(C) Ohio Capital Journal
This story was originally published by Ohio Capital Journal and is unaltered.
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Support group warns against lottery tickets [1]
['Marty Schladen', 'More From Author', '- January']
Date: 2024-01-03
Christmas is over, but a support group’s holiday warning is wisely heeded year-round: Think twice before giving lottery tickets as gifts. It’s probably also a good idea to ask whether it’s a good idea to buy them for yourself.
In a pre-holiday release, the Problem Gambling Network of Ohio said that lottery tickets can be triggering for people at risk for problem gambling.
“While purchasing such items may be an easy, last-minute gift for someone, research shows that gifting lottery items could be triggering for those who experience problem gambling,” it said. “The 2022 Ohio Gambling Survey found that 2.8% of Ohioans have a gambling addiction and 19.8% are at risk for developing problem gambling. Receiving lottery tickets, scratch-offs, or other gambling items can cause harm to those in recovery and should be avoided altogether — and this goes for all ages.”
The Ohio Lottery has been around since 1974. But with the advent of huge jackpots from Powerball or Mega Millions — and more recently, legalized sports betting — little attention has been paid to the harm caused by problem gambling.
And when it comes to lotteries, those costs fall more heavily on the poor.
Writing in CNN in 2013, Cornell University economist David. R Just wrote “we find there are big jumps in lottery purchases when the poverty rate increases, when unemployment increases, or when people enroll on welfare. Lottery playing among the poor is a Hail Mary investment strategy — a small ray of hope among the hopeless.”
The group Stop Predatory Gambling estimates that Americans will lose $1 trillion to gambling over the next eight years and half of that will be lost to state lotteries, which it calls a form of “consumer financial fraud.”
“Lottery gambling games, especially the most profitable ones like video gambling machines, instant scratch off tickets, and Keno, are designed mathematically so users are certain to lose their money the longer they play,” the group’s website says.
Part of the problem stems from a lack of understanding of the astronomical odds against winning a big payoff. When the Powerball jackpot grew to $1.73 billion in October, Yahoo News published a story listing some of the things that are more likely to happen to you:
Being eaten by a shark
Being attacked by a grizzly bear
Being struck by lightning — twice
Winning an olympic medal
Being elected president
The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, in 2021 characterized lotteries and other forms of gambling as “a health-harming addictive behavior” that needs further study.
“Gambling and its related health harms have been ignored and hidden from public health scrutiny for too long—our Commission intends to correct this aberration,” it said.
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