Gambling Is Sending More People to the ER

Legalizing gambling can come with big health problems.That’s the conclusion of a recent study out of Ontario, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which found that after the Canadian province legalized betting on individual sports events in 2022, emergency department visits for gambling disorders doubled. Most of the people who landed in the emergency department were men, and almost one third of the visits led to hospitalizations. “This rise in severe presentations might be a bit of a warning signal of a wider increase in harms across the general population,” says Ryan Forrest, a public-health doctoral student at the University of Toronto and one of the authors of the study. “We think about things like financial distress, family and relationship problems, worsening mental health—and those things are not captured in the emergency department data.” The authors of the Ontario study projected how many people would normally end up in an emergency department every year, and then compared that to what they saw after online betting on single sporting events became legal in Ontario. Emergency department visits were 154% higher than they would have been had the law not b...