I confess I was a touch shocked when I saw you can do the lottery with an app on your phone nowadays. The incentive to get more people putting money into the pot is just far too high for folks, it seems. :(

I don't think anyone seriously thought it's not harmful. The only positive spin was talking about responsibility or tax income while just not saying anything about negatives.

Gambling in general is bad for consumers. Making it available online only makes it reach a larger audience. A much larger one, though.

Honestly how could it have helped? It's essentially slots just with a live product, the lines are designed to make money for the bookmaker.

And there you hit the nail on the head. Concentrated bookmaker wealth can lobby for allowing online sports betting. Distributed consumer money can't, in any effective form.

Spending money on recreation means you don't have that money any more. You could claim the same of recreational fishing. It is also random interval operant conditioning and the boats are huge money sinks. Or video games.

But this is actually not "hurt". This is nothing to do with "health". Those medicalizations outside of medical context are attempts to bring in the use of legal force to try to control people behaviors for situations that are both voluntary and non-fraudulent. If some people enjoy losing money "betting" on sports, or "wasting time playing videogames" then let them. Don't pretend "harm" is being done just because you want to use force to stop some behavior you don't approve of.

Gambling is objectively harmful and predatory to those with addictive disorders and those in lower income brackets. It creates an illusion of control and steals their money away, enriching those who need money the least.

If I spend money on fishing equipment, I can later sell that gear and recoup some of my cost. I can enter fishing competitions and make some money back. I can rent that boat out and make money back. Once I have spent that money, I have my entire life to make that worth it to me. I can never make money back from gambling. I can never recoup my cost, and considering that the most popular forms of gambling are purely luck-based, there aren’t even any skills I have honed to make money.

Recreational fishing at least has fishers buying lures, lines, rods, canoes, etc, and going out to parks and lakes, maybe spending money on dinner and lodging, spreading their money around. Online sports betting takes minimal time, and the money only goes to the bookies.