The second half of Derrick’s adult life began on March 27, 2025.
That was the day, at 33 years old, he decided to walk into a room at a church in Willoughby for a Gamblers Anonymous meeting. Before that was a decade of numbers: overs and unders, parlays, three credit cards maxed out to the tune of $10,000 each, some $20,000 in gambling debts.
Derrick’s body shook as his car idled in the parking lot of Grace Episcopal Church. This was one of two options — walk into the church or go home and try to handle the problem himself. But the problem had to be solved. After a decade of betting, ten years of the fraternity of The Game, the gravity of the situation was clear. He had a wife and two kids, and he might lose them.
“It was to the point where my wife felt helpless,” Derrick told Scene. “She was like, if you’re not going to go to GA, then you’ve almost given me no choice. I can’t have you in this house.”
“So, it was either go in or I lose anything in my life that is still important to me,” he said.
Ohioans wagered a staggering $10 billion in 2025, according to the Ohio Casino Control Commission, with about 98% of bets being placed online compared to physical retail locations. Sportsbooks raked in $1 billion in revenue for the year on the backs of losses by those gamblers.
Sports betting is ubiquitious, as DraftKings, FanDuel and other companies pummel Ohioans with endless ads, sponsorships, and promos that promise fun, fraternity, and little risk. And it’s worked: 30% of young adults ages 18 to 24 engage in online gambling with high frequency, The Atlantic relayed in a deeply reported cover story on the industry and how it’s become a dominant and dangerous force in American culture.
A sentiment that Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has belatedly come to just a few short years after putting his signature on a bill to legalize sports wagering in the stage, calling that decision the biggest mistake of his tenure.
“It’s a huge problem among young males up to 45. It’s a huge problem. And we have many of them addicted, many of them spending money that they do not have,” DeWine told Cleveland.com in January. He held up his cell phone. “They don’t have to go to a casino. They don’t have to go anyplace—they got it right here.”
As the industry has grown from $5 billion in wagers placed nationwide in 2017 to $160 billion in wagers in 2025, so too have the risks of addiction, financial ruin (only 3% of gamblers turn a profit in the long run), and suicide.
Gamblers Anonymous has been a refuge for those in the throes of addiction since the 1950s. States with legalized sports betting also have other sources of help. Roughly $15 to $20 million a year is spent by Ohio on treatment programs, a hotline, addiction specialists and Know Your Limit public service announcements, all funded from tax revenue collected by the state. Gamblers can even blacklist themselves and opt out from Ohio’s 11 racinos and casinos and the 18 sportsbook apps available.
Those tax-revenue funded programs keep expanding, both because of the growth of collections and need.
“Oh, we’ve definitely seen an increase of guys coming into the room,” Greg, a hotline operator and addict-in-recovery who once had six figures in gambling debt, told Scene. (Two out of every five of the 1,500 calls to the state hotline in January, records show, came from a Cleveland-area number.)
“It’s such a lonely disease,” Greg said. “Nobody knows what you’re going through. How much debt you have. You don’t see the physical aspects of it, like drugs and drinking.”
In 2012, when JACK Casino (then the Horseshoe Casino) first opened up in the Higbee Building on Public Square, 10 percent of Ohioans were prone to develop a gambling addiction, according to the Problem Gambling Network of Ohio. By the breakout of legal sportsbook apps in early 2023, that at-risk population doubled to 20 percent.
“It’s all about this culture shift,” Derek Longmeier, PGNO’s executive director, said.
“We have accessibility, then access, then availability—and then acceptability,” he said. “And the acceptability of gambling has shifted over the last few decades where it was such a taboo issue. Now, you can’t go to a game without seeing an ad for a sportsbook.”
And you can’t watch sports without seeing one either.
“I think this culture is very structured towards men — men trying to create these bonds with people,” Pete, an accountant in his twenties who had to work Uber Eats part-time to pay off $50,000 in debt, said. “It’s just an easy conversation to have with the boys. ‘Oh, what did you guys put on that? Are we betting this game or what?’”
It’s frighteningly easy, Pete said.
Sportsbooks weren’t given enough guardrails when they were allowed to advertise—newcomer “free” bets or holiday deals—to those they could harm the most.
“I don’t think they did a good job in regulating it,” he said.
In Derrick’s mind, the act of weaning oneself off sportsbooks was a feat of self-reliance. After he walked into that Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Willoughby last March, he followed a suggested flowchart of options. He banned himself from public books. He stopped consuming sports podcasts. He installed a bet blocker, Gamban, on his phone. “I even called up my old bookie,” he said. “And told him to delete my number and never call me again.”
His wager on himself has paid off, but he felt he had no other choice.
“I had to. Because if I lose my kids, if I lose my wife, then I don’t—I don’t know what my desire is to keep going would be. I really don’t.”
“At this point,” he said, “that’s the only thing that matters to me.”
Anyone struggling with a gambling addiction can reach out to Ohio’s hotline at 1-800-589-9966 or find more resources for help here.
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