Adults may decide how to spend their own money, and most customers come to no harm

The argument

Those who oppose a ban begin from what prohibition would do to the majority of customers. Most people who visit a casino treat it as an evening out, spend an amount they have decided in advance and go home, and opponents argue that a rule removing that option for everyone in order to protect a minority reverses the usual relationship between the state and the adult citizen. The activity is legal, the money is the customer's own, and the loss is foreseeable and accepted at the point of entry. Opponents argue the principle is not seriously disputed elsewhere. Alcohol harms a minority of drinkers severely, consumer credit ruins some borrowers, and dangerous sports injure some participants, and in each case the accepted response is age limits, information, restrictions on marketing and treatment for those harmed rather than prohibition for all. Opponents hold that gambling is treated differently not because the reasoning is different but because disapproval of it is older, and that a consistent application of the harm principle would license and supervise casinos while targeting the specific harms. They also argue that the licensed venue is where protective measures can actually be imposed. A casino that holds a licence can be made to operate self-exclusion registers, train staff to intervene, refuse credit on the premises, verify age, cap stakes and contribute to the funding of treatment, and it can lose its licence if it does not. The customers at greatest risk, on this account, are better served by a supervised venue that has something to lose than by the absence of any lawful venue at all, and prohibition would remove the mechanism through which society currently reduces the harm it is worried about.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Proponents of a ban reply that the comparison with alcohol and credit concedes more than it settles, since all three are trades whose profits rise with the harm they cause, and the fact that society tolerates the others is not a reason to tolerate this one. They argue that the appeal to the untroubled majority misstates where the money comes from: if revenue is concentrated in heavy losers, then the recreational customer is not the business being defended. On the protective measures, they argue that self-exclusion and staff intervention depend on operators acting against their own commercial interest, and that an industry asked to discourage its most profitable customers will do so reluctantly and incompletely.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] If revenue is concentrated in heavy losers, the occasional customer spending a planned amount is not the business being defended, so the majority cannot carry the argument. [Rejecting P2] The comparison concedes the point, since drinking and borrowing are also trades whose profits rise with the harm they cause, and tolerating those is not a reason to tolerate this one. [Rejecting P3] Self-exclusion and staff intervention require operators to act against their own commercial interest, which an industry asked to discourage its most profitable customers will do reluctantly and incompletely. [Rejecting C] Choice is the thing compulsive gambling impairs, so invoking it to defend the venue assumes the capacity the objection says is absent.