alt Hacker NewsAbsolutely addiction does; so we're going to ban alcohol (and weed), and then maybe move onto video games and books and and and and?
Prohibition has generally been a lot less effective than regulation. The problem in the US, in my view, is much more the utterly-gutted effectiveness of the regulatory state than it is the existence of legal gambling.
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If alcohol and tobacco were discovered tomorrow, they'd probably end up schedule 1, and rightly so. If cannabis was discovered tomorrow, it would probably be unscheduled, and rightly so.
We literally have a system of tiers of addiction versus potential value for addictive substances. A slippery slope argument is pretty silly when we literally already created a staircase.
So then you must have a clear set of principles on how to regulate gambling to maintain it as a healthy activity with no degenerate pathways?
There's a big slippery slope here.
Who says we need to keep going? That's not a hypothetical question - who says? Why would we do that?
I agree regulation is good, but prohibition is a type of regulation. There're also levels of prohibition - you don't need to prohibit all of it, maybe just the most obviously harmful.
Like you can ban online gambling but keep casinos if you want. I don't know, I don't have the analysis on which is worse.