“I am watching family and friends struggle with the addiction for years now and watching their lives fall apart.”
Maybe these individuals should exercise a little of the personal responsibility that comes with the freedom they have to make their own decisions?
There are millions of Americans who reponsibly gamble, drink and engage in other vices — marijuana for one — and do so responsibly while there are some who gamble away their savings, drink themselves to death or die of overdoses of harder drugs, devastating families in the process.
Are we to have the federal government ban gambling or drinking because a certain number of people are hopelessly irresponsible to begin with? These same people will find a way to self-destruct whether a given activity is legal or not. It all comes down to personal liberty and responsibility.
You can have a liberal nanny-state dictating your every action to you because it knows best or there are those who make bad decisions. I’ll make my own decisions and take responsibility for my own actions, thank you.
Those millions who responsibly gamble, drink, smoke marijuana and the millions who don’t are already paying for the millions of irresponsible ones through taxes that fund social programs, health & drug abuse costs, mortgage assistance programs, unemployment and countless other programs - do you actually think that those costs will not go up dramatically with the legalization of gambling & marijuana ?
That’s the real liberal nanny state, cradle to grave government assistance - find a way to eliminate those programs for the irresponsible first and they you have a case.