I don't think the reasons are obvious. Where do you put gambling on the spectrum?
Personally, I am leery of any technical definition of “addictive” that operates outside the traditional chemical influences on physiology. So I would not describe gambling in that sense.
One might have a malady that causes gambling to take on the same physiological vibe for you, but that’s not what it means for gambling itself to be addictive.
If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?
I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.
It not at all certain that you would find it hard to stop if you suddenly decided to try smoking. There would naturally be a risk, but how high that risk is is a debated subject if you have none of the risk factors for addictions.
There is a particular hard drug that I could be easily addicted to if it were cheaper and more accessible. Nothing else like it gives me irresistible craving for more. Not nicotine, ADHD meds or speed, benzos, and not even opioids have the same effect. So after I discovered this about myself, I went on a little journey to self test myself other possible addictions.
Social media? Nope. Video games and tv? yes. Gambling, hoarding, shopping: No. Sex: yes. Exercise: yes
I can’t rationalize any of it.
If you don’t want to call that addiction, fine, but you can’t deny that it happens.
One is physical addiction and the other is psychological.
But I'm also feeling a parallel here to people who think that mental health issues aren't real medical problems and that people can just "get better" whenever they want. And that's concerning. We shouldn't be more lenient on things that are "only" psychologically addictive.
Indeed, and if we want those behaviours to remain as things considered to be choices rather than the nearly inescapable negative life-destroying feedback loops (activities with high addiction potential, for lack of a more concise term), they should be treated with special reverence and highly restricted from outside influence. Put another way, if we want liberal societies to be sustainable, I'd argue all forms of overtly addictive behaviour should—in many cases—be banned from public advertisement and restricted from surreptitious advertisement in entertainment, and we should have definitions for those.
For ages we've not had cigarette ads on public broadcasts, and yet people still "choose" to smoke, meanwhile there's been a increasing presence of cigarettes among Oscar winning movies in the last 10 years.
If you are addicted to smoking and trying to avoid being reminded of it, you'd realistically have to stop watching movies and participating in that aspect of culture in order to regain control of that part of your life. Likewise, with gambling, you don't only have to stop going to the casino, you have to stop engaging with sports entertainment wholesale.
Fortunately it also has minimal to no value to society, so even if we overreacted and banned it completely it’d be fine
You can still smoke, drink, get high, and gamble. We ask that you limit these to places that minimize the damage you do to other people.
In the US, regardless of what type of addiction you have, it is considered mental health. Open market insurance like ACA does not cover mental health, so there is no addiction treatment available. Sure, you can be addicted to a substance where your body needs a fix, but it is still treated as mental care. This seems to go directly against what your thoughts are on addiction, but that doesn't say much as you're just some rando on the interweb expressing their untrained opinions. So am I, but I'm not the spouting differing opinions with nothing more to back them up than how you feel.