It's hard for me to view that as anything other than mostly for show.

The retailers still have every incentive to sell as many lottery tickets as people will buy, because that's how they make a sizable portion of their money.

And the gambling addiction hotlines are too little too late. I've known people who struggled with gambling. They never admitted they had a problem until they had bottomed out. At that point I doubt the lotteries and casinos particularly care because that well's already run dry, anyway.

If the gaming industry really wanted to put their money where their mouth is on this one, they'd figure out ways to prevent people from getting into that situation in the first place. Putting limits on how much money anyone person can lose, even if only at a single establishment, is one idea that wouldn't even be hard to implement. But of course we won't see that because, unlike gambling addiction hotlines, that runs the risk of reducing their profits.

I worked with a heroin distributor as well. They had very clear training for the dealers they worked with to identify and stop problem heroin use. There was space reserved in every text and on every dealer’s coffee table for stop heroin assistance.

Not equating your work for a lottery with dealing heroin, I’m just pointing out that to say you don’t want people addicted to heroin while still selling heroin isn’t sufficient, and I think the same applies to lotteries. If they acknowledge the problem stop even offering it as a product.

Imagine having a "stop gambling assistance" section of your fking AD to promote gambling to people

When widespread sports gambling was illegal before, there were not rich and powerful people whose ability to maintain and grow their wealth and power was tied to keeping sports gambling legal.

Now those rich and powerful people exist, and they will use their wealth and power to keep it legal. It is not easy to put the genie back into the bottle.

Sports gambling definitely existed 10-15 years ago. And it's hard to ban things on the internet with cryptocurrency being a thing.

It's pretty wild that we let it be advertised and boggles my mind that pro leagues jumped on the train.

One of the arguments was to make gambling legal, less harmful, and regulated to protect players from cheating. In my state the state lottery company puts out TV ads. Stores have scratch off vending machines with strobe lights on top. So much for harm reduction and making gambling something that you have to actively seek out.

"poor tax" framed by the state to help fund things education.

Well, aren't they though, technically?

Your $1 lottery coupon has extremely low chances of winning a million dollars, but they aren't zero. No one will sell you any stocks for $1, but even if they did what is a chance of a random $1 stock increasing in value one million times?