The Worsening Pandemic of Gambling Highlighted in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
Physical health problems result from gambling, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, sleep difficulties, and peptic ulcer disease, Schlafly states. Pathological gambling has also been linked to frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Psychiatric harm includes the onset or worsening of major depressive episodes, anxiety or substance use disorders, and intense feelings of shame, rash decision-making, and deceptive conduct, he adds.
Roughly half of Americans are engaged in gambling now, he estimates. In 2023, $49 billion was spent on table games and slot machines. Extreme addiction to gambling afflicts about 5 percent of the population, and the rate is higher for young adults. Relatively few—typically less than 10 percent—of addicted gamblers ever seek help to overcome their habit, he reports.
'It is no longer necessary to travel to a casino to lose one's life savings,' he writes. Gambling as tailored by artificial intelligence (AI) to individual weaknesses is invading the cell phones of everyone, including teenagers particularly vulnerable to this addiction, he warns.
Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA, 39 states have legalized sports gambling. By 2021, $57.2 billion was wagered annually on sporting events alone. Today, hundreds of suspicious sports performances annually have been correlated with unusual betting activity, Schlafly states.
Gambling may become even more prevalent as a clever new way around state regulation of gambling percolates through the courts: a way to bet on event contracts, which is federally regulated in a very permissive way by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This includes betting on elections outcomes, which could rope in many more people, and make more corruption inevitable.
The Major Questions Doctrine is a legal mechanism that conceivably could help limit the spread of this madness, Schlafly suggests.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.
Contact: Andrew Schlafly, (908) 719-8608, Aschlafly@aol.com, or Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@gmail.com
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