That's certainly part of it - but there's some distance between prohibition and infinite alcohol dispensaries in everyone's pocket (which is what gambling has become).
I completely agree. Fundamentally, prohibition showed that legislating morality ultimately fails. As immoral as mobile gambling is (and I firmly believe it is), people are going to do it. And when you start coming up with top-down technology solutions to stop people from gambling online, you realize that there isn't a workable solution that privacy advocates would support en masse.
Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.
I think everyone agrees you can legislate morality, just they disagree where that line is (even the Oldes™ like Aquinas, who argued that prostitution is immoral but the state shouldn't outlaw it because the alternatives are worse for the state).
The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal. You also wind up with a better quality product, labels that help with dosage, potency, etc.
The no-holds-barred legalization of gambling apps has none of these benefits, and almost everyone I've talked to, no matter how libertarian their instincts, seems to agree we've gone way too far. I think (and hope) we'll see a backlash on the gambling stuff that pushes legal gambling out of the insanely public and accessible places where it currently lives.
> The major benefit of legalization of something like marijuana is that you nix a lot of criminality associated with the drug being illegal.
These days, if you exclude ‘possession’ and ‘selling’ from weed-related crimes, there’s almost nothing left. Weed is commoditized and is one of the few products that has gotten cheaper over the last 6 years.
There’s very little violence in the weed trade, the profit margins aren’t high enough for people to murder each other like they are for cocaine, heroin, and meth.
agreed - s/marijuana/dangerous drug of your choosing/ - the point is more about the differential between the purported benefit of legalization / decriminalization of "sinful" activities and the actual outcome in the specific case of gambling
Increasing awareness and creating programs to help people seeking treatment are the way to go.