Over the last fifty years, gambling has been transformed from a private and local activity into the public voice of American government, such that ever increasing appeals to gamble, and ever-expanding opportunities to gamble, now constitute the main ways that our government communicates with us on a daily basis.

Extreme forms of gambling are being pushed in several different forms, They include online sports gambling, state lotteries, regional casinos, and video gambling machine venues, all of it offered at virtually every hour of the day in almost an unlimited amount of locations.

Gambling operators, their partners in government, and industry lobbyists like to call it “regulated gaming.” But elsewhere, it’s more widely-known as “predatory gambling.”

To be clear, we are not talking about social gambling like the Super Bowl office pool, NCAA March Madness brackets, Friday night poker games, or casual wagers on the golf course with friends. Predatory gambling is when governments partner with powerful corporate gambling interests to use commercialized gambling – gambling being run as a business – to exploit and defraud citizens and their communities. Unlike any other business, in commercialized gambling there is an adversarial relationship between the gambling operator and its customer, the gambler. They are trying to take you down.

The legalization of commercialized gambling has failed. We believe it’s America’s most-neglected major problem. This is why:

• Over the next six years, the American people are on a downward spiral to lose more than $1 trillion of their personal wealth to predatory gambling, an average of at least $150 billion of lost wealth every year. That means the American people are losing more than $285,000 of personal wealth every minute.
• Through its massive advertising and marketing, predatory gambling has become the public voice of American government to citizens today. It’s what we advertise to the American people more than anything else. We have turned a nation of small earners who could be small savers into a nation of habitual bettors.
• This torrent of gambling advertising has affected the nation’s kids more than any other demographic. It’s normalized a known dangerous and addictive product that has unleashed an epidemic of gambling addiction among young adults and teens across America.
• More than half of all commercialized gambling profits come from citizens who have been turned into addicted gamblers. The business model is based on inducing and exploiting addiction and because state governments are a partner, no one is protecting the American people.
• More than 40 million Americans are experiencing harm because of predatory gambling.
• And predatory gambling has metastasized like a cancer across the country not because of a grassroots citizens movement demanding electronic slot machines, online gambling, and $100 lottery scratch tickets in their homes and communities. Instead, predatory gambling has spread unchecked because of the greed of big gambling operators combined with a lust for power of some politicians from both political parties.