This stuff is still unclear to me. The addictive drugs, ones that punish a quitter chemically, are not mysterious, but gambling addiction certainly is. "Dopamine" won't work as an explanation - for instance I was once hooked on building a wooden table, which sucked up two months of my free time and lots of money, and damaged my thumbs, and no doubt I was driven by the dopamine rush of learning through the repetitive process of chiseling. But gambling is assumed to be a glitch, not a wholesome obsession. In what way does it differ? The addiction is very old, I'm sure there are accounts from the 1700s, and it doesn't even require a house to reel the gambler in - it could all be about informal games and wagers, still leading to huge debts. It's tempting to blame it on dumb ideas about luck and fate, but the dumb ideas involved could be varied and complex.

That's similar to dumb ideas involving social pressure. When people have a tendency to be dumb about a thing we use the law to restrict the thing, apparently. But this involves, in effect, an authoritative declaration of "that's dumb" by law. I feel personally threatened, then, in activities such as my woodwork, which might have been an equally dumb obsession! I know nobody's at all likely to regulate woodwork, but that's only because it's relatively unpopular. I could imagine a parallel universe where woodwork (portable somehow) becomes a trend that makes a young person feel socially relevant, and then it gets regulated. I think I disapprove of this interference with people's dumb notions.