But turbocharged advertising and online “engagement” and “monetization” hyper-optimization by unscrupulous growth hacker types who heavily optimize for excessive and reckless gambling by targeting, with malice aforethought, people with issues and aggressively try to recruit new people into a risky activity seems maybe even worse?
How about door #3: keep it legal to avoid most or all of the downsides of prohibition, and absolutely fuck up the profitability of hyper marketing it?
So many problems have plausible if not compelling solutions if you always care more about the welfare of the vulnerable than anyone, anywhere, who is getting shit rich by doing harm.
It took a long time, but we finally took the gloves off with Big Tobacco. You can still buy cigarettes, but you so rarely see them anymore. Even I gave up (which I swore I’d never do) because it’s just impossible to smoke most places, they’re not sold everywhere anymore, and it’s expensive as hell.
There will always be diehard smokers, but it’s not the crisis it once was and you still don’t have drug dealers involved.
How is this not the playbook?