Sports betting, like cancer rates and bad water, is a growing problem in Iowa.

There’s a relatively simple solution – limiting advertising – which I’ll get to in a minute. But first, some background.

Sports betting has a long history, although online betting has been legal only since 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the 1992 Bradley Act, which had severely limited sports betting at the dawn of the digital age.

Iowa, which pioneered modern-day lotteries and riverboat gambling, has four decades of gambling experience and was among the first to embrace legalized sports betting in August 2019. 

More recently, Iowa became the first state with a college-level sports betting scandal, when more than two dozen athletes at Iowa State University and the University of Iowa were charged last year with illegally placing bets.

No one involved looked good – not the athletes, not their friends and families who shared betting accounts with underage players, not coaches or administrators who failed to warn how easy it was to get caught with modern technology, not even state police who, defense attorneys allege, lied to at least one player.

But the problem is larger than Iowa.

A recent report on CBS’s “60 Minutes” focused on how gaming companies use science and technology to target men under 35, leading one addiction therapist to declare: “This is a public health emergency.”

With little regulation, the odds are all in favor of the betting companies. Few guardrails exist, partly because everything has happened so fast. Plus, beneficiaries include governments that receive a cut of sports bets as taxes.

The amount Iowans wagered on sports bets grew from $368 million in fiscal year 2020 to $2.25 billion during 12 months ending June 30, 2023, according to the Iowa Racing and Gaming Commission. 

Nationally, according to Legal Sports Betting, a trade publication, $300 billion has been gambled since the online gates opened in 2018; the same publication predicted that more than $23 billion would be bet on this year’s Super Bowl.

A January poll by St. Bonaventure/Siena Research shows how widespread and wide open sports betting has become. It said that nearly one in five adults, or about 50 million people, say they have at least one account with an online sportsbook, while roughly 45 million say they have “at least one app” for betting on a mobile phone.

Among those with phone apps, nearly half said they check betting odds at least once a day, with 24% saying they check the odds more than twice a day.

“60 Minutes” found anecdotal evidence of individuals who gambled away student loans and inheritances.

No one really knows how bad the problem is because the bookmakers have all the data, and they are not talking, said “60 Minutes” correspondent L. Jon Wertheim.

“There is no federal funding for research,” he added.

Wertheim noted, however, that the United Kingdom has placed limits on how betting companies advertise.

He also interviewed Harry Levant, a lawyer who successfully sued tobacco companies and who recently joined two law school professors “to wage war against mobile [phone] gambling addiction.”

Reporting by Wertheim and others suggest that limiting advertising can slow the industry’s mushrooming growth.

Hard liquor and tobacco are two other so-called vices that have experienced advertising limits.

According to National Public Radio, at the dawn of television in 1948, hard-liquor makers agreed to a self-imposed ban on TV advertising. It lasted until 1996, when local stations began airing ads for spirits. Since 2002, liquor ads have appeared more widely on networks and cable channels under an agreement that imposed restrictions on when the commercials can air and whom they can target – not underage viewers. 

Cigarette advertising was banned from television and radio in 1971, and smokeless tobacco was banned in 1986. Wider bans affecting print, billboards and other types of media followed and continued into the 21st century.

While limited advertising is one answer for addictive sports betters, implementing it anytime soon in our current political atmosphere will be about as easy as solving Iowa’s cancer or bad water problems.