alt Hacker NewsI mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though. It may actually be more beneficial to allow these things more broadly, because then social safety features can be wedged in between consumers and suppliers more easily and they don't have to deal with a gigantic shadow market that already gets stigmatised to death by the rest of the population. Just accept that a certain percentage of the populations has screwed up dopamine households and try to keep them away from gangsters as best you can. That would probably help society as a whole more than banning everything and pretending the problem goes away if you close your eyes.
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It's nuanced. When I was a kid I really enjoyed Scarne's books about gambling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scarne
which were written in an era when most of the gambling in the US was illegal and run by organized crime, Las Vegas was small, Atlantic City new, and New Hampshire the first state to get a lottery. Like prostitution, gambling needs a rather sophisticated criminal network, a parallel system of law-and-order, to be a workable, safe and reasonably fair business. Scarne started out his career, as a magician and card mechanic, as a sort of consultant who could keep games fair.
Blacks in New York City, for instance, ran illegal street craps and ran a lottery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_game
quite similar to the "Pick 3" games you see in many states -- the latter got taken over by the Italian mafia.
Gambling has a broad cross-cultural appeal and some people are going to do it no matter how you try to shut it down. In the US we went from having a few centers to widespread "riverboat" and tribal gambling to widespread casinos now to mobile gambling on sports and sometimes the equivalent of video slots.
Of course there is the matter of degree. It's not going to wreck your life to drop $1 on the lottery a week and probably gives you more than $1 worth of fun. If you're addicted though it may be no fun at all. I can totally see where Nate Silver is coming from but I can also see the degenerate who drops 20 bets on a single game on the weekend as well as the person who thinks he is Nate Silver and he isn't. I think the Superbowl is a fair competition by player who are playing their hardest, but it breaks my heart as a sports fan when teams are not playing to win and that's why I can't stand watching the NBA despite loving going to second-tier college basketball games in person.
And for drugs? I remember all the Lester Grinspoon talk about how prohibition is worse than the drugs themselves and that might have been true before 2000 but in the Fentanyl age I see people dropping like flies all around me -- but Marshall McLuhan said we are driving by looking in the rear view mirror and of course some people are going to be repeating things that were true in the last century.
The argument you are presenting is recycled from debates about newly banning things that have been legal for forever, but doesn’t make any sense at all as a response to people bemoaning disasters caused by an activity being newly legalized.
>Doesn't seem to curb demand though.
Because its an addictive product. See also: gambling.
I think the laws are written assuming everyone is rational but it's pretty clear from neuroscience than dopaminergic/VTA pathway abnormalities addictions make one anything but rational; and they haven't been updated to reflect the science.
What's even the point of having laws at all if some people will just ignore them and do whatever they want, right?
> then social safety features can be wedged in
The bans and strict regulations are the social safety features.
It does curb demand.
>I mean, you also can't advertise illegal drugs either. Doesn't seem to curb demand though.
Making drugs illegal does not eliminate demand, but it absolutely curbs it. The converse is also true, for example legalizing cannabis in Canada has significantly increased demand for it [1]. While it's true cannabis use had been gradually increasing for decades prior to legalization, there was a significant spike afterwards which has since levelled off.
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/231016/dq231...