Over time, the “responsible gambling” space looks more and more unpleasant to me. It has many wonderful and beautiful people with a genuine commitment to helping people with, or at risk of, gambling addiction.

But “responsible gambling” is also a space — a sector, if you will — where so-called “rockstars” command attention, credit, and praise in jarring ways. Why would anyone want to be a rockstar in shifting the blame to users of addictive products?

We live in a hyper-capitalist society where it’s difficult to have your hands clean of gambling money if you want to reduce gambling harm. I get that. People need to pay their bills and survive, and the commercial gambling sector is an enormous parasite with money to spend to launder its reputation and make its financial harm more sustainable.

I used to be a journalist for gambling industry trade publications that made money from signing up users for gambling. My hands were dirty. I know I contributed to gambling-related harm.

Over 18 months since I launched GamblingHarm.org, I’ve heard or read the term “rockstar” used so many times in the context of responsible gambling. It’s offensive. To me, a rockstar means someone who receives outsized attention for their work.

The responsible gambling space does not have a single leader, but it does have rituals of praise, insider status, and professional validation that feel badly out of step with the scale of the harm.

For every RG rockstar, there are thousands of people doing the emotional or physical labor without recognition.

Perhaps “rockstar” would feel less obscene if gambling addiction were subsiding, or if gambling were not still infiltrating more aspects of society.

If you want gambling harm to be greatly reduced in society, you have to admit we’re not currently winning the fight. Why would anyone want to be considered a rockstar while losing?

But that is the alternate universe of RG: the belief that gambling harm is being managed, or that we are pointed in the right direction.

Someone can, of course, be a rockstar in someone’s life — but, big picture, there are no rockstars in a crisis. We are in a gambling addiction crisis in the U.S.

People should be celebrated; some people are even heroes — a term I think is much more appropriate for work related to gambling harms. There are countless heroes doing this work. But the responsible gambling framework stigmatizes people with addiction by framing harm as predominantly an individual, personal failure.

At the end of the day, perhaps RG is so toxic that it needs rockstars to exist. Fortunately, I believe that RG is slowly becoming discredited, which is a win for everyone harmed by gambling addiction.

We don’t need more rockstars. We need no more ruined lives, no more families in crisis, no more people blamed for becoming addicted to products designed for compulsive use.