Same goes for drugs, tobacco, alcohol etc. oh look how that ended up. There's a reason why Prohibition has been repealed in every major country that tried it.

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satellites 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Alcohol is older than recorded civilization, while online gambling has existed for about half of one human lifetime, and has been mainstream for less than a decade. We're watching the negative consequences play out in real time. This isn't prohibiting something innate to humanity; you could still go to a casino and gamble before DraftKings existed.

10 years ago I had some friends who were into online sports betting. It required getting a VPN, accessing offshore servers, signing up for sketchy websites, and linking an online bank account. It was enough hoops to jump through that the average person wouldn't bother. Back then I would have agreed with you: let the people play! But I'm only 33 and I've watched online gambling cripple peoples' lives in just the last few years. It's a huge problem and should be made illegal again. You should not be able to access it in one click from the App Store.

	▲	ryandrake 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Just like all prohibitions, if you take away access to X, people will just find other (often illegal/dangerous) ways to do X. We can make gambling less convenient and push it back into the backroom poker rooms and illegal bookies who break peoples' legs, but it would be more effective to solve the problems of despair, desperation and hopelessness that are driving people to gambling in the first place. That's a lot harder, so here we are talking about bans.

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ericyd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Strange response, do you believe that society has always had access to online gambling, in the same way that alcohol and drugs have been around forever?

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max__dev 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So where was this multi billion dollar industry before? This demand is highly elastic and new, which you cannot say about any of the others you mentioned.

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Barrin92 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

alcohol prohibition has always been difficult because it's so tied into food and social culture. Tobacco use has been extremely successfully restricted, harder drugs and gambling also remain prohibited in many countries.

You may not be aware of how rapidly and historically unprecedented gambling has spread in the US in the last few years. More than half of all men aged 18-49 participate in some form of online sports betting (https://futurism.com/future-society/men-aged-18-to-49-hooked...)

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bryanlarsen an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There aren't too many places where you can order beer from Amazon.