Time: The Man Who Took On Big Tobacco Now Going After Sports Betting

Written by :

C Costigan

Published on :

27 January, 2025

Time: Man Who Took on Big Tobacco Now Targeting Sports Betting

Yours Truly has had a front row seat to two so-called "sin" industries.

During the mid-1990s I worked as a paralegal on tobacco litigation and today I'm fully entrenched in the world of sports betting.

The 80-year-old Northeastern law professor Richard Daynard argues that sports betting is an addictive public health risk — while applying lessons from his successful decades-long fight against cigarettes.

Time.com has an extensive feature on Daynard, who last year appeared on the CBS news magazine show "60 Minutes" to discuss what he sees as an epidemic.

The tobacco industry rejected responsibility for the health issues suffered by smokers. Under legal pressure that Daynard helped direct, the companies eventually were held accountable for the addictive and harmful nature of their products, Northeastern.ed noted.

The Time.com piece reports that Americans bet an estimated $150 billion on sports in 2024, up 24% from the prior year, according to the American Gaming Association, and sports books kept some $14 billion of that, up 27%. State governments collected about $2.5 billion in sports-betting tax revenue in 2024, a 19% jump.

From Sean Gregory of Time.com:

But America’s burgeoning love affair with sports gambling has come with costs. Calls to problem-gambling hotlines have spiked. Emerging research suggests that sports betting depletes investment accounts of already financially vulnerable households, increases bankruptcy risk, and even contributes to upticks in intimate-partner violence. “I am presently, or have recently been, treating divorces, breakups, estrangement from children, criminal charges, incarceration, loss of all savings, foreclosure of homes, end of careers, suicidal ideation, hospitalization for a suicide attempt,” says PHAI director of gambling policy Harry Levant, a former gambling addict who’s now a clinical gambling-disorder therapist and also testified at that December congressional hearing. “The deepest forms of despair.”

Read the piece in its entirety here

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By Chris Costigan

Chris founded Gambling911.com in 1999 and serves as the website's publisher. He brings more than 3 decades of expertise related to the gambling and sports betting sector. Creative talent is in Chris' genes, which he brings to the G911 website. He comes from a showbiz family that includes Yankee Doodle Dandy George M. Cohan. Chris is the grandson of artist John E. Costigan, whose work appears in the Smithsonian. Chris' father was also in the news business and co-founded what is today the Union County Performing Arts Center. Chris is a graduate of Kean University.

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