Young Men are Paying the Price for Casinos on our Cell Phones

The evidence is clear that the rush by many state legislatures, including Massachusetts, to buy into the sports-gambling craze has had a hugely negative impact upon one group in particular — young men.

When the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting in 2018, Americans legally wagered less than $5 billion on sports annually. Last year, they bet $150 billion — and 90% of those bets were placed on phones, not at casinos or racetracks, and more than half were so-called live bets, which are placed while the games are in progress.

This increase in wagering has come primarily out of the pockets of young men, who by any measure have become casualties of the sports-betting craze.

As the TV ads inform us, a person can open a betting app on their smartphone and find hundreds of options per game. This new generation of bettors is not merely wagering as to which team will win and the final point spread, but on minutiae such as whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike — in other words, they can bet throughout the game on every single thing imaginable.

One need not be an expert in addictive behavior to realize that making it this easy to place a new bet every minute (or even less)  feeds into an insatiable desire to achieve the “high” of placing a bet — a form of addiction to which the brains of young men are uniquely vulnerable.

One would have hoped by now that our state legislators would have realized the mistake they made and would repeal the law allowing betting on cell phones, and restrict sports gambling to casinos.

But the states themselves are now addicted to the tax revenue from the sports gambling industry, especially in this era of reduced funding from Washington. Our legislators have made a deal with the devil — and young men and their families are paying the price.