I have to disagree. Scale does matter.

If murder was legal we'd have a lot more of it. We still have them despite it being a crime, but nobody would ever suggest making it legal because some people do it anyway.

Vices are very different than murder and the fact that people equate the two is how we get things like prohibition and the war on drugs. Lots of studies have shown that legalizing drug use does not appreciatively increase drug use, for instance.

It’s hard to make an argument that making murder illegal was a net harm to society. It’s really easy to make that argument with vices, in fact any history book probably will in the section on prohibition.

Sports betting is not any more insidious than any other type of gambling. Even if legalizing it has increased the amount of sports betting, which likely it has, we don’t know that it has increased the overall amount of gambling, and we certainly don’t know that it has increased the overall amount of societal harm from gambling, no matter how many great anecdotes we get from newspaper articles.

Perhaps people have simply switched from the lottery or slot machines to sports betting. Perhaps some are better off because sports betting has a much lower house edge than the lottery or a lot of other forms of gambling.

I could tell you for sure there is a whole lot of illegal sports betting going on, or at least there was. There is a seedy black market that I would be willing to bet has been largely destroyed by the ability to Gamble from your phone. (I’m far too removed from it these days to have any firsthand knowledge of the current situation.)

I can also tell you about the negative impact that gambling laws have on the lives of non-problem gamblers, myself included.

People always reflexively follow the train of logic: vice bad, make vice illegal. It failed when we made alcohol illegal, the war on drugs has been disastrous for the poor, far worse than the drugs we were fighting, and there’s not much evidence to believe it even significantly reduced drug use. The idea that any vice being illegal creates an overall harm reduction has pretty much been shown time and time again to be incorrect, and yet everybody just believes it because it seems like common sense.

That's a lot of assumptions you're making there. We don't know if these people were playing the lottery/slots before? I doesn't matter. They didn't go bankrupt before.

Sports betting is way too easy to use and thanks to the "skill" part it tricks people into thinking they have even more chances. Turns out those are chances to lose even more money.

Unlike your example of drug use, AFAIK there are no studies saying the same effect happens for sports betting, or even betting in general.

This for me is all pointless. We're arguing about something that does not improve society in any shape or form. The typical argument "we've been gambling since forever" doesn't cut it. We've also been murdering since forever, and both are still a net negative in society.

If we really need this silly vice, then lock it down. We can't allow this free-for-all where everything is sponsored by betting with money straight from the pockets of addicts, kids are getting addicted with loot boxes and the only ones that profit are the few middlemen that are morally corrupt enough to go into this business.

If your argument is that legalized sports betting doesn't increase the total amount of sports betting, in the absence of extraordinary evidence, that seems implausible on its face.

Well banning it would also remove the marketing. Just because some illegal gambling will still happen doesn't mean banning it wouldn't help a lot of people.

Overall harm minimization is more than just helping a lot of people. Prohibition of alcohol helped a lot of people but hurt even more. Same with the war on drugs.

Combatting vices with prohibition fails over and over, badly, and yet people can’t get past the “common sense” idea that it’s an overall harm reduction no matter how many times they see proof that it isn’t.

A much more surgical approach is called for.

You are arguing that reversing the very recent legalization of sports gambling would be a net harm to society and that there would be greater suffering than there is today because of that ban.

Are you making that argument by accident, because you felt compelled to nitpick some word choices, or do you seriously believe that?

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.