On March 28, 2026, DraftKings’ Chief Responsible Gaming Officer Lori Kalani appeared on The Hill’s “Raising America” and made a suggestion that should alarm every parent, educator, and bettor paying attention: American high schools should integrate “responsible gaming” classes into their curricula. “I think people are waking up and saying we should be talking to the younger generation about gambling,” Kalani told host Elizabeth Prann. “Gambling is everywhere. Kids can play real money games even with video games.” Her conclusion: “The more people are educated that this is fun, but moderation is the smart way to do it and stay safe, is important.” Moderation and education — taught to minors, proposed by a $6 billion sportsbook operator, with no curriculum, no academic partner, and no independent oversight framework attached.
“The more people are educated that this is fun, but moderation is the smart way to do it and stay safe, is important.”
— Lori Kalani, DraftKings Chief Responsible Gaming Officer, on The Hill’s “Raising America” (March 28, 2026)
This isn’t a public health proposal. It’s a regulatory defense strategy — and it has a direct historical precedent that already played out to its conclusion. The tobacco industry ran this exact playbook for three decades. Peer-reviewed research documented how it ended. DraftKings is following the same script, beat for beat.
KEY FACTS AT A GLANCE
- The Proposal: DraftKings’ Chief Responsible Gaming Officer publicly suggested US high schools should teach “responsible gaming” classes — with no curriculum, no academic partner, and no independent evaluation framework
- The Precedent: The tobacco industry ran school-based “youth smoking prevention” programs from the 1980s through the 2000s — peer-reviewed research later proved these programs were designed to forestall regulation, not reduce youth smoking
- The Financial Context: DraftKings posted $6.05 billion in FY2025 revenue (27% YoY growth) while Q4 ARPMUP hit $139 — meaning each paying customer is losing 43% more money per month than the prior year
- The Youth Data: 65% of US adults gambled before age 21, and gambling before age 18 is associated with 80%+ higher risk of developing problem gambling later in life
- The Timing: The proposal arrived during the same week as a major microbetting addiction lawsuit, an ABC News investigation calling youth gambling a “public health crisis,” and Problem Gambling Awareness Month
Why DraftKings’ Gambling Education Proposal Follows Big Tobacco’s Script
In the 1980s, the tobacco industry faced a problem that looks remarkably similar to DraftKings’ current situation: surging public awareness of youth smoking, mounting lawsuits, and an increasingly hostile regulatory environment. The industry’s response was to launch school-based “youth smoking prevention” programs — the Tobacco Institute’s “It’s the Law” campaign in 1990, Philip Morris’s “Think. Don’t Smoke.” initiative in 1998, and R.J. Reynolds’ educational materials distributed through Boys and Girls Clubs, amusement parks, and schools nationwide.
These programs were presented as corporate responsibility. Internally, they were something else entirely. A landmark 2002 study published in the American Journal of Public Health by researchers Anne Landman, Pamela Ling, and Stanton Glantz analyzed thousands of internal tobacco industry documents and concluded that these youth prevention programs were designed to accomplish four strategic objectives: forestall legislation by demonstrating voluntary action, frame smoking as an “adult choice” that children should simply defer until they were old enough, position the industry as a responsible corporate citizen, and preserve industry access to youth audiences. The peer-reviewed finding was unambiguous: industry-sponsored programs were less effective at reducing youth smoking than independent public health campaigns, and in some cases subtly normalized the product they claimed to discourage.
The playbook was later recycled by JUUL Labs, which sent representatives into schools to deliver “education” presentations about e-cigarettes. Congressional testimony from a ninth-grader described JUUL representatives visiting classrooms, calling the product “totally safe,” and asking teachers to leave the room during the presentation. What was framed as health education functioned as marketing — and resulted in regulatory action and billions in legal settlements.
DraftKings is now running the same sequence. The structural parallels are not subtle.
The background of the person making the pitch matters. Kalani is not an educator or public health researcher. Before joining DraftKings in April 2024, she was a partner at Cozen O’Connor, where she co-chaired the State Attorneys General practice — a role focused on managing regulatory and political relationships between corporations and the officials who regulate them. She previously spent nearly a decade as senior corporate counsel and director of government affairs at DISH Network. Her expertise is in navigating the space between corporations and the government officials who oversee them.
When DraftKings announced her appointment, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall called her “a powerful and trusted voice” who “crafted creative, meaningful and successful solutions” to complex disputes. Colorado AG Phil Weiser added: “DraftKings is getting a first round pick.” These are endorsements of a regulatory strategist, not a public health advocate. In a separate NBC News interview, Kalani framed DraftKings’ position plainly: “This is a form of entertainment that is meant for adults, and those are the people that we want as our customers — not a 17-year-old who’s using his dad’s credit card.” The role itself — “Chief Responsible Gaming Officer” — is reputation infrastructure, not a public health function.
The Numbers DraftKings Won’t Teach High Schoolers
If DraftKings were designing a genuinely educational curriculum about gambling, here is what the data would require them to teach — and why they have every financial incentive not to.
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DraftKings posted $6.05 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2025 — a 27% increase year-over-year. The company is guiding $6.5 to $6.9 billion for 2026 and expects Adjusted EBITDA between $700 million and $900 million. In Q4 2025, average revenue per monthly unique payer (ARPMUP) hit $139, up 43% from the prior year. That metric means exactly what it sounds like: each paying customer is losing significantly more money per month than they were twelve months ago. DraftKings achieved positive net income for the first time in its history in fiscal 2025, posting $3.7 million against a $507 million loss the year before. The turnaround was driven not by adding more customers — monthly unique payers held flat at 4.8 million — but by extracting more money from existing ones.
Now set that financial reality against the youth gambling data that DraftKings’ proposed curriculum would need to address honestly.
A March 2026 NCPG/Harris Poll survey found that two-thirds of US adults participated in at least one form of gambling before turning 21. Among 21-to-44-year-olds — the cohort that grew up with legal sports betting — 33% placed a sports bet before they were legally allowed to. Meanwhile, research from the ABC News investigative unit found that 2 to 7 percent of young people who place bets report gambling addictions, compared to approximately 1 percent of adults. Dr. Nasir Naqvi, director of Columbia University’s gambling disorders program, reported seeing children as young as 13 seeking support for possible gambling addictions — and called the situation “a looming public health crisis” that is “already here.”
A 2025 report in International Gambling Studies found that gambling before age 18 is associated with more than 80 percent higher risk of developing problem gambling later in life. The neuroscience is straightforward: the prefrontal cortex — responsible for impulse control, risk assessment, and long-term planning — does not fully develop until the mid-20s. Adolescents are structurally more susceptible to the reinforcement patterns that gambling products are designed to exploit.
The juxtaposition is damning. DraftKings wants to “educate” high schoolers about responsible gambling while simultaneously designing microbetting products — live, in-game wagers on individual plays that addiction researchers describe as fundamentally more addictive than traditional wagering because they compress the bet-outcome-reward cycle into seconds. Dr. Harry Levant of the Public Health Advisory Institute framed it plainly: “Either in 2026, all of our brains have somehow changed, or the product has changed.” The product changed. And the company that changed it now wants to teach children how to use it responsibly. Understanding how the house edge actually works — and how it’s built into every product DraftKings offers — would be the first honest lesson in any legitimate gambling curriculum. DraftKings has no incentive to deliver that lesson.
The Regulatory Pressure That Explains the Timing
Kalani’s proposal did not appear in a vacuum. It arrived at the precise moment when regulatory, legal, and reputational pressure on DraftKings reached a compounding peak — the same timing pattern that characterized tobacco industry education launches in the late 1980s and 1990s.
On March 24, 2026 — four days before Kalani’s television appearance — the Public Health Advocacy Institute filed an 81-page complaint on behalf of Christopher Sage and Terry Thompson against DraftKings, FanDuel, Genius Sports, and the NFL in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County. The numbers in the complaint are staggering: Thompson wagered $22 million across both platforms, lost $1.8 million total, sold his finance company, took additional mortgages, lost his last dollar in February 2026, contemplated suicide, and voluntarily entered psychiatric care. Sage wagered $1.6 million on FanDuel and $360,000 on DraftKings, lost $175,000+, and borrowed $25,000 from loan sharks. The complaint alleges that defendants develop and distribute “unreasonably dangerous” products using AI and machine learning to create addicted gamblers, and push addictive live in-game microbets relentlessly — including through personal “VIP Hosts” who offered free Eagles and Phillies tickets, hotel accommodations, and betting credits after losses, continuing contact even after plaintiffs enrolled in self-exclusion programs. PHAI’s litigation director Andrew Rainer drew the connection explicitly.
“Following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, the online sports gambling industry has developed a highly addictive product that bombards consumers with betting opportunities.”
— Andrew Rainer, Litigation Director, Public Health Advocacy Institute
Weeks earlier, a USA TODAY investigation revealed the scale of underage access to legal sportsbooks. In Ohio alone, DraftKings generated 620 underage gambling reports totaling $2.78 million in wagers since 2023. In Massachusetts, DraftKings reported stopping more than 4,807 underage registration attempts but still suspended 243 accounts that had already placed illegal wagers. In Tennessee, underage reports quadrupled in a single year. Minors bypassed age verification using parents’ accounts, relatives’ credentials, and in some cases entirely stolen identities — including Social Security numbers belonging to deceased individuals. Virtually no one faced consequences more serious than a ban from the apps. ABC News ran its own investigative package in March, with Columbia University’s Dr. Naqvi describing the situation as a public health crisis already underway. All of this unfolded during Problem Gambling Awareness Month, which amplified the media coverage cycle.
The state revenue dynamic compounds the problem. Online sportsbooks generated more than $3.7 billion in state and local taxes in 2025 — money that state governments are now financially dependent on. This dependency complicates aggressive regulation, which is precisely why DraftKings is positioning itself as a “responsible partner” offering to help educate youth rather than as a target that needs to be regulated. It’s the same dynamic that protected Big Tobacco for decades: when the government profits from the product, the incentive to crack down diminishes. The broader financial pressures facing sportsbook operators make this defensive posture even more urgent.
What Youth Gambling Education Should Look Like — Without Industry Funding
The need for gambling education is real. The NCPG’s March 2026 survey found that only 15% of Americans have ever been asked about gambling behavior by a primary care provider. Two-thirds of adults gambled before they were legally permitted to. Half of 16-year-old boys reported gambling in the past year. The educational gap exists — the question is who fills it and how.
The tobacco precedent provides a clear answer. Independent, non-industry-funded programs with evidence-based curricula are the only interventions that have been shown to work. Stanford’s Tobacco Prevention Toolkit — developed without industry funding, emphasizing critical analysis of marketing tactics and refusal skills training rather than “moderation” messaging — is the model that actually reduced youth tobacco use. The gambling space needs the same approach: independent curriculum development with no industry funding or branding, emphasis on probability literacy and how odds actually work, honest instruction on cognitive biases that gambling exploits, and critical media literacy around sports betting advertising.
What the gambling space does not need is a curriculum designed by the entity that profits from the behavior it claims to moderate. Dr. Timothy Fong of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program has pointed out the core problem: “Combine that with the rise of social media and partnerships between sports leagues and influencers, we’ve created a world where gambling is now seen as part of the entertainment fabric.” The most effective youth gambling prevention strategy, as multiple researchers have emphasized, is delaying the age of first exposure — not educating around it. DraftKings’ proposal moves in exactly the opposite direction: it normalizes gambling as an inevitable part of life and positions the company as the appropriate educator.
SOURCING TRANSPARENCY
Dyutam is a gambling publication. We cover the sports betting industry, publish betting tools and educational content, and our audience includes active bettors. We name this structural position because it is relevant to this story: we are part of the ecosystem we are analyzing. Our editorial position is that gambling education should be independent of industry funding and oversight — including from publications like ours. The tobacco parallel is drawn from peer-reviewed research, not from an anti-gambling advocacy position. Our interest is in accurate analysis, not in the elimination of legal sports betting.
What to Watch
Kalani’s television suggestion is currently a trial balloon — not a formal initiative. The escalation triggers that would turn this into a more significant story are specific and trackable.
Formalization by DraftKings. If the company announces a named academic partner, publishes a curriculum document, or launches a pilot program in any school district, the trial balloon becomes an active campaign. The independence of any academic partner — and their funding relationship with DraftKings — will be the first question worth investigating.
Competitor adoption. FanDuel, BetMGM, and Fanatics have not endorsed the proposal. If any major operator joins the push for school-based gambling education, it becomes an industry-wide strategy rather than a single company’s positioning move. The existing loopholes that expose students to sportsbook platforms make competitor behavior worth monitoring closely.
State legislative activity. Any bills that reference gambling education curricula — particularly in high-handle states like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio — should be examined for industry lobbying fingerprints. The tobacco precedent shows that industry-backed “education” legislation was a key tool for preempting stricter regulation. The regulatory actions already underway in states like Colorado show that legislators are moving — the question is whether the industry gets ahead of them.
The Sage & Thompson discovery process. If this lawsuit proceeds past the motion-to-dismiss stage, the discovery process could yield internal DraftKings documents about customer acquisition strategy, youth exposure research, and the institutional purpose behind the Chief Responsible Gaming Officer role. This would mirror the tobacco document revelations that powered the Landman, Ling, and Glantz research — and it could transform the public understanding of DraftKings’ education proposal from a corporate suggestion into a documented strategic initiative.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Same playbook, different product — DraftKings’ proposal to teach “responsible gaming” in high schools mirrors the tobacco industry’s school-based “youth prevention” programs that peer-reviewed research proved were designed to protect the industry, not children
- No curriculum, no independence — Kalani’s suggestion came with no academic partner, no curriculum document, and no evaluation framework — making it a corporate positioning move, not an educational initiative
- The financial conflict is structural — A company that just posted $6 billion in revenue by extracting 43% more money per user has no incentive to teach students how the house edge works against them
- The timing is strategic, not coincidental — The proposal arrived during the same week as a major microbetting addiction lawsuit, a federal underage gambling investigation, and Problem Gambling Awareness Month
- Effective education requires independence — The tobacco precedent shows that only non-industry-funded, independently developed curricula actually reduce youth harm. The gambling space needs the same standard
Sources
- DraftKings Suggests Teaching Gambling Dangers in School — The Hill / Raising America (March 2026)
- Tobacco Industry Youth Smoking Prevention Programs: Protecting the Industry and Hurting Tobacco Control — Landman, Ling, Glantz; American Journal of Public Health (2002)
- National Survey Finds Widespread Gambling Participation Before Age 21 — National Council on Problem Gambling / Harris Poll (March 2, 2026)
- DraftKings Reports Fourth Quarter Revenue Growth of 43% — GlobeNewsWire / DraftKings Investor Relations (February 12, 2026)
- PHAI Files Landmark Sports Gambling Lawsuit Against DraftKings, NFL, Genius Sports — Public Health Advocacy Institute (March 24, 2026)
- Teens Hooked on Sports Betting Apps — NBC News (2026)
- Teens Are Betting Millions on Sports Apps — USA TODAY Network (2026)
- Lori Kalani to Join DraftKings as First Chief Responsible Gaming Officer — GlobeNewsWire / DraftKings (April 22, 2024)
- DraftKings Suggests Schools Should Teach Kids About Gambling — Casino.org (March 2026)
