People in Illinois lost more than $7.7 billion gambling last year. As lawmakers increasingly bet on gambling to pay the state’s bills, they have only spare change to treat compulsive gamblers.
By Casey Toner and Maggie Dougherty | Capitol News Illinois
This story is a collaboration between Capitol News Illinois and Illinois Answers Project.
Editor’s note: Some individuals in this story are identified only by first name and last initial at their request to allow them to speak openly about their addiction without fear of reprisal for actions taken when gambling.
CHICAGO — When Reeve L. was growing up, his babysitters were the horse tracks in Arlington Heights, Maywood and Stickney, where he’d watch his father bet for hours.
When his father won, life was good — or at least tolerable. But when his father lost, he’d beat Reeve and his mother, her so badly she’d be afraid to show up to work with her bruises. In his father’s life, gambling came first, family a distant second.
Reeve saw how gambling could ruin a man and his family, and it was the last life he wanted to lead.
And yet, after Illinois legalized sports gambling in 2019, Reeve saw a gambling promotion scroll across the bottom of a televised Cubs-Reds game offering a free $5 bet for new customers. A modest bet on the Cubs, his favorite team, cracked open the dam for Reeve, sending his life spiraling into the rapids of uncontrolled gambling for five years.
That first bet, placed with a few taps on his phone, led him to blow through about $450,000 in savings and $150,000 in loans. He drained the nest egg that he and his husband saved to buy a house. Along the way he alienated about two dozen friends and would have lost his husband had he not joined a local Gamblers Anonymous group, Reeve said.
If the state had stronger gambling guardrails in place, Reeve said, he may have never found himself falling headfirst into his father’s addiction.
“There’s a responsibility of the state to protect the people,” Reeve said. “I think there has to be a responsibility of the state to know how many lives are being destroyed, and not even that person, but the lives around them, the divorce rates, the people not going out and spending money at restaurants or anything that now is going to sports gambling. It’s a billion dollar industry — that money is being taken away from somewhere in Illinois.”
Gov. JB Pritzker expanded casinos and sports gambling in his first year in office and has encouraged people to gamble in Illinois casinos, building on more than three decades of elected officials dealing a favorable hand to gambling operators. Chicago, the last major holdout against slot machines, recently lifted its ban, setting the stage for possibly thousands of new machines to flood bars and restaurants.
The state raked in more than $2.6 billion in gambling tax revenues last year to help balance its budget, but that’s just a slice of the more than $7.7 billion that people in Illinois lost last year gambling at casinos, playing on regulated slot machines, betting on sports and buying lottery tickets. Of those losses, more than $4.1 billion went to sportsbooks, slot machines and casino operators.
Illinois collected over $1 billion in tax revenues from sports betting in the first six years of legalization
The state has also made over $6 billion in taxes from video gaming terminals since they launched in 2012, nearly $13 billion from casinos since the first licensed casino opened in 1991, and over $23 billion in lottery revenues since introduced in 1974
The state dedicates less than 0.1% of the revenues generated by gambling back to treating the addiction it causes; for every $100 the state collected from gambling last year, it devoted less than $0.06 to treatment. Nationally, problem gamblers have one of the highest rates of suicide; the National Council on ProblemGambling estimates one in five have tried to take their own life.
The state last assessed problem gambling during the pandemic when sports gambling had yet to be fully implemented, estimating 383,000 Illinois adults to have a gambling problem, and another 761,000 as being at risk of developing one, though some clinicians consider the estimates an undercount. Pritzker’s Department of Human Services plans to publish a second assessment in 2027 and plans to do so every five years.
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