The North Carolina Lottery Commission is likely going to share data in the coming days about how much money was gambled online in the state during April – the first full month since mobile sports betting was legalized in the state. The numbers from March indicate major activity, as the state saw more than $659 million wagered on sports events in just three weeks.
With that increase in legal gambling and gambling prevalence, though, does it mean more people will discover or develop a gambling disorder? And is North Carolina prepared for any steep rise in problem gambling?
When Michelle Malkin was hired at East Carolina University three years ago, she remembered researching North Carolina and thinking it was a “gambling desert.” With legalized gambling only allowed at a handful of casinos on tribal lands, there were not widespread options or opportunities to wager. But not long after Malkin moved, legislators began floating the idea of legalizing mobile sports betting.
“No state stays stagnant,” she told Chapelboro, “and with so much growth happening all over the country and what other states are doing around gambling, I was not at all surprised that North Carolina was taking up the issue and likely to pass it.”
With a master’s degree and Ph.D. in criminology, Malkin studies gambling-related harms and gambling-motivated crime with the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative at ECU, which was started in November 2023. While she said she believed at one point such expansion would correlate with a rise in such things, the research ultimately led her to feel the opposite.
Malkin’s team ran a study of gambling behavior and risk among college students in North Carolina in 2023 to get a baseline of how much gambling was occurring before the legalization expanded people’s options.
“What we found among our college students,” she said, “was about 58 percent were already gambling in some way, with about 13 percent gambling at least monthly. Similar to all other studies, our male students were gambling at much higher rates at 70.5 percent versus females, which were only 55 percent. But still – everybody was gambling.”
Michelle Malkin is the head of the Gambling Research and Policy Initiative at East Carolina University. (Photo via Rhett Butler/ECU.)
Malkin said it is too soon to know hard data on how much those rates have changed, but it’s realistic to believe they will have increased now that the opportunities and incentives to gamble have been heightened. She said she would much rather have legal, regulated wagering than otherwise, because now North Carolina is committing more resources to help those who face gambling-related harms.
Presently, the main statewide resource is the NC Problem Gambling Program through the Department of Health and Human Services. Amanda Winters, who is the program’s administrator, said her first actions when hearing the state could expand gambling were to reach out to other states’ equivalent departments. While the North Carolina program has been around since the birth of the state lottery, its $1 million allocation in the annual budget is set to increase to $3 million moving forward as a stipulation of the new sports betting law.
Much of the state initiative is focused on education, like providing funding to groups seeking education and technical support to staff focused on substance misuse prevention, which problem gambling is related to. Winters agreed with Malkin that – legally or not – gambling disorder is often more prevalent than people realize, with the estimated rate at 5.5 percent of people having at least experienced it before.
“That doesn’t sound like a lot to most people,” Winters said. “But when you think about that in relation to other common things… like, do you know anybody with green eyes? Or red hair? Well, about 2 percent of the population has green eyes, 2 percent of the population has red hair. So there’s a very big likelihood that you know someone who experiencing or has experienced a problem with gambling.”
Part of that education, according to Winters, is to help break the wider stigma around people with gambling-related harms. One method – which also is a treatment step – is the problem gambling hotline managed by the program, and which Winters said has seen a 77 percent increase in use since the beginning of March.
Another resource for education and potential treatment is a self-screening tool on the NC Problem Gambling Program’s website.
“It’s a check-in with your habits, behaviors, actions and thoughts,” said Winters. “When you look at what leads to developing a problem, it’s the inability to stop and it’s the preoccupation and then letting it build until you engage in the behavior. When you do the self-screening, it’s meant to be an introspection looking at it and looking at where you might be able to change. ‘Maybe I can spend less money, maybe I can spend less time, maybe I can be more honest about what I’m doing.’”
Malkin said treatment presents both the most critical step and the biggest challenge for both those with gambling-related harms and those providing resources. Since there is no blanket way to treat someone, she said most of the best practices now revolve around behavioral health approaches and require both time and money. Those are things that people with gambling disorders may not much of — and, Malkin said, their disorder usually directly impacts at least three to four other people in their lives that may also need extra help.
With the extra funding coming to the NC Problem Gambling Program and Malkin’s policy initiative gaining traction with its studies, more options and solutions may be on the horizon. In the meantime, the ECU researcher said it’s important for people to be aware of gambling-related harms, understanding to those with them, and prepared to ask for help once its needed.
“People can be gambling in a healthy way for a very long time, and then something might happen that pushes them over that invisible line, and they don’t know they’re going there,” added Malkin. “And we haven’t taught people the signs that we’re going there. So, in order for people to get help early if they start to go there, we need to do that education and outreach. Because just saying, ‘If you have a problem, call [the hotline],” doesn’t necessarily tell people what [it means] to have a problem.”
North Carolina’s Problem Gambling Helpline is 877-718-5543 and more resources for those who need help can find more materials at More Than A Game.
Featured photo via Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Network.
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