Legalized gambling and health

Time -   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….

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 been changed, Forrest says. The visits were concentrated among men aged 10-44. 

Many of the patients showed up at the emergency room with major depression and suicidality, and some had other mental-health or substance-abuse diagnoses, Forrest said. Doctors at the emergency department noted in patients’ records that gambling had contributed to those other issues.