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I don't know, I see your point but I personally know few people addicted to gambling, the damage they do themselves and their families is the worst I've seen of any addiction, including drugs.

If a family father gets addicted to some drugs it's bad, but somewhat limited in impact, if it comes to gambling, those people ruin their families, very quickly.

Most countries in the West have hordes of homeless people everywhere...is it the gambling?

Saying a drug addiction has a "somewhat limited" impact is delusional. Particularly as addiction is an inherent property of taking drugs, that is not the case for gambling.

Maybe I wasn't clear, and please understand both my parents suffered of addictions.

If my father or mother got high or drunk every evening I did not. Terrible, pitiful, psychological nightmare, sure.

But I was not intoxicated.

On the other hand, I've seen the impacts of ludomania. When parents go broke or accumulate unpayable debts that's something you cannot recover with rehab and that will have insane implications for the whole family for decades.

I hope you understand now what I mean.

One of my best friends SO suffers of ludomania, a court has ordered his salary to be paid to her, and she gives him an 80€s monthly allowance. They got lucky, another family I know got completely ruined in the course of few weeks.

By the way, I'm polish/Italian, and we don't have hordes of homeless people, I don't think I've ever seen a single homeless person in my life in Poland.

> debts that will last generations

That’s something that should be banned.

Debts should die as part of settling the decedent’s estate. (The US got this right, and I thought most of the world did as well.)

Okay...but they are still alive? Poland has tens of thousands drug and alcohol-induced deaths, you can lose your money doing anything: gambling, women, bad business, job loss, etc. Many, many more people will have lost all their money because of alcohol in Poland than gambling...you only care about one of these things. The only explanation is that you care about people losing money in ways you don't approve of.

> The only explanation is that you care about people losing money in ways you don't approve of.

I don't see a way for this discussion to find a middle ground.

Ludomania is classified as a mental disorder and a very real illness.

I've seen it's effects along the effects of other addictions and my two cents is that it can be more devastating to people surrounding the addict than others.

Misery is misery regardless of the disorder, addiction or illness, we don't need to have a competition between it.

But it is very important to underline that gambling is not only increasingly legal but increasingly deregulated too.

> There is redeeming value: it is fun and harmless for most of the population.

The only way for this to be the case is if they don't do it very much. So if you're a new player and you get out pretty quick, or hop on once a month or whatever.

Which is not how gambling companies make their money. They make their money off the subset of their customers who have severe addictions - that makes up almost all their profit.

Right, like the Tobacco company isn't making money off a dumb 16 year old who bummed a cig under the bleachers.

If you knew for a fact that gambling was a significant net negative to society (ie, even when you take into account illicit gambling etc), would you support its ban?

That is like saying if you knew heroin was good then would you support giving it to children?

Asking this question is a sign that you aren't interested in the answer.

I believe that alcohol and tobacco are significant net negatives to society.

Yet, I do not support a ban on alcohol and I suspect that an outright ban on tobacco would be worse than simply having high taxes on it.

Sports betting is probably closest to alcohol in this regard: lots of people get moderate enjoyment from it from time to time and some people have their lives significantly harmed or even ended, meaning the overall net is negative, even though many people experience a small positive.

I wouldn’t ban sports betting for the same reason I wouldn’t take away your glass of red wine with dinner.

There are a lot of things that are a net negative to society but since we're not slaves, we're allowed to do things that can be fun but -ev if we choose to

Are you opposed to any or all of the following things?

- Seat belt laws

- Prescription requirements for drugs (whether that be Oxytocin or blood pressure medication)

- Building codes

- Minimum wage

I wear my seatbelt and insist my family does the same, but am opposed to seat belt laws.

I’m in favor of building codes for commercial and public buildings but not for detached private residences (or not at the current level anyway).

I’m opposed to minimum wage laws.

For oxytocin, I think people derive pleasure and overall significantly benefit from it and naturally encourage people to seek it out, despite it having a positive feedback loop in its mode of action.

Used under a doctor’s care and oversight, for patients where a prescription is indicated, benefits are well in excess of side effects. Maintaining the requirement for a prescription is fine.

Medicines for blood pressure management are likewise overwhelmingly beneficial, and so I want them to also be highly available to anyone for whom they’re indicated, though I think having a doctor in the loop to monitor is appropriate and needing a prescription is therefore fine.

Do you support any regulation of anything, or any laws for that matter?

>Also, online providers maintain lists of self-excluded people with state regulators (to be clear, the state holds the list, people put themselves on the list and are banned everywhere).

There's and ongoing lawsuit alleging sports betting platforms sent promotions targeted to users on the exclusion list to encourage a relapse in their gambling addiction.

https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/44520842/baltim...

>There's and ongoing lawsuit alleging sports betting platforms sent promotions targeted to users on the exclusion list to encourage a relapse in their gambling addiction.

>https://www.espn.com/espn/betting/story/_/id/44520842/baltim...

Your linked article doesn't say anything about that claim?

No, that lawsuit doesn't allege that, as the article explains. Self-exclusion lists are not maintained by gambling companies, so there is no way to market to them (and also, the lawsuit is being brought by a city...not an authority responsible for regulation). Just generally, there is no upside to doing this either. It makes literally zero sense if you apply rational thought.

What the lawsuit alleges is that at-risk users with promotions. This is undoubtedly true because people who have gambling addictions use gambling products and there is no way to identify someone with a gambling addiction prior to them using the product (contrary to what the article says, there is no way for companies to identify these users either, there are multiple third-party vendors in the industry who claim to have developed ML models to identify at-risk behaviour...none of them work).

The lawsuit does not identify whether these users opted-out of promotions (every regulated provider has this option...if you don't want these promos, just turn them off). And does not identify what aspect of existing regulation is insufficient (as I just explained, if you are a gambling addict, you have the option of being unable to open an account at any regulated provider).

In other words, this is the equivalent of Baltimore suing Budweiser because alcoholics drink their beer. It misunderstands at a very fundamental level how society should operate and tells you everything about US society where companies are expected to have a social role (and btw, what is most odd about this is that MD has a state gambling regulator, Baltimore is complaining about things that government already has the power to fix...I suspect the issue is that this revenue source is not being distributed their way, govt officials need to eat too).