so your conservative 5% number of people who will have problems amounts to 7.5 million people. So like, if you were being a bit hyperbolic but not terribly, you could say your fun hobby of gambling which you do responsibly, is still responsible for 7.5 million people's addiction. Which I agree isn't a reason to BAN it, but I would say is a reason to, I dunno, not make it so you can do it on your phone? Which was the status quo for the majority of the time we've had smartphones. Like a major deterrent to sports gambling being addictive, even where it's permitted, was that you had to actually go to a bookie's and place bets, and collect your winnings there, not just sit on your sofa doing it on your phone.
Thirdly if you want to expand this into video games, I think addiction there is pretty problematic too, and has gotten substantially worse in the last ten years or so, specifically with the advent of micro-transactions. When I was a kiddo if you were "addicted" to something like Grand Theft Auto, the worst thing that would probably happen to you is your parents taking away your XBox and telling you take a fuckin shower and/or go outside. Or coworkers telling you you smelled, if you happened to be older. The worst thing you could say from that era would be something like WoW subscription fees, and while that's definitely ethically gray for me, I think they can make an argument on the fact that you just buying the game can't offset the costs they face in keeping it updated, maintaining the online services to enable it, the moderation of that platform, etc. etc. etc. However modern Gacha games especially have taken a LOT of heat for flagrantly predatory monetization practices that greatly affect people with certain kinds of neurodivergencies, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on them, oftentimes against the wishes of their carers or spouses. That certainly sucks, and I don't think there's any kind of ethical argument one can make in favor of it, it's just straight exploitation of vulnerable people.
TV addiction is gonna be it's own paragraph but most of the people in my parents generation think the Democrats are communists and are so utterly brain-rotted from the idiot box that they can't even answer basic questions about the reality they live in, so I'm gonna say that's kind of "enough said" there.
There's always going to be an element of addiction in anything, you're correct, because addiction is really just getting hooked, to a problematic degree, on the sense of pleasure you get from doing or consuming a thing, and that thing can be basically anything. That said, a whole lot of very large, very valuable businesses, including many that are owned and operated by the State, take advantage of that to push predatory products onto vulnerable populations, and that's kinda fucked, no?
> In 2024, Ontarians wagered $82.7 billion CAD on these sites through 2.6 million player accounts.
Truly astounding numbers. Without a doubt, online gambling is the most preventable public health crisis of our generation. None of this had any business getting legalized.
Important context that many of these dollars are counted multiple times.
Ex: you bet 100 and win, bringing your holdings to 200. You bet another 100 and lose, back to 100. You’ve gambled $200 but have arrived at the same number you started with.
I have friends who gamble in excess of 100k/yr total. In general their net is ± 3k. A lot to spend on a hobby, but the total is often misleading.
Good call out. I hadn't considered this. Would be interesting to see net.
Wow, good thing I'm a curmudgeon who only wants to bet at an IRL sportsbook. A place I only get around to visiting every few years.
No good can come of me having a gambling app, I already fool around too much with stocks.
I was just coming to say the prediction markets are probably way, way worse for society; sports or otherwise. For one thing, they'll be around a trillion dollar market in a few years[1]. How is that in any way a good thing? For another, every bettor on a prediction market is incentivized to use insider information at best, or even to influence the outcome at worst. This is a low point of civilization.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/14/prediction-markets-will-grow...
That figure seemed way off to me (gut response) so I did a tiny bit of digging: Ontario claims income (primary household income) for 2024 was $791B. ~10% isn't as shocking as I expected.
Wagering 10% of your household income is not shocking?? What would it take to shock you? That is an astounding amount.
Most people are living paycheck to paycheck. I've watched gambling destroy more than one family member's lives.
To put this number in context: estimate 1/3 of income for rent, so this is 1/3 of their rent?! Translating that to my own rent is an amount that would immediately lead me to quit forever.
The key word is *as*. It's a lot, it's shocking, it's not *as* shocking as my I thought on first read.
It's both better and worse than it seems. I'm guessing something like 50% of folks gamble $0. Then another 45% gamble some amount of their income, averaging 10%. Finally 5% will gamble everything they have and send their family careening into poverty.
Really? That's an incredible number to me. 10% of all household spending goes to gambling?! 31,000 dollars per player *per year*? The mind boggles.
By transaction volume yes. Presumably it’s not all spending though, if you regularly win back some of that money. The same dollar is probably wagered multiple times before it is lost.
Ontario lotteries pay out about 58 cents per dollar in, so that's still $13,000 annually out-of-pocket for a total spend of $31,000. That's crazy money.
Sportsbooks typically pay back more like 90%, brick and mortar casinos 90%-99% depending on the game. I don't know what Ontario mandates for regulated online casinos, but I'd guess they're at the high end of that and focus on volume, return custom and dark patterns rather than extreme house edge.
If it's 98%, the average household loses 0.2% of their income gambling.
https://igamingontario.ca/en/news/igaming-ontario-posts-stea...
$3.2B revenue, 2.6M player accounts, ~$1230/yr ~= $100/month
An average of $31807 per person...
It also could be inflated due to winnings being put back into another bet. A single dollar could be accounted for multiple times if used in multiple bets.
Not that I am saying that this number is ok, gambling is a net negative on any society.
Average is meaningless for anything that isn’t a normal distribution. The median spend per account is probably like $100.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49733104
Comes out to about $100/month
Also, spend is different than wager if every wager might return money to be re-wagered.
"The average is meaningless so here is a number I pulled from my ass."
while the specific illustrative example they gave may be ass-pulled, the point the parent comment is making is valid.
The gross amount doesn't tell you how much money is being lost to gambling. I'm not going to soften that wording, it really is lost, but such a shocking gross amount means the average loss is in the thousands per year. Gambling is also the archetypal whale hunt. Your best customers are harmed most by your product.
There's nothing else that delivers that level of harm directly to a device in your pocket.
I’ve traded over a million dollars of equity volume this year but my brokerage account has less than $50,000 in it. You can wager the same dollar more than once.
Some can.
It's a long tail. The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow. And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because otherwise "what's the point?".
Short of outright banning (which I would favor), we can at least make mobile wagers capped at say $100 and the same account can't wager more that $500 within a 24 hour period.
That would allow people to have their fun but seriously limit the blast radius when they inevitably lose big repeatedly.
> The vast majority make $20 parlay wagers here and there and they're the real cash cow.
You got the meaning of "whale" wrong. The majority of the winnings / losings come from the "long tail" addicts.
> And then there are the degens that make $2,000, or $5,000 wagers on everything because [they are addicted]
I think my edit more accurately reflects what is going on.
You need to put more time into the proposal if you want to make it serious. How long would it take for people to learn they need "alt accounts" to gamble?
Suggestions:
1. Ban advertising of gambling.
2. Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment? Post a link to someone who has thought about it.
> Ban "remote" gambling including phone apps.
So gambling will be limited to anyone with AnyDesk?
> What would it take to make progress on this in the current regulatory environment?
Banning cryptocurrency as a concept,
banning fantasy sports betting (shown as credits, settled in dollars in person or out-of-band),
banning Tor,
I could go on.
But the real lever would be to make it illegal! Which, it was, in many jurisdictions. Now it’s splashed all over every NFL broadcast, as you alluded to with your advertising portion.
Basically printing money just like tobacco companies used to be (and now are again with smokeless products). I'm not generally in favor of morality police laws, but this is so egregious it's beyond morality to me- it's vulnerable peoples' firmware getting exploited to give predatory actors their money.
> Emergency room visits for gambling disorders
Are Canadian ERs different than ERs in the U.S.? Why would one go to an emergency room, seek emergency treatment, for a gambling disorder?
Self-harm and suicide attempts account for some situations, I think following that you can imagine others. The article mentions that 70% include other mental health disorders, with a gambling addiction as a contributing factor for presentation.
is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
but my skimming of the study itself is that something else occurs (mental episode of some sort, such as anxiety attacks or suicide attempts, etc.) and gambling is noted as a primary or contributing factor in the billing code. it does not appear like someone wakes up, realizes they have an addiction to gambling, and then walks into the ER.
> is the sense that it wont immediately bankrupt you, yes, they are different.
also in the sense that you'll wait for a looong time to get treatment
You also wait a looooong time to get treatment at an ER in the US too, unless you're actively dying, and sometimes even if you are.
never been my experience
the reason i brought up cost is because gambling addicts having a mental crisis are not typically sitting on piles of cash. a canadian gambling addict would be more willing to visit the ER than a us one because of the cost of the visit.
the pay vs. wait argument is a fun one, but im not super interested in hashing it out here
Maybe, maybe not. Our system is based on triage so if you are in dire need you go first.
A few years ago I thought I broke some ribs in a snowboarding accident (turns out it was just 3 cracked ribs). Got to the ER, was given some pain medication and help breathing and was waiting for treatment when someone ran over 2 elderly people in front of the hospital. Their need was greater than mine so they took priority while I spent about 6 hours waiting.
Last week I had my first heart attack. In this case I was the one that was immediately helped, stabilized, transferred to another hospital where they installed 2 stents and then back to my local hospital ICU all within 2 hours. If it weren’t for our system I would not be here today.
Most stories about hours in ER waiting rooms simply don't take the severity of the issue into account and just generalize.
Not saying that there are not issues, but I am so tired of the blanket anecdotal complaints
Dang. You're young and healthy enough to do intense snowboarding, and then a few years later suffer a heart attack? Glad you're doing better now, and thanks for the reminder to try to take care of my health.
If you’re in the midst of some kind of crisis, whether physical or mental, it’s somewhere safe you can go that’s available 24/7.
From there they can keep you safe until you’re stabilized (physically or mentally) and then refer you to specialists or hospitalize you.
The ERs I'm familiar with would look at you, see that you're not bleeding out or having a heart attack or stroke, and then you'd sit in the waiting room for six hours to finally be seen by an intern who would send you out with a psych referral (probably booked out months in advance).
I had the same question. I'm guessing that they tried to commit suicide or something but didn't think we could handle hearing that so they didn't mention it in the article.
Vegas was such a great solution to gambling for Americans. We had it contained to a specific place, making it easy to access but also easy to avoid.
Cryptocurrency, which turned into just another form of gambling, seems to have been the corrupting influence that allowed it to spread into people's homes. I hope we can reverse it somehow.
A few months ago I read an article that compared vibe coding to gambling[0] and I've found it a useful model.
[0]: maybe this one: https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/
Totally helpful and I believe accurate. I find the times where I’m actually most productive with coding agents are not super fun, instead it’s iterative manual qa and code review hell. But while that actually results in good, usable code it’s not addictive, quite the opposite it feels like work. Whereas starting from scratch vibe coding a whatever-ma-jigger sure feels like a blast until I actually start pushing at edge cases.
So there is more awareness of the problem, gambling ads are required to publish a helpline number. Most of the gamers have other psychological disorders. Thus it's awareness + more consistent asking for help + regular naming of gambling among other problems.
What is the number of non-gamblers that started gambling and ended up in ER and would not have eneded up in ER if gambling wasn't available?
Out of seemingly nowhere a few years ago, the canadian local landscape changed overnight.
I feel like I am walking around las vegas half the time.
Virtually every corner store has turned into those english sports betting pubs or whatever they have all over England.
It's disgusting.
I was passively watching the NFL pregame last weekend, and they straight up had gambling-sponsored segments where they showed live odds for all sorts of events/stats for the day's games. It's become completely pervasive in the span of a couple years. But I live in the US, aka Biff Tannen's Pleasure Palace.
May you find the flux capacitor to your time machine, my friend.
Are those just like a room full of a few rows of video gambling terminals and basically nothing else?
We have those near me (US) now. I don’t even like seeing them. They’re kind of depressing.
> those english sports betting pubs
... a betting shop, you mean?
ah bloody hell mate!
Back when legalized gambling was on the ballot for my state, I was enthusiastic supportive, even though I don’t enjoy gambling personally. I conflated these bans with a sort of religious and social nannying, an affront to individual liberties and denying a legal livelihood for something people will do anyways. Legalizing gambling was a step in liberating society from churches and the state. Considering I had no skin in the game, I ignorantly downplayed mental health claims. Years later, I not only regret my support but am deeply embarrassed by it.
Since then, I’ve watched an alarming number of friends and coworkers slip into erratic and reckless patterns of anti-social behavior and self harm. People I never would have expected. No economic or social renaissance has followed as proponents might have claimed back in the day. The casinos around me are large, costly, seedy, hopelessly depressing dumps littered with equally depressing people that stink of desperation and delusion.
The expansion, normalization, and corporatization of traditional gambling and prediction markets is accelerating degeneracy and letting low rent hucksters strip mine countries where they are legal and leave the rest of us paying the bill. I think they are a genuine risk to the health and safety of society.
How does someone at the ER for gambling addiction present?
The study addresses it. You don't walk into an ER and say "Doctor I have a gambling addiction.", rather you typically present as having a suicide attempt, intoxication or drug overdose, psychosis, or panic attack. During the assessment the treating team identifies the main contributing reason for one of the above listed conditions and there are two specific codes available if gambling is one of the primary contributors.
> "Emergency room visits for gambling disorders"
Huh?
> "More than 70 per cent of gambling disorder emergency department visits involved another mental health condition or heavy substance use and almost one-third of the visits led to hospital admission."
Ok, so I assume they mean that these emergency visits were for things like drug overdoses and psychotic episodes in people led to by their gambling disorders, not for the gambling disorders themselves. What a strange way of writing this up. A gambling disorder is a chronic problem, not an acute one.
There's a difference between "emergency visit for X" where you treat X and "emergency visit (for Y) because of X" where you treat Y proximal to X, and people could learn to be more discerning in their use and interpretation of language.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
from the study
> An ED visit for a gambling disorder was defined on the basis of the clinical judgement of the treating team and was identified when ICD-10 codes F63.0 (pathological gambling) or Z726 (gambling or betting problems) were coded as the main or contributing reason for the visit.
> In 29.3% of these ED visits, a gambling disorder was listed as the primary cause of the visit,
Contributing reason, sure, but main reason makes no sense.
Maybe. On the other hand it's common for genuine medical problems to 'make no sense' to a layperson. That tradition goes back thousands of years.
apparently there's an ICD code for it
i guess if someone gets a meltdown (mental breakdown) after losing a lot of money
That definitely still seems like contributing.
Also, the ICD ontology specifically exists for billing purposes and isn't the same as patient diagnostic classification, though there is overlap and people do mistakenly use it as such sometimes. But there's a difference between "emergency visit for X" (treat X) and "emergency visit because of X" (treat Y proximal to X). (I also edited my original comment to include this last part, since it seems likely to create confusion)
there's a difference in semantics between clinical reason and billing, agreed, though it seems that the news article did not sensationalize the study, and the study uses at least one valid code that can be a primary reason for a visit, and while I'm absolutely just a random dog on the internet, for me the overlap in meaning seems significant to warrant the use of this term.
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/F63.0
https://icdlist.com/icd-10/Z72.6 "The code is not accepted as a principal diagnosis "
The paper lists the mental health conditions as "anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, self-harm, acute stress reaction and other". I'm surprised that multiple people went into the ER to seek treatment for a gambling addiction without being flagged for anything else. It seems like there should be a better place for people looking for help to go.
I wonder how many were for suicide attempts after a huge loss specifically.
Yeah, that was kind of odd.
Maybe they also mean suicidality after ending up in a ton of debt? Or just other self-harm because of it?
Personally, I really don’t like the expansion of legalized gambling. I’m not surprised it’s causing serious issues.
I would at least be more OK if it happened but advertising was heavily restricted/banned in context. The fact that every professional sport seems to be nothing but a thin wrapper around gambling ads now can’t possibly be good for us as a society.
> emergency department visits in which a gambling disorder was recorded as either the main or a contributing reason for the visit.
Why did it result in an emergency room visit? Did they try to self-harm or something because of losses?
Yes, gambling prevalence is direct related to suicide.
good news for cancer and CVD
at this rate, in 40 years 100% of ER visits will be due to gambling disorders.
really a triumph in public health
Hmm, I was expecting it would halve, once gamblers get their fill.
I’m confused, are these suicide attempts due to gambling addiction or is it mental health ER patients looking to enter a gambling addiction treatment program?
I’m having a hard time thinking of any other reason that a gambling addiction would cause someone to visit the ER.
I have never felt anything about gambling. Most boring thing ever. I don't feel anything about investment, and wrote automation to track mine because it's all so boring.
I wouldn't tempt fate to try to expose myself more, but it doesn't seem like I contain whatever is required to form these addictions.
Has it been studied if some people are just much more vulnerable than others, and are there predictive factors?
Yes. One interesting example is that compulsive gambling is a side effect of a certain class of drugs for treating Parkinson’s disease.
https://parkinsonsjournal.com/en/parkinsons-disease/gambling...
That's because parkisons drugs can upregulate a certain protein that is implicated in all forms of addiction that feature that kind of "seeking" behavior and modification of the reward system!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB#Role_in_addiction
We found that if you give an addicted rat a chemical which suppresses the expression of this gene, it will improve their addiction situation, reduce seeking behaviors, etc.
We found that in 2015.
Another interesting thing is that GLP-1s anecdotally treat compulsive gambling.
I find the "normal" forms of gambling very boring: going to a casino, sports betting, lottery tickets, prediction markets, etc. I just assume I'll lose money because that's what tends to happen, so I have no interest in playing. As a result I thought I was a higher life-form, immune to gambling.
Then I played some mobile JRPGs that had gacha (gambling) elements. New fancy unit (big damage numbers or skimpy clothing or both) comes out every week and you get them by spending scarce resources on slot machine-like animations. Somehow I fell for this, despite knowing all about how gachas work, spending hundreds of dollars over the course of a few years. Now I realize I'm not a superior life-form. I just needed to be gifted a few wins of something that mattered to me, and then I'm throwing away money on pull after pull just like a casino gambling addict.
I like alcohol and trying new things, whether that be food or languages. I get nothing from gambling. Not all stimuli affect everyone equally. You’d need something approaching a unified theory of consciousness to adequately explain this finely.
I feel the same way - it's just not fun for me. I like playing poker with my friends, but I like the social aspect of it - putting down $20 on the table is no different than buying a few beers at a bar, and I don't care if I come out of the game with more or less money.
Going to a casino, which I've done a few times, is just wildly disinteresting.
But I know I'm prone to other sorts of addictions, so I guess gambling is somehow different.
I think that I would get more enjoyment dropping $20 in the parking lot at a casino and seeing somebody excited to find $20 than going inside to gamble it away.
I'm getting sick of the ads. It's in every NHL commercial break, Rogan (though I don't know about it now) has them as sponsors
Guys, it's predatory. Stop
Unfortunately I fail to empathise with gamblers not because I think they deserve to be afflicted by this disease but simply because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
I bought a few lottery tickets when the prize reaches astronomical proportions but it was always a case of going along and doing it with family/friends just for fun.
I guess I could understand the appeal if the chances to actually win something were pretty good but it’s a well known fact that the house always wins in the end.
>I fail to empathise with gamblers [...] because I have never found gambling appealing as an activity.
that was a strange sentence to read! the whole point with empathy is being able to do it despite not sharing the same feelings or point of view. it's putting yourself in their shoes, and attempting to understand the things they would feel.
maybe you meant you can't "relate to" or "identify with" or something
There is a double digit percentage of Americans who are relying on winning the lottery for retirement.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-millennials-would-rather-...
Let me guess - because some people are unable to consume this form of entertainment responsibly, we have to make it illegal for everyone?
Makes sense. While we’re at it let’s kick the war on drugs back into high gear, reinstate prohibition, and make other higher risk behavior illegal.
We can go back to how it used to be, when you had to go to a gambling establishment in person
Why would we do that? I’m perfectly capable of using a gambling app responsibly.
Consider the possibility that your brain chemistry is different from that of other people, and that this could affect the level of responsibility people bring to bear here.
Sure, but you can say the same about alcohol, drugs, sweets, red meat, sex, motorcycles, base jumping... pretty quickly we're going to end up in a pretty milktoast world.
I met someone recently who filed bankruptcy over tens of thousands of dollars of debt incurred obsessing over baseball cards (!) There is always going to be someone.
We also restrict which establishments can sell all those things! Some more than others. E.g. liquor licenses
I think if you could drink alcohol through your phone, people would probably pause on whether that's a good thing.
Surely you can use your imagination a bit and imagine the difference between baseball cards and connecting your bank account to a gambling app, especially with all the paid endorsements from companies and celebrities telling young people they will make a lot of money using these apps.
That's fine that my brain chemistry is different from that of other people, but I don't see why that should prevent me from using gambling apps.
Because it's harm reduction. Sometimes you can reduce a vice impact by putting in friction. Too much can end with poor results for sure.
Because there is a significant amount of externalized costs we should increase the impedance: taxes, banning/regulating advertising, cooling off periods, limits, et cetera.
We don’t have to fully outlaw gambling or other forms of high risk entertainment, but we absolutely should be outlawing the pervasive advertising these companies are doing. You can’t enjoy sports these days without dodging tons of ads for betting platforms
I don’t see why advertisement for gambling is any more offensive than advertisement for any other form of entertainment
Watching a TV show or a movie that you saw a commercial for isn't going to bankrupt you and cause you to lose your house.
Should we ban advertisement for skydiving and other such high risk behavior?
I haven't looked much into the Canadian levels, but I assume they are similar to the US. Some stats might not be quite right, but...
Something like .15% of the US population skydive a year. Almost none of them die.
I've seen estimates that over 5% of the US population gamble at a "problem" level and about 0.5% to 1% are outright addicted. About 20% of those addicted have a suicide attempt.
Americans who skydive in the US will be about the same number of Americans who attempt suicide due to gambling issues. Skydiving is quite safe so the death rate is so minimal.
The scale between the two is just so different.
I'd settle for making these apps play fair at least. Being able to effectively ban users who are good at sports betting by limiting their wagers to trivial amounts[1] is a "heads we win, tails you lose" situation and contradicts their marketing claims.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/opinion-sports-betting-morgan-camp...
Privately funded health care solves this.
it'd be cool if you expanded on that thought for the rest of us