>What is the societal benefit provided by it?

Same as beer or any other drug - just a way to have some fun and not destructive provided you can control yourself.

Though, the one time I opened a CSGO gun case and felt the dopamine rush, it was way stronger than any drug I've done. Not that I'm a "highly-experienced individual", but alcohol, weed or adderall don't come close to a CSGO case. Gambling feels much riskier.

I can't think of any addiction worse than gambling. It can ruin the life of a family quickly whereas all other addictions are in general only self destructive.

Those things should really be illegal too, I think, even as someone who enjoys alcohol.

The costs to society due to alcohol and the like are massive for essentially no real benefit.

Yes, I know what happened during prohibition. That still doesn’t mean alcohol is good for society.

Regulation and education are where the sane middle ground is. You don't outright ban the stuff (which is expensive and doesn't work anyway) but you keep the worst of the harms it causes from getting too out of control. Sadly, gambling is under-regulated and we'll probably all be suffering for a while as a result before regulations are tightened back up.

I agree that sane regulation is the most likely successful approach in the world we currently live in. A large cultural shift would be required for total prohibition to be successful.

Alcohol is the only painkiller which can be infinitely self-administered. There's value in that. It's quite ancient, been proven to work, which is why it's probably stuck around so long.

What makes alcohol different from others? You can take any painkiller indefinitely until it kills you.

What are you talking about? Fatal alcohol poisoning hits long before infinite self-administration. And there actually are many other far safer painkillers than alcohol.

Some people want to gamble and the gambling industry provides what they want.

How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?

> How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?

In this hypothetical scenario, is my hobby actively harmful to society?

Some people would enjoy killing people but we don’t let them do that.

Gambling can absolutely destroy lives. I've seen it in my own family. Its highly addictive nature combined with an easy way to lose everything you own is incredibly dangerous.

I've personally witnessed domestic violence from a gambler taking heavy losses as they realize they're about to be in a really bad place financially. I've never seen someone get violent over messing up a few rows of knitting.

So your beef is with domestic violence, not with gambling.

In a counterfactual where someone was doing some gambling and not doing some domestic violence, would you be still upset about the gambling in and of itself? Who does it harm?

Its not just domestic violence (though the rates of DV are usually higher with gamblers than the general population...huh I wonder why), but also just completely messing up a family's finances. This can really destroy families and relationships.

And sure, the same could be done with lots of things. But gambling is incredibly addictive.

I've watched family members gamble themselves into homelessness before. Isn't this a harm as well? Aren't the kids harmed when they lose their home and have no college savings despite the household having a net value of several million dollars a few years before?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not 100% against all forms of gambling. I gamble from time to time myself. What I'm against is this current wave of constant, relentless push of gambling into damn near everything, all the time. Back when gambling meant you'd have to go to the riverboat or fly halfway across the country or you're only dealing with small stakes poker between friends, its radically different to apps on our phones pushing notifications all the time, every sports game spending a significant amount of screen real estate to showing betting odds, news outlets talking about polymarkets all the time.

Could one have still been a problem gambler back before smartphone betting? Sure, one of those family examples I know about related to flying out to Vegas a few times a long time ago. But the rates of that happening were far lower before.

Maybe I enjoy having an arsenal of late-model machine guns, doing research on rare nuclear isotopes, brewing cholera in my septic tank, tending a Japanese knotwood garden, raising lantern flies, and breeding new strains of cold viruses.

Perhaps society should continue to restrain such hobbies.

Those are all good examples of things that you could in principle do without harming other people, so I don't see your point.

Yes, you should be allowed to do those things as long as you do it without harming others.

If a lot of people have that as their hobby, and some are careless or malicious, people will be harmed. Now suppose that it's not simple to stop the offenders directly. Instead, restricting the sale of nuclear isotopes or cholera samples would probably be highly effective.

What is the point of being this obtuse? Is there a rhetorical benefit to pretending that gambling is not a vice? That it is just a "hobby"? Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?

>How would you like it if people who didn't care about your hobby started questioning the social benefit of allowing you to do it?

Gambling? Is people questioning gambling a new thing? Seems like the opposite is the case. Again, this is where being purposefuly obtuse gets us.

> Should we apply this logic to selling illegal drugs?

Yes, of course.

Selling drugs is also a private transaction between two people that does no harm to anyone else.

If the people buying or selling drugs are harmful to others in the rest of their life, that's on them. It shouldn't be used as a fig leaf to negatively impact people who can buy and sell drugs responsibly.

Entertainment.

It's also the only vice you don't have to ingest an outside substance for.

> the only vice you don't have to ingest an outside substance for

to name a couple: gaming, prostitution (okay you might incidentally ingest an outside substance but YOU DON'T HAVE TO)

I wouldn't classify gaming as a vice.

You could say the same for dog fighting.