BOSTON — In the 1980s, when Northeastern University law professor Richard Daynard began his crusade against the tobacco industry, few in the legal community gave him much of a chance. Since the 1950s, Big Tobacco had weathered a steady stream of lawsuits, with not a single one succeeding in court. The industry relied on what seemed like an ironclad defense: that smokers willingly assumed the risks and that the science linking cigarettes to disease remained uncertain and contested.
“The experts in the field didn’t want anything to do with it. So it was left to me,” Daynard told me as we sat at the dining room table in his Back Bay apartment, where nearly every wall is covered with a painting, some by his wife, the artist Carol Daynard.
To Daynard, the logic was simple. Lawsuits had helped dismantle the asbestos industry by exposing internal cover-ups and forcing companies to answer for knowingly endangering lives. Why, he reasoned, couldn’t the same strategy be used against Big Tobacco? “I trusted my logic, and I knew I was right,” he said.
What followed was a decades-long legal campaign that transformed public health law and how Americans viewed smoking. Working with a national network of lawyers and public health experts, Daynard helped build a strategy that exposed the industry’s deceptive tactics and reframed smoking as a public health crisis driven by corporate manipulation. His efforts helped achieve the landmark 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, in which major tobacco companies agreed to pay more than $200 billion to states and to change how they marketed their products.
But at 81, Daynard isn’t finished fighting. As president of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University, he’s focused on what he sees as the next major threat: the sports-betting industry. With its targeted promotions and digital reach, he believes the industry is quietly exploiting a new generation of vulnerable consumers — many of them young men — through practices he says are every bit as insidious as those once used by cigarette companies. “This is just a way to provide these microscopic micro-bets to keep you going,” Daynard told me. “And if there is no game going on (to bet on) in the states, there is Hungarian pingpong.”
In December of 2023, the Public Health Advocacy Institute and the center’s nonprofit law practice, the Center for Public Health Litigation, filed a class action lawsuit against DraftKings, a Boston-based betting app operator, over a $1,000 sign-up bonus offer, which, the lawsuit alleged, was aimed at inexperienced users who were unlikely to fully grasp the terms of the ad. DraftKings “knowingly and unfairly” designed the promotion, according to the complaint, particularly because of the “addictive nature of the underlying product.”
DraftKings moved to dismiss the case last summer, but a judge allowed the case to proceed. The company maintains that the rules of the promotion were clearly and simply explained. ”We remain committed to resolving the matter in question through the legal process,” DraftKings said in an email to Deseret News. The company provides a “regulated platform that prioritizes integrity and responsible gaming,” according to the statement.
Since filing the lawsuit, Daynard has drawn national attention once again. He’s been profiled by Time magazine, and Boston magazine described him as “a folk hero to public health advocates and a nemesis to anyone tied to the tobacco industry.”
“Dick is a legend in the field of public health,” said Harry Levant, director of gambling policy at the Public Health Advocacy Institute and a former gambler who is now a gambling therapist. “ He believes in the concept of public health being something that helps everyone.”
Other states are now starting to take action. In January, class action lawsuits against DraftKings were filed in Illinois, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Last week, the city of Baltimore sued DraftKings and FanDuel, another gambling company, alleging the companies used misleading tactics to exploit vulnerable betters and then relying on data-driven strategies to keep problem gamblers engaged.
Meanwhile, Daynard’s inbox is filled with heartbreaking stories of financial ruin and despair from families of gamblers, and he hopes to bring these stories to light. While the case plays out in court, Daynard and his colleagues have launched a grassroots advocacy campaign, Friends and Families of Gamblers, modeled after Mothers Against Drunk Driving and focused on the people behind the statistics. Daynard hopes the group will elevate personal stories and put pressure on lawmakers to take action on gambling regulation.
“It’s not just a bunch of citizens — it’s going to be stories of real human beings and what happened to them.”
The silent addiction
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting, granting states the authority to regulate it. By 2025, 39 states, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, have embraced legal sports wagering, with a handful of holdouts remaining, among them Utah, California and Texas. Globally, some form of gambling is allowed in 48 states plus the District of Columbia (the exceptions are Utah and Hawaii) and in more than 80% of countries. According to The Lancet Public Health Commission on Gambling, consumer losses are expected to climb to $700 billion by 2028.
In the U.S., gambling addiction has grown alongside the industry’s expansion. Roughly 2 million Americans are affected by gambling addiction, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, and the risk of developing a gambling addiction has increased by 30% over the past three years.
Meanwhile, the sports betting industry continues to break records. Last year, U.S. sportsbooks brought in $13.71 billion in revenue, up from $11.04 billion the previous year, according to the American Gaming Association. Legal sportsbooks processed close to $150 billion in wagers in 2024, making a 23.6% jump from 2023. Twenty-two percent of Americans have at least one active sports-betting account and about half among them are men ages 18 to 49, according to the Siena College Research Institute and St. Bonaventure University’s Jandoli School of Communication.
While most people can gamble occasionally without harm, easy online access has made it more likely for casual gambling to turn into a problem, according to Timothy Fong, an addiction psychiatrist and co-director of the UCLA Problem Gambling Studies Program, who spoke about public health risks of gambling at Harvard University in January. Early warning signs — like lying or overspending — can look similar to signs of substance addiction.
Gambling disorder is now recognized as a medical condition, with biological and psychological risks; it is defined by continued gambling despite negative consequences. According to research, 1 in 2 gamblers will think about suicide and 1 in 5 gamblers will attempt it. “We see the expansion of gambling activity not only on our phones, but in our real lives to the point that gambling is not only endemic, but it’s so much part of our daily lives that it has changed the fabric of what we do to our body, our brains and our minds,” Fong said.
Unlike an alcohol addiction, gambling is considered to be a “silent addiction” due to the lack of physical manifestations that come with it. “You can gamble unlimited amounts of money without anyone knowing it,” Levant told me. “You can do it in the palm of your hand, and as a result we’re not learning about it until tremendous harm has taken place.”
From Big Tobacco to sports betting
Daynard’s thick silver hair is neatly parted above a pair of dense, expressive eyebrows. Dressed this day in slacks and checkered shirt, Daynard exudes the understated authority of a seasoned professor, a career path he chose in his 20s.
Nearing his graduation from Harvard Law School, Daynard wrestled with a dilemma: Where could his legal skills make the most meaningful impact? While working at a New York City law firm, he helped draft a lawsuit on behalf of Ford Motor Company against a linoleum manufacturer over a breach of warranty.
Someone had to “oil the wheels of commerce,” he reasoned, and he pictured a partner’s office, a house in an affluent suburb and a country-club membership if he stayed the course. But that wasn’t the legacy Daynard wanted to leave behind.
“When I’m 50 — what would I have to say for myself?” he asked himself then. “And my answer was — I will have nothing to say for myself.” After graduating from Harvard, he clerked for a federal circuit judge in New York City and, after receiving invitations to join several law firms, Daynard took a different path.
He was 25 when he joined the Northeastern University faculty and became a law professor at 26. For him, teaching offered a platform to do something useful. “I wanted to do something to make the world a better place and that would be a meaningful thing for me,” Daynard said.
That drive had been with him since childhood. At age 12, Daynard was part of a New York City ham radio club, which met in a bar’s back room, thick with second-hand smoke. Although the science on secondhand smoke wasn’t widespread then, the fact that he had to inhale smoke felt “backwards” to Daynard, even at that age. “I had this sense that something here doesn’t compute,” Daynard told me. “That the priority here should not be given to the polluter rather than to the people who have to breathe it in.”
Daynard, who earned undergraduate and master’s degrees at Columbia University and eventually a Ph.D. in urban studies and planning from MIT, joined the Group Against Smoking Pollution, and in 1983, he became the president of the Massachusetts chapter. He didn’t learn much about urban studies in his program, he told me, “but I did get the notion of planning.”
This inspired a more practical approach when he taught a course called “Consumer Protection Planning.” He encouraged his students to put themselves in the shoes of regulators — say, the Food and Drug Administration — and think practically: What legal tools do you have and what do you do to deploy them?
When tobacco came up in class, he posed a question about strategy. The students didn’t hesitate and unequivocally suggested suing the companies. So, alongside a colleague, Daynard launched the Tobacco Products Liability Project, which helped attorneys filing cases for smokers and published legal opinions, legislation, and other tobacco-related documents. It was an audacious idea at the time. Since 1954, tobacco companies had faced 321 liability cases; most were dismissed or withdrawn, and the industry hadn’t lost a single one.
Daynard wasn’t even a torts or civil procedure specialist; he was teaching administrative law and contracts. He was open to passing the project to someone more “qualified.” But no one stepped forward: “They all knew better.”
Daynard began mobilizing attorneys, forging networks and combing through internal industry files. In 1987, Daynard publicized an incriminating document from the case file of a lifelong smoker, which revealed that a cigarette company had admitted the cancer risks of smoking while continuing to deny the dangers publicly. The jury awarded $400,000 to the widower, marking the first-ever financial penalty against a cigarette manufacturer, though the verdict was later reversed.
Slowly, the legal tide began to turn.
In 1998, the largest cigarette manufacturers in the United States signed the Master Settlement Agreement, resolving dozens of state lawsuits that sought to recover the public health costs of smoking. The landmark deal required the tobacco industry to pay out more than $200 billion over time and imposed sweeping restrictions on advertising, particularly to youth. “There wouldn’t have been a master settlement agreement if it wasn’t pretty clear before that to the industry that they were gonna be losing these cases,” Daynard said.
While the settlement didn’t make the cases easier to move forward, it began shifting the public conversation about smoking. Eventually the lawsuits drove the cigarette prices up and smoking rates fell. In 2009, Congress granted the FDA sweeping new powers to regulate tobacco products. “We’re talking about litigation changing the discussion,” he said. “And once you talk about something — in tobacco cases and sports-betting — the tobacco companies had nothing to say for themselves.”
I asked Carol Daynard if she’d ever seen her husband discouraged during the years of legal battles. “He doesn’t get upset, he’s a bit of a stoic in general,” she told me. “For him, it’s two steps forward, one step back.”
Daynard remembers the moment he realized the cultural shift had taken hold. Scanning the news one day, he saw a story comparing chemical executives to tobacco executives. “At that point, I knew we had passed over,” he said.
Today, Daynard sees the same addictive patterns and deceptive promotions with sports betting, and believes the same legal strategy can be used here, too. “You don’t swallow it, you don’t inhale it,” he said of wagering online. “What’s similar is the design.”
The orbit of harm
In March, Daynard and his colleagues joined Rep. Paul D. Tonko, D-N.Y., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., on Capitol Hill to announce the reintroduction of the SAFE Bet Act (Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet). Andrew Douglas, a recovering gambling addict who spoke at the event, said gambling addiction put him in “the darkest hole that I could ever imagine.” The bill proposes federal guardrails around advertising, affordability and the use of artificial intelligence in sports betting, while still allowing betting.
Daynard, who teaches civil procedure and law and public policy, isn’t a gambler himself, though he may have placed a $10 bet when he walked through a Las Vegas casino once. He believed Massachusetts’ strong consumer protection laws makes it a favorable place to file the lawsuit.
The complaint breaks down how DraftKing’s advertised $1,000 “bonus” worked: The gambler would need to deposit $5,000 and then place $25,000 in bets within 90 days, according to the complaint. “My notion was that this was low-hanging fruit,” Daynard told me. “If this isn’t a deceptive ad, there is no such thing as a deceptive ad.” “In fact, if the plaintiffs had understood the cost or the odds of winning the bonus, they would not have acted upon the promotion,” the complaint said.
DraftKings responded in an email to Deseret News: “Our products are designed for fun and entertainment, giving players opportunities to follow their favorite teams and athletes while connecting with friends,” the statement said. “We believe our promotional terms are clearly and fairly disclosed in plain language, and we adhere to the regulations set forth in each jurisdiction where we operate.”
During our conversation, Daynard got a phone call from Levant, who shared that a fellow passenger on a flight spotted Levant’s PowerPoint presentation on gambling disorder and invited him to speak to his addiction treatment organization. “Wow, I love it,” Daynard responded cheerfully.
Nearly 11 years ago, Levant almost took his own life. It was also the night he placed his last sports bet. “I hurt many people who once trusted me,” said Levant, a former lawyer who was disbarred after paying down his gambling debts with his clients’ money. He is now a licensed therapist, working with gambling addicts.
The scope of harm inflicted by gambling habits is much wider than the industry suggests, Levant said. “We know on an international level that each person who struggles with the gambling disorder, eight to 10 additional people in their orbit at a minimum are suffering harm,” Levant said. These voices will help expose the toll the industry is having on victims and their families, he added.
While Daynard and his team are not opposed to gambling generally, they’re fighting a system “that had gotten dangerously out of control.” PHAI’s work aims to shift the focus from “responsible gambling” to a broader public health approach to combat online betting, with stronger health-based rules and reforms at both the state and national level. “The normalization (of how sports gambling is marketed) is a threat to everyone, it crosses over state lines,” Levant said, noting the relevance of the problem to states that haven’t legalized sports betting.
Daynard’s team plans to find more lawsuits.
Reflecting on how to effect lasting change, Daynard offered this advice: take a stand, and if it still makes sense over time, stick with it. “If one door’s locked, maybe another door is a little bit ajar,” he said. “And maybe nobody goes around that way, because it’s a long route.”