Online gambling is dangerous. Missourians should vote against it.

Missouri's Amendment 2 would legalize online and mobile sports gambling, which is far more harmful than people realize. You should vote No.

Among Missouri’s ballot measures, most of the attention has been focused on Amendment 3, which would overturn the state’s abortion ban. I’ve written about that too; it’s hugely important.

But there’s another amendment that we need to focus on: Amendment 2, which would legalize online and mobile sports gambling in Missouri.

In large part because of efforts and lobbying from FanDuel and DraftKings, there are 30 states in the country that have legalized mobile sports gambling since a Supreme Court ruling in 2018 gave states the right to do so.

Across those states, what we’re seeing is consistently frightening:

• Gambling addiction is up.

• Debt is up, credit scores are down, and bankruptcy is up. This is especially true among men and among younger people.

• Legalized mobile sports gambling hasn’t generated nearly the tax revenue that its advocates promised it would.

• Making it easier to gamble—which we’d be doing, by essentially giving everyone a casino on their phones—leads to higher rates of domestic violence and higher rates of suicide.

The goal of more funding for education is worthy, but it isn’t worth the costs. We have much better ways to fund education.

Vote No on Amendment 2. Much more detail below on why this is so important.

Please forward this article to any Missouri voters who might not know about Amendment 2, or who might be on the fence.

Gambling is not inherently bad

I have no problem with gambling; in fact, I actually gamble pretty often. In college, I wrote an article¹ about how I grew up gambling. I play in a few regular poker games. I’m in two fantasy football leagues. I’ve been to Las Vegas just about every year since I turned 21.²

I’m mentioning this to establish that I’m not a gambling abstentionist, nor do I think it should be banned outright. There is some good that comes from gambling, beyond just the fact that (in moderation) it can be fun.

Casinos employ 750,000 people³ across the country and drive tourism. The history of tribal gaming is complex, and its benefits are wildly uneven in their distribution among the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes, but Indian gaming has generated huge revenues, employment, and population growth in and around Indian country.⁴

For Missourians, Amendment 2 would basically change two things:

1. It would legalize sports gambling.

2. It would legalize mobile and online gambling.

For lots of reasons I will get into, mobile gambling would be dangerous for Missourians. But even beyond that, it’s also highly extractive.

Unlike traditional casinos, which in Missouri employ more than 6,000 people, mobile sports gambling platforms—namely FanDuel and DraftKings—create no local jobs. They invest in no local infrastructure. FanDuel is based in New York City and DraftKings is based in Boston; beyond a pretty modest tax, there’s no reason to think that any of the profits will stay in the state either.

There’s a reason that FanDuel and DraftKings are spending well over $10 million—so far—to get this amendment passed.

The “Yes” campaign has talked about millions being invested in local education, but even that is suspect.⁵ In states across the country, legalized mobile gambling isn’t generating the tax revenues that were promised.

And beyond that, it’s creating all kinds of other issues.

If sports gambling isn’t legal, won’t people do it anyway?

Of course. A United Nations report claims that $1.7 trillion (!) is gambled illegally on sports every year across the world. In the United States alone, it’s around $60 billion.

So yes: gambling on sports is happening regardless of whether or not we want it to. That’s a very real problem.

But making gambling easier for people—that is to say, creating legal avenues for people to gamble—does make people more likely to gamble. People very demonstrably gamble more and are more likely to engage in other dangerous behaviors when they are near casinos:

• “A casino within 10 miles of home has a significant effect on problem gambling and is associated with a 90 percent increase in the odds of being a pathological or problem gambler.” (Source)

• “If a respondent had no casinos within 30 miles, he or she had a 2.7% chance of being a problem gambler; if one casino, a 3.9% chance; if six or more, a 6.2% chance. The authors estimate that at least part of this effect is causal.” (Source)

• “The negative changes [of nearby Indian casinos] include about a 10 percent increase in auto thefts, larceny, violent crime, and bankruptcy in counties four years after a casino has opened, and an increase in bankruptcies within 50 miles of a new casino.” (Source)

Is the same thing happening with online gambling? Yes. We’re seeing exactly the same sort of impact happening now that people can gamble on sports without even leaving their couch:

The average credit score in states that legalized sports betting decreased by 0.3 percent — and by one percent, three times the average, in states that allow online sports betting. These might seem like small shifts, but they represent averages for entire state populations. This implies that a relatively small group of intensive users — “problem gamblers” — are suffering major damage to their credit scores, dragging down the overall average… Meanwhile, states that legalized sports betting saw significant increases in bankruptcy filing rates and debt collections. Debt consolidation loans went up 8 percent by dollar value, and auto loan delinquencies increased 9 percent.

As this article hints at, the damage that mobile sports gambling is doing is not evenly distributed:

• There’s variable data on this, but men are between 2× and 7.5× more likely than women to have a gambling problem. I couldn’t find good data for this in the U.S., but in the United Kingdom, 94% of gambling revenue comes from men.

• Youths and college students—many of whom, it should be noted, are not 21 but are finding ways to gamble anyway—are more likely to gamble and much more likely to develop a gambling problem.

• Black people are twice as likely as White people to be gambling addicts.

I’ve written about how hard it is to be a young man today, and how we need policies to help them. Young men are hit hardest by legalized mobile sports gambling. Amendment 2 will hurt young men especially; it’s the exact opposite of what we need.

Gambling is a legalized narcotic. Just ask the American Psychiatry Association

Prevailing wisdom is that people will find a way to satisfy their vices—drinking or gambling or whatever else—regardless of any policy decisions. Empirically, that is untrue. We’re seeing that in states across the country.

Gambling is, clinically, a legalized narcotic. The American Psychiatry Association has a list of “Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders” that includes a lot of the culprits you’d expect: alcohol, meth, opioids, and more. Gambling is the only addiction that isn’t directly related to substance use. Why? “Gambling disorder is similar to substance-related disorders in clinical expression, brain origin, comorbidity, physiology, and treatment.”

2.5 million Americans—1% of the adults in this country—are severe gambling addicts. As many as eight million more are considered problem gamblers lower in severity.

To the extent that you buy the “Yes” campaign’s claims on its website that the amendment will raise tens of millions for education—and as I noted above, you should be skeptical—even if we do raise that kind of money, we’d be creating all sorts of other issues:

1. Raising revenue this way will disproportionately fall on the backs of men, of young people, and of Black people. It will also, invariably, fall on the backs of addicts, for whom having access to a casino in their pocket will make it that much harder to quit.

2. With demonstrated increases in bankruptcy and debt, it seems impossible to believe that we won’t have to start spending more on social services.

3. As I wrote about last time, Missouri’s professional sports teams are asking for, and are likely to get, $1 billion in taxpayer support to build and rebuild their stadiums. If the state were serious about increasing teacher pay, as the “Yes” campaign claims, they could do it now.

Gambling leads to higher levels of domestic violence and suicide

Beyond just the financial losses, and the impact you’d expect that to have on individuals and their families, there are profound and wide-reaching impacts of gambling and gambling addictions.

1. Problem gambling leads to increased rates of domestic violence. Study after study demonstrates this relationship;⁶ according to one study, 25.4% of problem gamblers reported having perpetrated severe domestic violence. It’s a problem well understood to such an extent that many of the resources for recovering gambling addicts include resources for domestic violence too.

2. Problem gamblers are far more likely to have suicidal tendencies. Specifically, problem gamblers are 5-10× more likely to attempt suicide than people in the general population, and between 48-70% of Gamblers Anonymous members have contemplated suicide. Of any addiction, gambling has the highest suicide rate.⁷

Is mobile sports gambling responsible for domestic violence and suicide? Of course not. Those are challenging, multifaceted issues with a million different causes.

But we have seen what’s happening in other states: people are gambling more than they can afford, and more people are developing gambling addictions. And the morbid reality is that by passing Amendment 2, all things held equal, rates of domestic violence will go up, and rates of suicide will go up.

Let’s fund education with the casinos that we have

Traditional, in-person casinos in the state are doing plenty well, because it’s great to be in the business of legalized narcotics. An obvious example: Philip Morris, the tobacco company, was the single best-performing stock over an eight-decade period between 1925 and 2007. If you bought $1,000⁸ of Philip Morris shares in 1925, you’d be a billionaire today.

I bring this up to say: casinos can afford to pay more in taxes.

In 2023, Missouri generated about $400 million in tax revenue from casinos, which pay a tax rate of 21%. That is, for context, not actually that high relative to other states with legalized gambling. In Rhode Island, the rate is about 61%; in West Virginia, it’s 53.5%; in Pennsylvania, it’s 54%; in Kansas, it’s 27%.⁹

Read the website for the Yes on 2 campaign. They’re claiming that it’s all about education funding. So if that’s what they care about, I’ve got an easier way to do it: tax the casinos more. Every 1% increase in the tax rate on casinos would generate an additional $20 million or so in tax revenue—more than Amendment 2 even claims it’s likely to generate.

No need to bother with Amendment 2, which is so obviously harmful. If you actually care about education funding, let’s just tax the casinos 1% more instead.

Feel free to share this post with someone who might find it interesting. And if you don’t live in Missouri, share this post with someone who does. (If you’re reading this email because someone sent it to you, please consider subscribing.)

1. A pretty bad article, I’ll note.

2. Shoutout to Ellis Island, perhaps the last vestige of $5 blackjack near the Strip and a nearly endless source of “tired, poor, and huddled masses” jokes.

3. This is from an industry publication, so take it with its requisite grain of salt.

4. “Indian” is, in this context, a formal term, even if it’s considered outdated now. Gambling on reservations is regulated largely by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and Indian Country or Indian Lands are formal terms from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency within the Department of the Interior.

5. Even in the ballot measure language, the promises are vague: “Because the proposal allows for deductions against sports gaming revenues, they estimate unknown tax revenue ranging from $0 to $28.9 million annually. Local governments estimate unknown revenue.”

6. It’s worth noting that the victims of domestic violence are also more likely to be problem gamblers; in the same Journal of Gambling Studies article, 62.9% of problem gamblers, “reported perpetrating and/or being the victims of IPV in the past year.”

7. I think a fair note would be that this is a question of correlation vs. causation. Said another way, people who are more inclined to be violent and/or be suicidal might also be more inclined to be gambling addicts. I’m sure that’s true in part. I’m not a researcher and I’m certainly not an expert in this field, but with that said, it feels unlikely that there isn’t at least some causal relationship between gambling addiction—and, namely, the debts and challenges that come with that—and both domestic violence and suicide.

8. For context, the average income in 1925 was $5,249, and the average home cost roughly $6,500. Adjusted for inflation, $1,000 in 1925 is worth about $18,000 today. So $1,000 back then wasn’t nothing, but no matter how you slice it: You would have done extremely well having owned Philip Morris (the moral implications of that notwithstanding).

9. Of note: there are Republican states, swing states, and Democratic states that all have higher casino tax rates. This isn’t really a partisan issue.