Texas Stopped Funding Gambling Addiction Programs Years Ago. A Surprising Donor Is Helping Fill the Void.
When Texas launched its lottery in 1991 it set aside about $2 million a year to treat problem gambling — a program that helped roughly 760 people before the funding dried up, leaving Texas one of only about seven states with no dedicated gambling-addiction funding. With sports betting and skill games spreading, the gap is widening, and the unlikely stopgap is Las Vegas Sands: the casino giant, which is lobbying to expand into Texas, donated $100,000 to the Texas Coalition on Problem Gambling to train therapists and stand up a state certification program. The story captures a system trying to rebuild treatment capacity from almost nothing.
Our Thoughts
There’s an uncomfortable irony in a casino company funding treatment for the harm casinos help create, and the article doesn’t look away from it. We won’t either. But the deeper story is the void: a state that quietly stopped paying for treatment decades ago and is only now reckoning with the bill as betting expands.
760 people over the life of a program, in a state of 30 million, is a rounding error against the need. Wherever the dollars come from, the people in front of them are real — and until the funding catches up, free, always-on peer support isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the floor. If you’re in Texas and can’t find a funded program near you, you can still find a meeting tonight.
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