In the spring of 2025, MACGH — the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health brought a five-session curriculum into five high schools and three community organizations around the state. The program walked teenagers through how gambling advertising works, what the actual math on a parlay looks like, and what problem gambling warning signs feel like from the inside. By the end, 69 percent of students said they’d wait until they were of legal gambling age before placing a bet. The percentage who believed sports betting was “easy money” dropped from 53 to 44.
That is what consumer protection looks like when it works.
The program, launched through the Youth Sports Betting Safety Coalition announced by Attorney General Andrea Campbell in March 2024, is the first youth gambling-harm prevention curriculum in the United States specifically focused on sports betting. Phase 2, running spring 2026, has expanded to 2,000 students at 15 high schools — plus another 200 students at five middle schools. The need is not abstract. Treatment referrals for Massachusetts residents aged 20 to 30 doubled from 140 to 300 between FY2022 and FY2024. Helpline calls citing sports betting as the primary concern are up 1,117 percent — from 6 to 73. A single Boston-area Gamblers Anonymous chapter added 17 new members in five months, two-thirds of them in their 20s or 30s.
What Massachusetts’s Sports Betting Education Program Actually Does
The curriculum runs five interactive sessions, roughly 45 minutes each. It isn’t scare tactics or abstinence messaging — it teaches students to read gambling advertising the way a media literacy class teaches them to read a political ad. How are odds presented? What does the house edge actually mean over time? What does it feel like when a hobby becomes compulsion?
This is basic financial and psychological literacy applied to a product advertised on every major sports broadcast in America. That it didn’t exist before 2024, in any state, is genuinely strange — until you think about who benefits from its absence.
Why the Gambling Industry Fights Every Consumer Protection It Can
In 2026, DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics formed a super PAC called “Win For America”. Total fundraising: $43 million. DraftKings’ contribution alone: $19.5 million. CEO Jason Robins confirmed the PAC’s formation on record. The stated purpose was to fight Massachusetts’ Bettor Health Act, a regulatory package that included a proposed ban on prop bets, a 51 percent tax rate, and advertising restrictions.
While that bill was advancing through the legislature, DraftKings gave $17,750 to the Massachusetts House Speaker and $19,800 to the Ways and Means chair. That’s not a gray area. That is a company spending money to influence the people who control the laws that govern how much money it can make from Massachusetts residents.
To be precise: there is no documented evidence that the industry has specifically targeted the MACGH school curriculum. Their opposition is to the Bettor Health Act’s full regulatory package. But that’s the point. A company’s posture toward every consumer protection mechanism tells you its posture toward this one. When DraftKings spends $19.5 million fighting a 51 percent tax and advertising restrictions in the same state where treatment referrals for young adults doubled in two years, “we have no specific objection to the high school curriculum” is not the reassurance they think it is.
The Math the Industry Doesn’t Want Teenagers to Learn
The gambling industry spent years and considerable political capital lobbying its way into Massachusetts. Sports betting went live in the state in January 2023. The market it wanted most was young adults — the demographic that grew up watching sports, is comfortable with apps, and has decades of potential wagering ahead.
The curriculum exists because AG Campbell’s office recognized that the same advertising machinery now targeting that demographic operates without any countervailing education requirement. Nobody is required to explain to a 19-year-old what a six-leg parlay actually pays out over time, what the implied probability behind -110 odds is, or what it looks like when recreational betting becomes something you can’t stop.
The $43 million super PAC is the industry’s answer to regulation. The five-session high school program — reaching, in its first year, 440 students — is the state’s answer to the industry. One of those numbers is a rounding error in DraftKings’ quarterly budget. The other is the only program of its kind in the country.
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