\n\t\tor Andrew Douglas, bottom was seven cops banging on the door of his apartment. He\u2019d sharpened the knife \u201cgood,\u201d filled the bathtub with water, and downed a vial of Coumadin to bleed out faster. Had his dad not sensed something and dialed 911, Andrew, a star baseball player turned gambling<\/a> addict in college, would have quietly checked out at age 33, leaving his twin infant sons, his guilt-crippled parents, and many thousands of dollars in gambling debts behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFor Jonah, bottom wasn\u2019t failing out of college and mulling suicide. Nor was it the month in a Florida rehab, where, for some fool reason, they let him have his cellphone and he bet money he\u2019d stolen from family on four-legged parlay bets. (More on parlays later.) No, for Jonah, a lacrosse player at a powerhouse program, bottom was crossing the last bridge of honor: trading inside info with players at other schools to cover the over\/under on games they bet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tFor the seven mostly young men sitting around this table, bottom was a grave of their own digging \u2014 a hole so deep that their cries for help went unheard. \u201cMy thoughts were too crazy, I thought that no one would get them,\u201d says Marcus, a mid-twentysomething dressed like a gamer: black glasses, high-top Chucks, and a Playskool-colored sweatshirt. At his bottom, he was staring out the window of his apartment, weighing whether a fall from five flights up would kill or merely maim him. \u201cI got to where suicide sounded sane.\u201d (Excepting Andrew, above, the gamblers in this story spoke in exchange for anonymity.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tWe\u2019re lunching at a sports<\/a> bar in a Philadelphia suburb, picking at taste-free wings and waffle fries. It\u2019s a curious place to bring a group of recovering gamblers, but the man at the head of the table has his reasons. Harry Levant has always been a rower against the river: a former criminal-defense attorney who lost his license, and nearly lost his life, to his own gambling jones a decade back;\u00a0a second-chance crusader and addictions counselor who mainly treats folks gutted by gambling disorders; and a peripatetic opponent of the online gambling behemoths DraftKings and FanDuel<\/a>, and the other sports-betting operators (hereafter, SBOs). Forty weeks a year, Levant\u2019s somewhere in the air, lecturing state legislators and groups of physicians about the betting apps\u2019 ploys and snares, as well as the harms he says they\u2019ve levied on Gen Z males. That grail of Levant\u2019s reads lonely and self-devouring: the mania of the gambler repurposed for public service. \u201cEvery addictive product has regulations,\u201d says Levant. \u201cWhy is this the only one without them?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tAs his clients tell their stories, a loose narrative hangs together. With an exception here and there, most of these guys started gambling as teens, playing lunchroom hold-em and NFL parlays for a buck or two a throw. Then they got to college, rooming and running with older kids. Here, suddenly, everyone seemed to be in action, be it betting stupid sums on esports soccer or throwing 15 bucks at a five-legged parlay that paid out 20 to one but rarely cashed. (A parlay is a combo bet on two or more outcomes; to collect, you must win each outcome, or \u201cleg.\u201d Should you hit on four legs but miss the fifth, you lose whatever money you put down. Oh, and the odds of winning that five-legged parlay? Less than five percent.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tHospitalized after a suicide attempt due to gambling debts, Andrew Douglas says nurses turned on the NBA Finals and handed him his phone: \u201cI gambled away my last $100.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe portals and drivers for much of this action were the giant sports-bet apps. On the party-colored killing floor of online gambling, FanDuel and DraftKings own most of the take, cornering 80 percent of the mobile bet market in this country. Eight years ago, Americans placed around $5 billion in sports bets. Last year, that number zoomed to nearly $150 billion; by 2028, we\u2019ll have bet \u2014 and lost \u2014 a trillion dollars since 2018. That was the year the Supreme Court reversed a federal ban on legalized gambling, freeing each state to partner with Big Sports Bet and feed their residents, especially the young ones, to the wolves.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tFanDuel and DraftKings wasted no time. They\u2019d spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and the better part of a decade, carpet-bombing the airwaves with ads. Now, they paid kings\u2019 ransoms to each of the major sports leagues in exchange for their data and branding, and partnered with, or bought up, AI firms to help target their users\u2019 browsing habits, favorite teams, and sports. \u201cDraftKings, for one, bought SimpleBet, the biggest AI firm in this space, to turn data into in-game microbets,\u201d says Levant. \u201cThen they tracked and used their customers\u2019 data to determine which of them preferred making constant, nonstop bets \u2014 and pushed those bets their way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBombarded by promos for FanDuel and DraftKings \u2014 \u201cGet a $1,000 deposit bonus!\u201d reads one DraftKings blast \u2014 underage boys pressed their parents to open accounts, often linked to dad\u2019s ID and banking info, critics claim. Or they surreptitiously opened accounts without their parents\u2019 knowledge, as teens have done with verboten vices since the dawn of time. \u201cYoung guys have always bonded around sports; it\u2019s wired into their pack behavior,\u201d says Levant. \u201cWhat the apps do is monetize that pack behavior: Guys bond over sports bets, not sports, now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tReached for comment on the matter, DraftKings and FanDuel pushed back on the contention that underage gambling is rampant on their apps, pointing to the safeguards they have in place. \u201cDraftKings is committed to providing a legal, regulated, and responsible gaming environment for adults,\u201d wrote a spokesperson for the company. \u201cWe employ advanced Know Your Customer (KYC) technology, relied on by the financial industry and law enforcement, to verify the age of our customers. Any use of our platform by minors violates both our Terms of Use and the law, and we actively monitor to detect and report this prohibited activity.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt bears noting that neither SBO agreed to on-the-record interviews for this piece. Instead, they responded with written statements, like the one from FanDuel, as follows:<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAs a legal, licensed and regulated operator, we \u200bhave focused on the importance of educating college students on the risks associated with gambling. Notably, recovered problem gambler and national TV host Craig Carton brings lived experience and well-documented struggles with gambling to campuses through the FanDuel Responsible Gaming College Tour. Additionally, we have extended our education efforts to reach families by creating the Trusted Voices parent portal which provides tools and resources to talk to young people about gambling, associated risks, how to recognize warning signs and where to go for support.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTo be clear, most adults who gamble on sports do so as a harmless time suck, a way to zest their weekend football viewing. And\u00a0 countless teens put 10 spots on ballgames without getting dragged into addiction<\/a>. \u201cThere are kids with a healthy relationship to money who can gamble casually on sports,\u201d says Jody Bechtold, the CEO and founder of the Better Institute in Pittsburgh and a distinguished lecturer on gambling addiction. \u201cBut there are lots of other kids wired differently these days \u2014 high anxiety, ADHD, over-immersion in video games \u2014 who\u2019re at much higher risk of addiction.\u201d That\u2019s especially so for kids \u201cfrom affluent families who never learned the value of a dollar. Money\u2019s supposed to hurt when you lose it,\u201d but they were raised on \u201call things cashless: Venmo, PayPal, you name it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tTwo years ago, the NCAA published a study on the steep surge of gambling on college campuses. It found that 67 percent of students living on campus were betting on sports \u2014 though simple math tells us that the large majority of those bettors likely wouldn\u2019t have been of legal age to do so. Worse, many engaged in a particularly rash form of gaming, making high-speed wagers on in-game action \u2014 a pernicious new product called microbetting. Last year, a study by the National Council on Problem Gambling found that betting on campus had surged to 75 percent \u2014 and that six percent of students were addicted to gambling, or nearly double the national average.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnd who on campus is qualified to treat this gusher of gambling addictions? Essentially no one, per the experts I talked to. \u201cColleges aren\u2019t set up to treat [six percent] of their students,\u201d says Jim Lange, the executive director of the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery at Ohio State University. \u201cThat isn\u2019t our business model, and never will be.\u201d He added that most schools don\u2019t even know they have a problem: Gambling is scarcely mentioned in the National Collegiate Health Assessment, the standard tool used by schools to track drug and alcohol misuse by students.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNone of those stats is news to the young men sitting at this table. \u201cWhen I owed money to every kid I knew and was betting on Chinese ping-pong at 4 a.m., I tried going for counseling on campus,\u201d says Marcus, the gamer kid. \u201cAs I\u2019m talking to the counselor, she\u2019s pulling a manual off the shelf, looking up [the definition of] \u2018problem gambling.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tFanDuel and DraftKings have paid king\u2019s ransoms to each of the major sports leagues in exchange for their data and partnered with AI firms to help target users\u2019 habits.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRon Vesely\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIn the hospital, where I was hooked up to a bunch of IVs [after his failed suicide bid], they turned the NBA Finals on and gave me my phone; I gambled away my last $100,\u201d says Andrew, the ex-baseball player. Things were no better during his 30-day stay at an addiction clinic in Florida. \u201cThey didn\u2019t touch on gambling at all.\u201d So, too, for Jonah, the former lacrosse player, sent to an out-of-state facility at 21. \u201cThis place knew nothing about gambling addiction. They gave us two hours of phone time a day, and I set up a VPN to bet in Philly.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI hear a collective intake of breath as Jonah wraps his story. For all the suffering at this table, there\u2019s a redemptive kinship as well, and a recognition that feels like rescue. The six percent of college kids who lose $500 or more in a day? \u201cWe used to be those kids,\u201d says Marcus, to grunts and knowing head nods. \u201cThis is what it looks like, five years later.\u201d Thousands of dollars stolen from a doting grandma. A bride empaupered months after her wedding. Betrayals so base they can\u2019t be spoken to other people \u2014 but with this group, there are no secrets or judgments; only gratitude for the chance to come clean.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Eight years ago, Americans placed around $5 billion in sports bets. Last year, that number zoomed to nearly $150 billion<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAfter all those months and years in the cold, here you\u2019re among friends who know exactly what you\u2019ve gone through,\u201d says Levant. \u201cAnd all I ask in return from these guys: Don\u2019t make a bet today.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAndrew cuts in here to show me his phone. \u201cLook at that top email, from Caesars,\u201d he says. It reads, Your mystery bonus is here. \u201cFour years since I shut down that app, they\u2019re still tryna get their hooks in me.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAnd that,\u201d says Levant, \u201cis why I chose this place.\u201d He points to the flat-panels mounted above the tables, 50 or 60 sets tuned to Fox Sports 1 or the umpteenth rerun of \u201cFirst Take.\u201d Every last one of them posts a ticker at the bottom: Odds brought to you by either FanDuel or DraftKings. \u201cThis is what these guys have to live with,\u201d says Levant. \u201cThey can\u2019t run from sports or those fucking apps. All they can do is change their response.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tA Caesars Sportsbook<\/a> logo looms large over the scoreboard at Rate Field in Chicago.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPatrick Gorski\/Icon Sportswire\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tMALIK BEASLEY, A SIZZLING SCORER and prime free agent, may never see the floor in another game. After nearly $60 million made in the NBA, he\u2019s awash in debt and unwanted by teams after a federal DA poked through his gambling tabs. (Recently cleared in that probe<\/a>, he remains unsigned as basketball season approaches.) Emmanuel Clase is one of the best closers in baseball, but he won\u2019t get to throw another pitch until the sport gets done scouring his prop-bet plays. Clase faces a lifetime ban if MLB can prove he engaged in spot-fixing, the practice of shading his own stat lines by intentionally sailing a slider over his catcher\u2019s head. Jontay Porter could be headed to prison shortly: The NBA center copped<\/a> to conspiracy to commit wire fraud recently for his part in a prop-bet ring. And Ippei Mizuhara is doing fed time already for stealing millions from his famous boss, Shohei Ohtani, to pay off gambling debts. If men who have everything can\u2019t stop betting long enough to save their prized careers, how will we keep a generation of teens from taking a match to their futures?<\/p>\n \n\tWe find ourselves on the cusp of this disaster thanks in part to a petition brought in 2018 by Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey. Murphy and his predecessor, Gov. Chris Christie, filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to decriminalize wagers on sports in their state. They were suing to unleash a product so destructive that in 2013 the doctors and clinicians of the American Psychiatric Association added \u201cgambling disorder\u201d to the list of substance disorders in their revised standard text, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 5.<\/p>\n \n\tIt was an extraordinary upgrade, says Levant, the first of its kind: warning readers of a \u201csubstance\u201d they couldn\u2019t smoke, shoot, or snort, but which was nonetheless \u201chighly addictive\u201d and \u201csimilar in nature to heroin, opioids, tobacco, alcohol, and cocaine.\u201d \u201cWe reclassified gambling because it shared the symptomology of classic narcotic addiction, \u201c says Dr. Petros Levounis, past president of the APA. \u201cWe\u2019re greatly concerned now because of the rise in sports betting. There\u2019s a striking likeness to the tobacco and opioid industries \u2014 and there\u2019s consensus among us that those industries committed crimes that resulted in suffering and death.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t(Approached for comment, Murphy sent this boilerplate: \u201cThe Murphy Administration is concerned by the growing national epidemic of online sports-betting addiction, particularly among young men. What begins as occasional recreational betting too often spirals into financial instability, anxiety and depression, and high-risk habits. Our Administration is committed to mitigating the risks associated with problem gambling, including expanding treatment options and holding bad operators accountable.\u201d)<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tFanDuel and DraftKings have cornered 80 percent of the mobile sports-bet market in America.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRob Carr\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tHarmful substances, such as alcohol and narcotics, are typically regulated and controlled. But when presented with what some experts call \u201cthe biggest public health threat since Big Tobacco,\u201d SCOTUS killed the only law shielding Americans from the corporate bet sharks. That law, called PASPA (Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act), did precisely what its title proposed. It protected pro and college sports leagues from point-shave rings; kept the Mob (and enraged bettors) off the backs of the players; and put so much physical distance between gamblers and casinos that they couldn\u2019t lose their shirts on a passing hunch. To be sure, problem gamblers found their way around it, opening accounts with offshore sportsbooks or a local guy-who-knew-a-guy. But the damage was contained to the vulnerable few, which is about the best you can hope for from a law.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWhat followed, post-PASPA, was so predictable, you couldn\u2019t have gotten odds for it at Vegas. A sanctimonious foe of sportsbooks for decades, the NFL immediately entered talks with FanDuel and DraftKings. For billions in betting revenue, the league leased those firms the rights to its stat packs, metrics, and branding. That proprietary data enabled the apps to launch a brand-new product: live, in-game wagers on practically anything that happened on field.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tNo longer were kids forced to wait hours on an outcome; now, they could bet on every play and every player through AI-brokered props in real time. That phenomenon, called microbetting, forever changed gambling by turbo-boosting the speed of betting behaviors. The effect of microbetting, if not its intent, is to induce a fugue state that keeps users in action. \u201cYou lose track of time and space, and next thing you know, you\u2019re betting Indian cricket at 4 a.m.,\u201d says Marcus. \u201cI don\u2019t even know the rules of cricket. Those fuckin\u2019 matches go on for three days!\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEvery major pro sports league followed football\u2019s lead, selling their data for a slice of the sports-bet pie. The effect on problem gamblers was catastrophic. \u201cI went from betting money lines on baseball games to betting the number of runs scored in every inning,\u201d says Frankie, a client of Levant\u2019s in his late twenties with a South Philly brogue and a shiny widow\u2019s peak. \u201cAny money left at the end of the night, I\u2019m flipping to FanDuel\u2019s casino. Then it\u2019s slots and blackjack till I bust, and now I\u2019m betting Chinese ping-pong at 3 a.m.\u201d A year ago May, Frankie married his sweetheart in a grand Italian wedding. The guests sent them off with a pillowcase full of cash. Behind his wife\u2019s back, Frankie lost all the cash, then defaulted on the mortgage for their house. \u201cI didn\u2019t know where to turn,\u201d he says. \u201cSuicide was my only option till I found Harry.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Two years ago, the NCAA published a study on the steep surge of gambling on college campuses. It found that 67 percent of students living on campus were betting on sports\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThose microbets and parlay packs that hooked Levant\u2019s clients are the SBOs\u2019 profit centers. How do we know this? Because the apps themselves say so: They\u2019re the bets featured in their ads. Kevin Hart, Rob Gronkowski, Tom Brady, LeBron James: You can\u2019t shut them up and make them go away when they\u2019re touting props and parlays in every promo. Nor can you squelch their motormouthed peers on the pods and sports-bet shows: the Bill Simmonses and Charles Barkleys and Scott Van Pelts, who\u2019ve merrily boarded the gravy train as \u201cambassadors\u201d for the SBOs. (Approached for comment, Simmons, Barkley and Van Pelt declined to speak.) \u201cAmong the dangers of celebrity endorsements is the normalization of an addictive product,\u201d says Levant. \u201cThey\u2019re accepting enormous sums to push [that] addictive product on an increasingly younger audience.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAFTER THE FALL OF PASPA, states raced one another to the betting window, smelling 10-figure windfalls in new taxes. Thirty-nine states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico passed bills that legalized the sports-bet racket. The ensuing carnage was swift and savage. New callers flooded the toll-free hotlines at 1-800-GAMBLER, and frantically searched the web for help, googling \u201cgambling addiction\u201d online. The state of New Jersey saw a nearly 300 percent spike<\/a> in hotline calls in the first five years of legal betting. (Around six percent of its residents now suffer from gambling disorders \u2014 or three times the national average, per a Rutgers survey<\/a>.) In Connecticut, the number of hotline calls<\/a> increased 200 percent in the first two years \u2014 and the crisis was most acute among young men.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cForty percent of those calls are coming from twentysomething males,\u201d says Diana Goode, the executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, who likens the legalization of gambling to the opioid crisis. \u201cIt\u2019s literally the same thing they did with pain pills. These companies hand out free samples [i.e., welcome bonuses] to get [young men] addicted to betting.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tGambling-addiction expert Jody Bechtold says young men are especially susceptible to the dangers of this culture because they\u2019ve grown up immersed \u201cin a stew of ads\u201d from the Big Two betting apps.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBrett Carlsen\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tI put the obvious question to clinician after clinician: Why are young people, males in particular, so susceptible to sports-bet apps? Bechtold, the founder and director of the Better Institute in Pittsburgh, began with the mile-high view. \u201cThis generation was basically bred for addiction, [having been] raised on cellphones inches from their faces.\u201d The feeds on those devices \u201cdisrupted their neural wiring,\u201d leaving them anxious, impulsive, and susceptible to \u201cstims that are quick and constant onscreen.\u201d Their online childhoods also robbed them of life skills best learned by leaving the house. Fiscal savvy gained by working part-time jobs. Risk awareness from running the streets, and an acquired sense of consequences from actions. \u201cWhen these kids go bust, time after time it\u2019s the parents who bail them out,\u201d says Bechtold. \u201cEvery family I deal with, I say, \u2018Quit giving the kid money!\u2019 And Mom says, \u2018Oh, I\u2019m not ready to do that yet.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBechtold says these things not to shame her clients, but to name the preconditions that make them targets. They\u2019ve grown up immersed \u201cin a stew of ads\u201d from the Big Two betting apps; been chased across the web by their pings and promotions; and been told by the celebrities they trust most to think that betting\u2019s how winners have fun. It normalizes gambling as \u201csomething cool to do with your friends,\u201d she says. Now layer on the male-skewing lubricant of sports, and you\u2019ve built \u201ca mass addiction machine,\u201d says Matt Gaskell, the clinical lead for the NHS Northern Gambling Service in England. \u201cThese companies engineered a product that exploits the reward pathways\u201d of young brains. \u201cThe constant crackle of dopamine keeps them playing\u201d \u2014 and then a big bump, equivalent to a \u201cspike of heroin,\u201d is triggered by \u201ca win on their team.\u201d Eventually, though, the wins and losses cease to matter. What keeps these kids in action is \u201cthat neurochemical feed that fires the desire centers in the brain.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tGaskell\u2019s had a decade-plus jump on his peers: Britain legalized mobile sports bets in 2005. The fallout has been tragic. \u201cWe have an estimated one to two suicides a day in England, and many of the ones I know of are of young men from middle-class families with university training\u201d he says. Rather than confront the SBOs by slapping limits on their ads and promos \u2014 \u201cour kids see 1,600 gambling logos in a 90-minute [soccer] match onscreen,\u201d says Gaskell \u2014 the British government lamely lists \u201cgambling disorder\u201d as an official cause of death. \u201cThis industry has captured our policymakers with its billions, as I expect it\u2019s done with yours. So the warning from over here is, expect disaster.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tEVER WONDER WHAT LIFE\u2019S LIKE with a serpent on your shoulder, whispering in your ear to bet the Braves? For Andrew, the ex-third baseman in college, that forked-tongue enticer gave him no quarter, hissing Check the bonus! at 6 a.m. \u201cBetween the voice in my head and the texts from the sportsbooks, I wasn\u2019t really sleeping a whole lot,\u201d he says in his honey-maple drawl from the Carolinas. \u201cEvery night, I\u2019d tell myself, \u2018That\u2019s your last bet.\u2019 Then every morning, I\u2019d get up, see the bonus on my phone, and bet double what I did the day before.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHe\u2019s calling from his flat in eastern Pennsylvania, a bachelor pad he\u2019s put through the wringer. There are gashes in the walls he\u2019s just getting around to fixing: holes he made throwing weights and plates after losing thousands of dollars in three hours. \u201cI\u2019ve never hit anyone in my life,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019ve got a hell of an arm.\u201d Between September of 2020, when he moved up from Atlanta to join the mother of his unborn twins in Pennsylvania, and May of 2024, when he placed his last wager, he bet more than a million dollars, he says, on live, long-shot parlays and props. He\u2019s not sure how much of that was lost on the apps, but concedes it was \u201ca lot.\u201d<\/p>\n A\u00a0study by the National Council on Problem Gambling found that betting on campus had surged to 75 percent \u2014 and that six percent of students were addicted to gambling, or nearly double the national average<\/p>\n \n\tHe says he stole cash from his parents on visits home to Greenville, and guilted them into stopgap loans he knew he\u2019d never repay. On blue-sky weeks when he won more than he lost, he\u2019d go out and buy himself something he cherished \u2014 a new titanium driver; a pricey pair of Jordans \u2014 then sell them on for half when he went bust. \u201cI\u2019d walk around my place whenever I hit zero, seeing everything I owned as dollar signs.\u201d His beloved baseball glove; the cashmere quarter-zips his grandma bought him for Christmas \u2014 anything to raise a hundred bucks and feed the addiction.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAndrew got addicted to betting in college, playing \u2014 and hitting \u2014 his first-ever backdoor cover. \u201cI had Duke in March Madness, and was just about to lose,\u201d he recalls. But then a ref blew the whistle as the buzzer sounded, giving Duke two meaningless free throws while up by four. With a make on the second, Duke won by five, miraculously beating the spread of 4 1\/2, per Andrew\u2019s telling. His brain went kablooey on dopamine. \u201cI can\u2019t even describe it \u2014 it was the best feeling ever. I thought it was gonna work like that all the time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tGambling experts talk about the \u201cfirst-win trap\u201d \u2014 a neurochemical surge that swamps the pleasure center, sparking delirium only matched by high-test heroin. \u201cThe reward\u2019s beyond anything in our day-to-day lives,\u201d says Gaskell. \u201cIt\u2019s literally off the scale we see in\u201d brain scans. \u201cThere\u2019s a reason we call gambling a substance disorder,\u201d says Levant. \u201cBut the substance isn\u2019t the dough \u2014 it\u2019s the dopa.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAndrew gave up baseball, got a degree in health fitness, and earned a good living as a trainer in Atlanta. He was constantly in the hole, though, laying a dozen bets a day with the bookies or the offshore apps. Then he met a girl and moved her into his place. Months later, she was pregnant with their twins. \u201cShe\u2019d no idea I gambled; no one did, till finally my parents caught on.\u201d That\u2019s the core difference between gamblers and other addicts. There\u2019s nothing physical that gives them away: no unexplained weight loss; no cocktail-hour slurring. That secrecy, born of shame, can destroy a spouse and family. They don\u2019t find out that their loved one\u2019s stolen from them till the marshals are at the door with eviction papers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tIn 2023, the Public Health Advocacy Institute filed a class-action consumer-fraud lawsuit against DraftKings. A judge rejected the company\u2019s motion to dismiss.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMark Cunningham\/MLB Photos\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tFor every person hiding a gambling disorder, six people in their orbit are impacted financially, according to the World Health Organization. The collateral impacts of new gambling addictions are just now being charted by clinicians. Among states that have legalized sports-bet apps, bankruptcies are up by 30,000 a year, per a USC-UCLA study still in progress. A second study, from Northwestern, found that eight percent of the households in legal-gambling states were wagering on SBOs \u2014 and that every dollar spent on those apps cost households double in net-worth losses.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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