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First I want to apologize if I got a little rude in my previous comment—I was just getting off work so the issue of drugs and alcohol was front of mind. Ultimately I want to understand what you and everyone else is saying, and me getting snippy gets in the way of that and isn't good for anyone.
No arguments on the cigarettes!
We could say the same for gambling too though, right? It's about as old and has similar cultural effects.
Fun fact, you can't actually make vodka or any distilled spirits in a bathtub, which I didn't know before I looked it up. You need some kind of still or still-like instrument to distill it, otherwise you just have a bunch gross tasting "wash" and that barrier to entry means very few people would end up doing it. Homebrew of beer, wine, mead, and other such "softer" alcohol is actually pretty safe all things considered, which I didn't really know either. All academic because I don't think it's a good idea at the end of the day, but I found it interesting at least.
I question the irrepressability of gambling being limited to the small scale. Unlike alcohol production which has a pretty big physical footprint, a pretty big gambling operation could just go through encrypted channels and stuff to keep it stealthy.
Also, I was thinking about currently still illegal gambling stuff like dogfighting or cockfighting. Isn't it possible that people could get pushed to more harmful types of gambling like that if it gets pushed underground?
Personal betting is thousands of years old. Gigantic billionaire dollar smart phone betting companies are extremely recent.
You will never convince people to quit betting their buddies 10 bucks over whose favorite team will score more points this weekend. You absolutely can, and if you as a government care about your citizens at all, must, stop DraftKings from taking all the rent money out of a poor family's bank account.
Enough people would do it and distribute it, that it would drive up deaths and injuries significantly
One: the barrier to entry would reduce the societal impact a lot
Two: you could still work to shut these places down, it would just be more work.
I doubt it.
First of all it was illegal half a decade ago.
Do you have reason to believe that dogfighting has dropped specifically in the last 6 years?
Per the ASPCA it's been on the decline since the 90s (when, remember, all this app casino shit that has been normalized enough in SIX YEARS that multiple posters in this communist instance are defending it, was illegal), but has been on the rise again "in recent years" due to the internet making it easier to organize, so if anything it's gotten more common along with sports betting.
Furthermore, in the Citations Needed ep they mentioned that gambling constantly desensitizes gamblers to the risk and they start making riskier, higher stakes bets over time. If anything, willingness to do riskier bets is going to make these people more likely to go to a dogfight, not less.
Obivously they didn't have megacorps back in the day, but developed, institutional betting has been around since Rome where it was commonplace for pretty much everyone to do it at arenas.
I looked more into moonshine and distillation, and I actually think the more dangerous part of it is the equipment itself rather than the methanol in foreshots. I'm still skeptical that more people would have alcohol-based negative health outcomes in a prohibition scenario compared to the current one. Apparently death and illness from alcohol dropped pretty significantly during prohibition.
That makes sense about the dogfighting, I really don't know much about it but was curious regardless.