Scranton could become the first U.S. city to trial treating problem gambling as a public-health issue after a community meeting at City Hall brought schools, health providers and community organisations into the discussion. Ken Winters, chief executive of Almond Digital Health, argued that the model should put early intervention, education and prevention alongside treatment and recovery.
The meeting was held in City Hall’s governor’s room and included representatives from the Scranton School District, United Neighborhood Centers of Northeastern Pennsylvania, Friendship Hours, Geisinger and Commonwealth Health. In the local report on the meeting, Winters said the community was lacking upstream intervention, while Mayor Paige Cognetti backed the focus on starting early, including K-12 and even earlier, with parents and pediatricians helping to spot warning signs and connect people to resources.
Winters also said he was not an anti-gambling advocate. His pitch was for awareness campaigns, general messaging on healthy gambling habits, education, early intervention, prevention, treatment and recovery, with a particular emphasis on young people who may face future risk.
The wider public-health case is reflected in the World Health Organization’s gambling fact sheet, updated on Tuesday. The agency says gambling can cause financial stress, relationship breakdown, family violence, mental illness and suicide, and that heavy online promotion and sport sponsorship can normalise gambling for children and young people.
The WHO says population-wide measures, including ending advertising and promotions and using centralized account registration with binding loss limits, can help reduce harm. It also says universal public-health approaches are needed and that prevention is the most cost-effective strategy for limiting gambling-related harm.
Pennsylvania lawmakers have also moved on the issue. On 3 June, Representatives Tarik Khan and Jamie Flick announced a bipartisan package aimed at addressing problem gambling as a public-health issue while strengthening consumer protections in online gambling.
Their announcement said that since sports betting and online gambling were legalized nearly a decade ago, Pennsylvanians have had around-the-clock access to online casinos and sportsbooks through phones, tablets and computers. It said explosive growth in online gambling, increasingly aggressive marketing and a lack of guardrails had raised concerns about addiction, debt and harm to individuals, families and communities.
The package would restrict advertising near K-12 schools, limit text marketing and push notifications, and eliminate credit-card deposits. Khan said the bills would tackle problem gambling with prevention, education, treatment and commonsense safeguards, while Flick said they were intended to protect young people and families from gambling-related harm.
Separately, Birches Health said in April that it had signed a contract with Pennsylvania’s Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs to expand measurement-informed care for individuals and families affected by problem gambling, with services rolling out immediately statewide and a focus on underserved and rural communities. The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board has also promoted Problem Gambling Awareness Month and says more than 16,000 people have used its self-exclusion programme.
State representatives are due to begin considering the new bills on 9 September.
