Opinion: It’s the Dopamine, Not the Dollars
If there’s one thing the public discourse around gambling gets wrong, it’s where the harm comes from and how to quantify it. Gambling addiction occurs in the brain, not the wallet, and it affects all aspects of a person’s life. Trying to measure it in dollars inevitably leads to faulty conclusions.
Tom Waits, before he sobered up, famously sang: “I don’t have a drinking problem, ‘cept when I can’t get a drink.”
That’s a bit of grim humor from a self-aware alcoholic. And yet, the focus on affordability in responsible gambling discourse boils down to exactly that logic, minus any sense of irony. As long as someone’s gambling habit hasn’t reached the point that it’s going to interfere with their ability to keep gambling, it must not be a problem.
In reality, it becomes a problem long before that point. Gambling addiction is a behavioral disorder rooted in dopamine-regulation pathology. Bankruptcy can be one outcome of the disorder, but that’s true of most addictions. Yet it wouldn’t occur to us to assess someone for alcoholism by asking how much they earn, nor to suggest that the solution is to make alcohol cheaper.
The problem with gambling is not that you can wager $100,000 on a single hand of blackjack, just as the problem with alcohol is not that $100,000 bottles of cognac exist. The problem largely lies at the low-cost, high-volume end of the spectrum.
It’s perhaps not surprising that affordability is the narrative when so much responsible gambling talk originates with or references the industry’s attempts to police itself. Believe it or not, gambling companies do not want to bankrupt their customers, as it means losing those customers. They’d rather keep them gambling within their means for as long as possible.
Poor Odds Don’t Harm Players
So, talking about keeping gambling affordable aligns the industry’s sustainability goals with the pretense of social responsibility. At the same time, it leads to various popular misconceptions, such as the idea that the amount of money a game returns to its players has anything to do with how harmful it is.
To debunk that notion, you have only to look at examples of high- and low-return games and studies that have correlated them with addiction rates. Draw lotteries are among the games with the worst odds, often keeping more than 50 cents of every dollar wagered, yet present a relatively low addiction risk. Online slots typically keep less than a tenth of that but are among the highest-risk products.
In fact, it may be the case that worse odds are actually better for players from an addiction standpoint, even though the players themselves will naturally say they would prefer to have better odds.
The reason for this is that most gambling payouts don’t end up back in the player’s bank account. Small wins very often get re-wagered. For things like lottery tickets, the low odds of winning keep that chain pretty short. On the other hand, slots sessions have a tendency to go on for much longer than the player intended, because at 95%+ return-to-player, lengthy break-even streaks are common.
It’s as if every beer came with a coupon for 95% off the next beer.
A player’s gambling budget is still their gambling budget—the game’s return mostly only influences how many plays they get before it runs out. And, ultimately, it is the number of plays that correlates with harm, not the number of dollars the player lost.
Money and Gambling Are Difficult to Separate
Each play, each dopamine hit reinforces the problematic neural pathways. That’s what leads to addiction and to addiction-related harms. Those include, but are not limited to, financial ruin.
Another feature of the discourse is that it often focuses on how gambling harms those on the financial margins. In fact, gambling habits are most prevalent at both ends of the income scale and lowest in the middle.
However, a low-earning player may hit rock bottom quickly and start their recovery process sooner. Many of the most extreme cases of gambling addiction involve people from privileged backgrounds. Their apparent ability to “afford” gambling just means they have a lot of runway, allowing the dopamine hooks to bury themselves deeply before the money becomes a problem.
And, until money is the problem, it’s all too easy for everyone around them to ignore the other aspects.
Nonetheless, even understanding this issue, it’s extremely hard to separate gambling and money. In large part, that’s because money is definitionally part of gambling. What differentiates a slot machine from, say, a pinball machine is that one might potentially reward the player with money, while the other does not.
The gameplay-related part of the dopamine fix might be the same for both, but the anticipation of a monetary reward is unique to gambling, which makes it a stronger type of cognitive drug. It’s the same reason the alcohol industry has worked so hard at connecting itself with sex.
Gambling isn’t gambling without the likelihood of monetary loss and the possibility of monetary gain. Yet the gambling addiction is not the same as losing money while gambling, and either can occur without the other. These ideas are so similar yet superficially contradictory that it can be hard to hold them both in mind at the same time.
Policy Consequences of Focusing on the Money
The misconception that gambling harm is financial harm is prevalent in legislative and regulatory circles. You can see it manifest in certain trends:
- The tendency to focus on maximum bets, deposit limits, and affordability checks.
- The emphasis on low-income communities when conducting impact assessments.
- The belief that potentially beatable games are less harmful, leading to excessive fixation on chance-versus-skill distinctions in deciding whether something counts as gambling.
- Strict requirements about RTP disclosure and game-testing to ensure fair payouts, yet comparatively few limits on pace of play or “engagement” strategies.
- A general lack of scrutiny of VIP programs for affluent players, beyond source-of-funds checks.
One positive trend in the U.S. at present is the increased scrutiny on so-called “microbets,” powered by advanced statistical models and allowing sportsbook users to bet on individual plays mid-game. Typical wager sizes for these are small, but the frequency is very high. Experientially, they make sports betting less like buying a lottery ticket and more like playing a slot machine.
Policymakers have correctly identified the problem with that and begun to talk about addressing it. So, there is some awareness that betting volume is more important than bet size.
Yet, that discussion has largely centered around banning that specific product. It might make more sense to look at ways to reduce betting volume across the board, for casinos as well as sportsbooks.
What Would Dopamine-Focused Policy Look Like?
Limiting session times, hours of operation, or wagers per day could help. Thinking outside the box, one could imagine a pre-purchased credit system making it impossible to re-wager winnings immediately. That is, you might pay for 100 spins and play 100 spins. Then there could be a cool-off period during which your winnings could be withdrawn but not used to buy more spins.
In terms of protecting low-income players, a minimum bet might actually be more effective than a maximum one. The illusion of being able to dabble at low risk creates a slippery slope. Along the same lines, many of the industry’s favorite promotional tools, like free spins and daily login bonuses, need a careful look.
Illinois implemented a per-bet tax and was criticized because operators just passed it on to players. But maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. If it means a player with a $100 budget places five $20 bets instead of fifty $2 microbets, that could be reducing their risk.
The problem with such suggestions is that they’re as unpopular with gamblers as they are with the industry. That leaves almost no one advocating for them. But raising the tax on tobacco and alcohol is never popular with smokers and drinkers, yet has been one of the most effective policy tools for curbing use.
So, let me be the one to say it: Lowering the cost of gambling just makes it easier to gamble enough to become addicted. If you want to reduce harm, then the barrier to entry needs to be higher, not lower, and part of that is accepting that it should be expensive to gamble.
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