Ex-US Surgeon General Jerome Adams warns sports betting could become an opioid-crisis-scale problem in the United States

Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams says the rapid expansion of regulated sports betting is starting to look like a public-health problem with the scale of the opioid crisis. For PSPs and acquirers, the point is not the moral speechifying; it is that betting volume, youth exposure, and addiction-related risk are now part of the commercial and regulatory backdrop.

1. Adams, who served as Surgeon General of the United States from September 2017 to January 2021, said: “Sports betting is the new opioid crisis. Our kids, especially our boys, are getting exposed and hooked early. And it’s ruining lives as surely as turning a blind eye to prescription opioids did.” He argued that the time to describe the issue that way has already arrived.
2. His warning was tied to a post by Charlie Bilello, who noted a 25x increase in the amounts wagered on sports in the United States over the past seven years: from $6.6 billion in 2018 to $165 billion in 2025. That is the kind of growth that changes the risk profile for any payments stack touching betting traffic.
3. Adams also said gambling addiction was the addiction most likely to lead to suicidal thoughts and actual suicide, citing at least one study. In 2024, researchers from Rutgers University found that 28% of problem gamblers would get suicidal ideation, and 20% did indeed make a suicidal attempt.
4. The Rutgers researchers also tentatively explored whether suicide attempts among young males aged 15-34 had increased as sports gambling became more popular, estimating roughly two more suicidal attempts per 100,000 individuals. Adams did not go further than that, and the article notes that the exact numbers are still disputed across studies.
5. One additional figure in the source comes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which said suicidal ideation in problem gamblers may range between 12% and 92%, with 4% to 40% having attempted suicide, specifically among law enforcement. The spread is wide enough to make anyone in risk management reach for the decaf.

For high-risk payment providers, the practical takeaway is simple: sports betting is no longer just a volume story. It is increasingly being discussed in the same sentence as addiction harm, which tends to invite more scrutiny of onboarding, monitoring, and who exactly is underwriting the flow.