UNH study links online sports betting legalisation to helpline surge

A researcher at the University of New Hampshire set out to find whether legalising online sports betting changed the volume and character of calls to the National Problem Gambling Helpline. G.T. Ozer, an assistant professor of decision sciences at UNH's Paul College of Business and Economics, found that it did — and the numbers he published are not easy to dismiss.

Calls to the helpline rose twenty-three percent after online sports betting became legal in the states the study examined. The share of callers identifying app-based or online gambling as their primary activity climbed thirty-one percent. Seventy percent of callers were men. Half were between eighteen and thirty-four. Ozer's team also found a 3.1 percent increase in suicide rates attributable to problem gambling in the same period.

That last figure deserves a moment before the policy argument begins. These are not helpline calls that resolved well. Some of them ended badly, and the study puts a number on how many.

Ozer's framing of the mechanism is specific enough to be useful: mobile access paired with real-time feedback loops lowers the threshold at which compulsive behaviour takes hold. The platform isn't designed to harm anyone — it's designed to sustain participation. The harm is a consequence of that design operating on a population that includes people for whom sustained participation is dangerous.

This is not a novel observation in public health, but the helpline data gives it a structure that is harder to wave away than a theoretical argument. The question of whether the industry's responsible-gambling frameworks are calibrated to that reality is one the UNH findings put pressure on.

I should be transparent about where my own instincts run here: I am constitutionally drawn to the downside scenario, and I am adjusting for that when I say the study still matters even after that adjustment. The 23 percent figure is a correlation in a complex system, not a clean causal proof. Ozer does not claim otherwise. But the demographic concentration — young, male, unmarried, lower levels of formal education — describes a group that prediction market platforms are actively recruiting as users through sports contracts. That overlap is not incidental.

The DraftKings congressional testimony earlier this week, in which the company denied using AI to target problem gamblers, sits against this backdrop. The UNH study does not address that specific claim. It addresses the broader environment that the expansion of online sports betting has produced, and what the helpline data shows that environment is doing to the people inside it.

Ozer also addressed university administrators directly, arguing that campus populations sit inside the highest-risk demographic and that institutions need empirical policy, not general warnings. That recommendation is narrower in scope than the legislative question, but it may be where the fastest action is possible.