Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

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No, I really believe that making vices illegal causes more harm than the vices they’re trying to prevent, and that we see it over and over every time we do it. I think nobody would disagree with me that that’s what happened with alcohol. I’ve been saying that’s the case with drugs for decades and public opinion is turning that way too.

It’s true with gambling too. You just likely haven’t seen the harm that happens because of it being illegal. Ever had a gun pointed at you over a game of poker? I have. Doesn’t happen online or in a casino. Ever met people who’ve been violently hurt because they couldn’t pay their gambling debts? I have. Draftkings or your bank aren’t out breaking knees.

Making it illegal does not make it go away. If you had been born into a world where alcohol was illegal for a long time, and then it were legal, you’d probably have the same opinion of that, but you know (because you were lucky to be born with the benefit of decades of hindsight) the world is less good that way. This is not different.

The harms of gambling can be mitigated much more effectively in ways other than prohibition. Regulation is always better than outright bans. Look at what we’ve done with cigarettes.

Making online betting legal was the right thing to do, it being illegal at all was the mistake, we just need to work on harm mitigation.

I just don’t even understand people who think vices should be illegal. I mean I do, their thought process is just overly simplistic and they don’t know what they don’t know, but there’s just so much evidence it is the worst possible solution and yet so many people can’t think past “it’s bad so it should be illegal”. Even intelligent people.

On reflection I think you've convinced me, and I find it curious that I initially dismissed the parallels with other vices.

I think I felt disconnected from, and maybe above, gambling, so I had less sympathy for it happening in illegal ways. I think it was wrong to have less sympathy due to that, but I also think I was wrong to feel disconnected from gambling. I played MTG for years, which is in many ways just legal gambling, and I had to quit it completely to feel comfortable.

I don't know if I would have played if it were illegal, but I can understand what it would be like to do so.

This might sound crazy but I know what you mean. I hate gambling. I never found it fun, and if I’m honest, I genuinely found most of them contemptible. I was very young and much less understanding. I’m just good at games and found one I could make really good money at. I never played slots or pai gow or much else unless I had an edge on the casino, and that’s rare and usually just because of a promotion.

I’ve seen first hand people throw their lives away for it, just like they do with drugs or alcohol. Addiction has familiar patterns regardless of the particular vice, and the answer is better mental health facilities, not criminalization.

All giving an addict a rap sheet does is make it harder for them to get a job.

Illegal gambling is an interesting underworld. You’ll be at the same table with drug addicts, local politicians (even police sometimes), successful businessmen, and everything else you can imagine.

It’s less in-your-face harmful than fentanyl but the processes they go through are similar.

I think legalizing gambling gets rid of a lot of problems, but of course, causes problems too. But just because legalizing it led to an upsurge in sports betting doesn’t mean the best option is to make it illegal again.

Cigarettes are the model to me for vices. It’s the best public health win I’ve lived to see. Instead of making them illegal, we made them expensive and uncouth. We made cigarette companies fund campaigns to get people off cigarettes, to huge effect.

That’s what I believe we should do for gambling. Legalizing it was not a mistake, and looking at the picture shortly after and deciding it was is short sighted.

Also MTG was how I got into poker! I’d travel to the tournaments or game cons, wait for people to bust out, and then get a game started.

In the late 90’s every big MTG tournament had a poker game going. It got to the point where game stores had to ban it because nobody was even playing Magic anymore.

That was the much less seedy side of underground poker. So much fun.

Fully illegal = lots of murders.

Fully legal = lots of suicides.

With drugs, perhaps. But even there, if you count overdoses as suicides, which I largely do, it’s still mainly that. Illegal gambling is probably a precursor to 100x as many suicides as murders. It’s not even close. Murders happen but not a lot.

And almost everywhere has plenty of legal gambling. All that’s been changed is you can gamble on one more thing and not violate federal law. State law still applies.

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