Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bratmon | Hacker News Reader

The US literally just tried that with gambling, and we discovered that making gambling legal increased the number of addicts by so much that it shows up in "total bankruptcies" statistics.

View on HN

The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life, but think gambling is a harmless pass time until it is too late. There’s nobody who doesn’t know the perils of heroin, legal gambling existed in most places in some form and had for a long time. People view it much more like alcohol than heroin.

Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.

It's worth noting that there's a form of gambling that's exactly the same as sports betting that has been legal for much longer, the financial markets.

The analogy is apt only in that financial markets are "a form of gambling" exactly as much as sports is.

> The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life,

Now they do; make it legal and in two generations it won't be viewed that way because, after all, it's legal!

Do you expect the same amount of ads for heroin as for sport betting?

Get your first dose for free! Refer a friend and get more free shots! Every tenth shot for free!

Yes, I do. Heroin was widely advertised before it was banned, and I don’t see why those same commercial pressures wouldn’t lead to it being advertised now if it were legal. It’s not even a lie to say that it works as a cough suppressant!

Weed is legal in many places, are there ads everywhere there?

Also Coca-Cola should be allowed to use a real coke extract. I doubt they will as they cannot even use a real sugar in USA anymore.

They still do use real extract

>Also Coca-Cola should be allowed to use a real coke extract.

They do. It's bought from a Peruvian state-owned company and the cocaine is extracted for medical use.

Cannabis has become legal 1 1/2 years ago here and now there is a lot of advertising and the smell is everywhere. I wasn't a fan before, but now I want it to become illegal even more.

So, you can’t make something legal, but ban advertising it? Seems like a user error.

Some countries don’t even allow advertising legal and OTC pharmaceuticals.

If you had the lobby to make it legal, surely you also have the lobby to allow advertising. Especially after there are legal companies who would benefit from that.

We also made it extremely easy to gamble. It'd be the equivalent to handing everyone a heroin replicator, so that all people had to do was press a button and heroin would instantly appear.

Isnt that more because gambling is ingrained with American culture? It’s seems to be pretty much everywhere.

Gambling as in roulette, gambling as in games of skill, or gambling as in trading?

In the last case gambling is pretty much everywhere in all developed societies.

> gambling as in games of skill,

These are pure gamblimg, the skill part is thinly weiled excuse having little to do with the reality. Even if it was skilled, it would still be gambling, but for the most part it is not skilled.

> or gambling as in trading?

Yeah many small investors treat it as a pure gambling. But investing has more regulations and somewhat saner culture. The companies are not intentionally trying to identify and hook addicts deeper and deeper.

Which "sports" literally do.

> These are pure gamblimg, the skill part is thinly weiled excuse having little to do with the reality

"Games of skill" in this context essentially always refers to poker, which is demonstrably not "pure gambling".

>Yeah many small investors treat it as a pure gambling. But investing has more regulations and somewhat saner culture. The companies are not intentionally trying to identify and hook addicts deeper and deeper.

>Which "sports" literally do.

This was perhaps largely true in the pre-robinhood era, now it's hard to draw any meaningful distinction between sports gambling and daytrading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com