Or, at least treat it like a public health issue. Used to be that if you wanted to gamble, you had to physically to a dedicated gambling zone.
Gambling in contrast is strictly zero sum at best and always negative sum in reality. A group of people puts in 1x capital, the house takes a cut of that, and then the <1x gets unevenly redistributed and that's it. Nothing is generated, the collective set of people is strictly worse off after the gamble, with a few making gains off the backs of loss distributed amongst everyone else. All while hacking dopamine reward centers that didn't evolve for that.
It appears to be the case that we can't perfectly stop 100% of all IRL gambling without a cost that exceeds the benefit. That's life. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be picking as much low hanging fruit as possible, same as with other negative sum brain hacks.
A drug is dangerous when it is toxic at an easily obtainable dose AND there is a clear incentive for people to consume it in that dose, such as addiction and tolerance. While acetaminophen is unusually toxic at doses only slightly higher than regular treatment doses, there is actually very little that compels people to use those doses, and acetaminophen toxicity is not an epidemic-level health problem the way many other drugs have become.
Either way, we don't have to assume, we can directly check the numbers. Per another commenter, Tylenol kills about 458 people in the USA every year. In contrast, death from overdose on illegal stimulants was estimated at ~33.000 people in the USA.
Now, is it fair to say that Tylenol is more dangerous than marijuana? Of course. But to say it's more dangerous than most illegal drugs? Obviously not.
I know that a lot of illegal drug overdoses are caused by people who thought they were taking a normal dose but got the wrong substance, wrong amount or wrong concentration from their dealer - who in many cases also didn't know about the discrepancy because of unreliable supply chains and difficulty of testing, both caused by illegality.
I have a very difficult time taking an argument plausibly that compares Tylenol (acetaminophen, an antipyretic analgesic) to illegal stimulant use (immediately following a discussion on fentanyl, which is an opioid - about as close to opposite a stimulant as possible) - i.e. generally amphetamines.
Or comparing Tylenol to marijuana in a very apples and oranges comparison - Tylenol's dangers come from very direct hepatotoxicity (i.e. liver damage), versus marijuana's most real risks coming from impairment and intoxication (driving, judgment, panic) and their effects than toxicity of the drug itself.
It's all mixing and matching in a way that doesn't make for a sensical argument.
Of course, most illegal drugs, even very light ones like marijuana, have other risks, like DUI or the general ills of addiction (money issues, increased criminality from the desperation of getting another hit, etc). But even ignoring those, I thought the death numbers make it very clear that Tylenol is nowhere near "less dangerous than most illegal drugs".
Doubling your meds on a bad pain day can put you way beyond the safe limits. People think it’s safe because basically every other OTC has a huge therapeutic band, and double dosing is not recommended but not really dangerous.
CDC estimates it at 56,000 ER visits a year, 26,000 hospitalizations, 458 deaths, about a hundred unintentional deaths per year. As a point of reference, it’s about 3 accidental overdose deaths per child that dies from being locked in a hot car.
Wait, no I didn't. That's absurd. Tylenol can cause long term health issues if used in excess (or death, for extreme overdoses), but most illegal drugs are illegal because they can cause immediate death even at normal usage amounts.
If cocaine was really a problem then C-suites and politicians would be regularly dieing.
No drug I'm aware of causes immediate death in normal usage, except perhaps those used for lethal injection. Would you like to elaborate on that? Tylenol, on the other hand, causes an unpreventable (no antidote) slow drawn out death over about a week, where your body will be slowly decaying and you have time to say goodbye to all your loved ones, if you take a few times the normal dose by mistake
Huh. The amount used on the street is not a "normal usage amount". Most fentanyl deaths are due to the fact that the medical usage amount is not something you can generally measure with your dealer's scale or the scale you bought at the local head shop (we, as paramedics, would typically administer 50-100 micrograms, and for anything more than 300 we needed to consult with a physician).
In those use cases, properly dosed, fentanyl is an exceptional, powerful, and short-lived, analgesic.
When people die from fentanyl ODs they're taking dozens, hundreds, or more, than the "normal usage amounts".
No, that is not a strict definition of gambling, that is your own loose, personal and casual definition. The strict definition of the gambling in question under Arizona law (the subject of this article) is I believe partly under 13-3301 [0] and has a number of criteria that clearly differentiate it from investment (whether it be stock, loan by a bank or any other entity/person, or whatever else). Other polities will have their own flavors, but all of them are aimed at a net negative, destructive social activity. That's the whole point of regulating it, it's not some metaphysical philosophy thing about life having uncertainty it's about long experienced concrete harm. Trying to argue that buying shares in a broad index fund is a "wager that a meteor will not hit the Earth" is uninteresting.
>Just because it (often) is positive sum doesn't mean it isn't an unknown that people are betting money on.
It does actually! Positive sum changes everything in terms of collective incentives, strategies available and how investors can hedge risk. You may not choose to make use of all the tools available, but that doesn't make investment the equivalent of gambling. Part of the whole point of markets is to manage changing risk and information discovery (including dead ends) such that we still continue to grow overall.
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The stock market was so gambling that we had 'bucket shops' where people would just buy and sell fake stocks that tracked real stock prices.
Now we have public companies directly selling shares with no voting rights and no plans to ever pay dividends, which is the same thing.
Unlike sports gambling or casinos, the stock market actually does have some legitimate utility, as compared to being (at best) pure entertainment.
Theoretically, more gamblers should mean better price discovery because the payouts for correctly taking the opposing side of the trade are higher.
The market solution would be that the gambling will eventually solve itself. They’ll either learn enough to be trading on knowledge rather than vibes, fueling price discovery, or they’ll exit the market when they’ve lost too much or everything.
My sticking point is that a lot of brokers offer leverage to people they really shouldn’t. I could have sworn you had to be a qualified investor to get leverage, but if that isn’t law it should be. Show the brokerage your certification, or a pile of cash large enough to convince them you can afford to lose the whole thing.
My theory is mostly that "gambling" seems like it inherently means "buying stocks based on something other than their concrete value". More gambling means stocks drift further from their "true value", which means a higher payout for correcting them back to what their price should actually be.
The whole thing does get very fuzzy because of the "market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" aspect. It's not enough to know what the correct price is, you have to know when other people will realize that as well, or else convince people that your price is "correct".