Worst of all are government run lotteries. A state run lottery may be preferable to one run by organized crime, but running millions of dollars worth of ads with product tie-ins (Harley Davidson, car companies, cruises, etc.) all while claiming to "support education" is outrageous.
It ignores the reality that poverty is a causative agent for lacking the appropriate math skill to recognize that playing the lottery is not a good financial choice, and self-perpetuates that poverty.
Probability is like...a Grade 5-6 concept.
Ergo, it can go straight to hell and does not belong in a civilized society.
This is more or less how retirement works so it's a pretty well-trodden path.
(mostly because I think it would avoid many of the life destroying parts)
If that's the heuristic for defining stupid, we better revisit auto insurance, which also has a negative expected value.
On the other hand, maybe variance and skewness (to say nothing of kurtosis) have values (and costs) which a rational analysis needs to consider. Some people might be willing to pay to shed variance, while others might pay to take it on depending on the value of their assets and their time horizon.
The brain still has fun even knowing not going to win and just spent $2.
Five dollars won't make any difference in your situation, but twenty thousand would be a life-changing amount of money.
Unfortunately, on a meta level, it's likely that were you to win, you'd go from twenty thousand to zero sooner than you'd like.
My gut tells me tax breaks are the exception and more often than not increased revenues are simply paired with boondoggle spending because money is fungible.
PA just had a bridge fall down because the same pattern of funds redirection I described prevented their "fix the roads" gas tax hike from doing more than treading water. The pattern I described is very, very common. My own state had the same problem using cigarette taxes to fund the schools.
I don't believe this is true, though it is often parroted as so.
Effectiveness of prohibition is determined in large part on severity of punishments.
It is imperfect, and will always be. But it can absolutely work to minimize the behavior being targeted.
And you really can't deny the "do more harm than good" part. "don't take a very small risk for your health or we will hang you" doesn't exactly seem like harm reduction.
That's not political, it's science, statistics, facts. Prohibition = more overdoses, more violence, more untreated addiction, younger users, richer criminals, more abuse from the police, more corruption, less incentive to educate yourself/learn a trade when you come from a poor area, more likely to be BORN addicted to drugs because your mom was terrified of getting help before/when she was pregnant, more likely to get aids, more likely to have your life completely and permanently ruined.
This whole debate can end in one word: Portugal. There is no debate really, only ignorance.
And btw it's not hard to get drugs in any city. I don't know a place on earth where you can't get drugs in an hour or two, besides rural areas.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/portugal-opioid https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/singapore-is-winning...
"Singapore has the world's highest percentage of millionaires, with one out of every six households having at least one million US dollars in disposable wealth." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore
Singapore is a 5 million people country.
Prohibition isn't the important factor here.
Dealers get shot on sight in Brazil or in The Philippines, that's not just prohibition, that's state-sponsored murder, at scale and that doesn't stop anyone.
It's not unclear if you're not looking at an extremely small subset of extremely rich and privileged people.
The US had a rate of 13.69 per 100'000.
We'd be reducing the harm to them and in a subjective way, to the overall community. That some people's "harm" will increase is obvious but this is a price many are willing to pay to achieve a better society for themselves.
In summary, "we will hang you" isn't "harm" but justice, and the solution to the "harm" that needs to be decreased.
> it doesn't seem to stop them
Sure it does, it decreases overall drug use, where it is harsh enough.
>that didn't stop most people from trying it.
Did it decrease overall drug use vs when these laws were relaxed? Yes. Mostly though the penalty for drug dealers needs to be harsher. Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.
Most of the harm coming from drug use is coming from prohibition.
Hanging drug users or drug dealers is not justice, it's a bigger crime than any type of drug deal.
>Additionally, there is a hierarchy of drugs, and in US the biggest problem is hard drugs / opiates. We should focus enforcement and punishment efforts at those, while also not enabling the addiction of users.
And this have absolutely nothing to do with drugs dealers. This problem was created by the likes of Purdue Pharma. Jailing drug dealers does absolutely nothing to stop Americans from getting hooked on opiates
>Purdue Pharma
Regulation against them and restrictions on opiates has helped to decrease that form of opiate use.
Obviously, Purdue Pharma executives should be harshly punished, much more than they have been. Why shouldn't they? They perpetrated a great crime and suffering, willingly lying and causing addiction, to so many people. That they should suffer for it and that there is a great need to deter other drug companies / doctors from doing the same is abundantly clear. It is not mutually exclusive from also targeting street drug dealers of fentanyl and other synthetic opiates which is the problem now though.
Or perhaps It's all arbitrary and decided by laws and the actual harm doesn't necessarily map directly onto illegal activity. If that's the case, maybe we should be careful about statements that hanging a drug.dealer causes less harm than they cause to communities.
Direct sale of water could be regulated, making people that sell it without license criminals. You'll have a hard time convincing me that selling water provides harm, but there would be just as much reasoning behind a statement saying as much.
You don't want to focus on that you want to misdirect to weed and.... water? What the hell does this dumb analogy have to do with anything in reality?
Saying "drug dealers" and "drug users" without quantifying which drugs and how harmful they are is just an easy way to ignore real aspects of the problem so it can be reduced to a simplistic model that is easy to make statements about, even though we all know that to actually follow through on the suggestions is folly, because the real people and real specifics of their problems make that untenable. So why bother with the simplistic arguments that we all, even you, know are bullshit and can't be followed through on?
The punishments for drugs are pretty severe in much of the US (multiple years in prison). Are you advocating for even harsher punishments than that?
How about if we banned Narcan, do you think that would affect the total number of opiate addicts long term?
What if we cut off the hands of drug dealers? Or applied the death penalty to drug dealers?
What if we rounded up all the addicts that commit so many crimes in cities today, and degrade the quality of life with tent cities strewn everywhere, and threw them all into the ocean...do you think that would decrease drug use?
Of course it would. What I'm pushing back against is the absurd claim that the problem is intractable in terms of "decreasing some behavior through disincentivization", which isn't true.
The question was never whether it was possible to curb drug use with the legal system (that seems like a straw man), but whether the cure is worse than the disease, or whether an alternative cure might be better.
Not true and there are many in this thread and elsewhere for years on the internet saying exactly this.
Thank you for conceding my point against the ridiculous argument that "prohibition is ineffective"... that no it is, it's only a matter of degree of punishment, which is what I said.
>more suffering than it prevents
This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.
No, I think drug dealers suffering is not the same as suffering of normal people wanting to live their lives in a productive and healthy way for their community. But this is what politics is for, conflict over interests, values, worldviews, and societal preferences.
It's also what all of criminal law deals with: justice for crimes isn't viewed the same as suffering of law abiding people or victims.
>a tradeoff exist here
Like the tradeoff exists for the death penalty of murders in that justice for that crime requires "harm" to be inflicted on the perpetrator, yes. But this isn't that profound of a concept.
It depends what you mean by effective and ineffective. Nuking San Fransisco would prevent tons of drug use, but is not an effective way of solving society's ills.
> This only matters in some utilitarian conception where all net suffering or utility or whatever is created equal.
Drug laws not only hurt drug users, but further criminalize nonviolent users who commit more crimes, fund organized crime (here and especially in other countries), cost billions of dollars to society in court systems, prisons, police officers, and lost productivity.
If your solution to that is literally kill people without a trial for drug use then some of those clearly wouldn't apply, but that's honestly a pretty sick worldview. I'm not sure if you're younger or maybe lived a more sheltered life and weren't exposed to drug users or similar groups of people, but you might change your tune if you knew someone affected by it (whether they were a user or the parent/child/spouse/friend).
I wonder what you think of other countries which have much lower rates of drug abuse yet don't impose punishments as harsh as the US?
It’s because their currencies aren’t as powerful. Drugs are a commodity sold in USD like oil. The USA has the easiest access to USD so drugs come here as the product-market fit is optimal for both distributors and users.
That data probably isn't super relevant to this argument though, since it includes alcohol. I don't think alcohol is more easily available in the US than those other countries because of the USD.
We'd all like to feel like it was as simple as expressing our dislike at a situation to fix it, that solving problems is as simple as applying a linear amount of force that is proportional to the size of the problem but the world isn't like that.
Drug addiction, Organized Crime, racism, sexism, global climate change are all examples of Wicked Problems[0] and no amount of force behind a whimsical edict is going to solve them.
Rather put a high tax, like tobacco products, do the state can make a boatload of money from vices rather than enriching the criminal underworld and indirectly funding illegal guns, sex trade, rackets etc...
Anecdotally, my own country banned alcohol and cigarette sales during the first lockdown. The black market rose from nowhere and made a filthy amount of money. You can guess whether or not the violent crime rate has increased of decreased.
I came away feeling like there was a web that would catch every single person in the state who had a predilection for gambling addiction.
The weirdest sign I saw was attached to a gas station casino: "Weekly grand prize jackpot: $50." That was hard to parse coming from tech salaries that a $50 grand prize would motivate anyone.
I find it pretty sad as there is no glamor at all in dunking dollars into bad slot machines at a shell station. But I didn’t find the scratch off tickets they sold at the counter glamorous either.
https://www.propublica.org/article/illinois-video-gambling-w...
These are interesting reads regarding slot parlors in Illinois. It gets repeated in every locale that legalizes slots. Big promises of increased tax revenues, then the actuals are 10%-30% of the forecasts, but by then the horse is already out of the barn. I've looked at a few state level gaming commission data sets and backed out the math, and even in backwoods areas, penny slot machines generate $20/hr average ($240/day) in gross income (even though they're called penny slots, you can easily lose $20 in under 60 seconds based on speed of play, number of lines and bet sizing-- all of which are heavily optimized to trigger reward centers in the brain), so even with expensive $5-10k machines, the recovery time is pretty low, so they'll just metastasize as much as legally allowed.
"You know how they advertise a casino, they always show a guy winning money, but that’s false advertising. Because that’s what happens the least. Perhaps when they advertise a hamburger they could show a guy choking. This is what happened once."
This is a really tricky problem, as there is clear evidence that these things hurt society as a whole, but it's hard to draw the line who is making deliberate choices about their gambling/smoking/drinking, and who is hooked.
Is there a politician somewhere that will try to ban Facebook because of the 'addiction' potential? I'm usually not much of a slippery slope guy, but it does seem weird, especially since a lot of this would be done by regulation, not legislation.
EDIT - Okay I think I see a concrete reason why gambling advertising should be illegal. The gambling industry makes money by negatively affecting people i.e. gambling wins if you lose. That's literally it. The gambling industry does not make money when their users win. They are specifically advertising so that more users lose. The car industry makes money by providing you a utility. The car industry is not advertising so that more people die in car crashes. But gambling on the other hand _is_ advertising to get more people to lose.
Or do you just think that making it illegal would probably show some benefit to the average person's health?
* Should I be allowed to ruin my health with cigarettes?
* Should I be allowed to make money selling cigarettes?
Tobacco companies prefer that you ask the first question, but it's really the second question which is interesting. We may, if we wish, say yes to the first and still say hell no to the second.
It doesn't even have to mean national monopolies. We can allow microbreweries and cigar makers and cannabis greenhouses and what have you to flourish, but just aggressively restrict their rate of profit. So that if you get into those things, we know you're not doing it to get rich off others' suffering, because you accept that you'll only make a basic living off it (at best).
I for one would be totally OK with that, and I think that if the profit motive was successfully removed, things like alcohol consumption would drop like a stone, even if alcohol was cheap.
Freedom of religion and separation of church and state helps create a collective conscience to enact laws, but at the end it comes down to each individual's responsibility to search for the truth - an effort that advertising can easily tamper with. We could use more stringent laws for advertising.
Note that the gaming and crypto industries have parallels with gambling, both targeting the younger population (least able to control addictions)
Disney (a media conglomerate) was initially opposed to sports betting, but once covid hit their bottom line, they turned to this opportunity once it was legal.
That's not what the US Constitution says.
It's going to need a huge transformation in society to change those advertising channels. Just like the movie cig industry was a long term process.
E-Sports has a terrible problem with this, and many organizations are solely supported by gambling site sponsors.
Kudos to Riot for outlawing the practice with League of Legends. I wish Valve would do the same.
I also think that alcohol and e-cig advertising should be outlawed as well.