I think I felt disconnected from, and maybe above, gambling, so I had less sympathy for it happening in illegal ways. I think it was wrong to have less sympathy due to that, but I also think I was wrong to feel disconnected from gambling. I played MTG for years, which is in many ways just legal gambling, and I had to quit it completely to feel comfortable.
I don't know if I would have played if it were illegal, but I can understand what it would be like to do so.
I’ve seen first hand people throw their lives away for it, just like they do with drugs or alcohol. Addiction has familiar patterns regardless of the particular vice, and the answer is better mental health facilities, not criminalization.
All giving an addict a rap sheet does is make it harder for them to get a job.
Illegal gambling is an interesting underworld. You’ll be at the same table with drug addicts, local politicians (even police sometimes), successful businessmen, and everything else you can imagine.
It’s less in-your-face harmful than fentanyl but the processes they go through are similar.
I think legalizing gambling gets rid of a lot of problems, but of course, causes problems too. But just because legalizing it led to an upsurge in sports betting doesn’t mean the best option is to make it illegal again.
Cigarettes are the model to me for vices. It’s the best public health win I’ve lived to see. Instead of making them illegal, we made them expensive and uncouth. We made cigarette companies fund campaigns to get people off cigarettes, to huge effect.
That’s what I believe we should do for gambling. Legalizing it was not a mistake, and looking at the picture shortly after and deciding it was is short sighted.
In the late 90’s every big MTG tournament had a poker game going. It got to the point where game stores had to ban it because nobody was even playing Magic anymore.
That was the much less seedy side of underground poker. So much fun.