In the illicit drug trade, all the liveliest action is driven by availability. In the street-level, one-on-one movement of a substance from person to person, an almost inviolable rule is that the extension of credit is unlikely. Even in the fanciest social circles, among habitual associates who may see each other every day, “fronting” product to anyone is not the method of most transactions.

The participants may have enjoyed a long relationship where all obligations have been honored, and trust has never been broken. Still, there is always a chance that one of them might fall victim to violence from a third party, or be coerced into rehab, or even arrested and jailed, before the debt is satisfied. Or the customer/buyer might simply overdose, leaving the merchant with no legal recourse to any legacy the decedent might have left.

There is also a statutory wrinkle. If this transaction leads to someone’s arrest, the customer who was not required to pay up front could be suspected of planning to resell the product. In the eyes of the law, that person automatically becomes a conspirator and a drug dealer.

A customer who pays slowly or inconsistently will soon be cut off by even the most lenient or greedy dealer. Non-payment of the drug bill has a built-in terminus. Even the largest city holds a limited cast of dealers, along with a disproportionate number of informants. Refusal to settle a balance can easily result in grievous physical punishment or execution, either of which serves as a warning to other customers who might be tempted to abuse the privilege of credit.

Of course, this all varies according to location and ambient environment, the specific drug, the ferocity of local law enforcement, the seller’s previous experience with the buyer, and the mutual acquaintances they share. Except for a few privileged media stars and other rare individuals, it is highly doubtful that a substance addict will be extended credit at all. The drug trade is pretty much a cash-and-carry enterprise, in which debts may be settled with definitive brutality.

Now, bearing all that in mind, switch focus to another very current subject, with another dose of background.

If a strong relationship to financial loss is any indication of a problem — which it definitely is then the most costly behavioral addiction to currently afflict the population has got to be sports betting.

It was bad enough, back when all wagers had to be negotiated on site, at the actual event. Instantaneous communication technology has brought the whole industry to an insane new level. Aiming to make that point clear, writer Logan Tantibanchachai discusses some particulars, which require a bit of knowledge about one school of thought.

Libertarianism is known as a laissez-faire sort of philosophy, tolerant of just about anything, in the name of individual rights. In the case of a behavior that many or even most citizens are unwilling to tolerate, it is still necessary to ask whether some fundamental right is involved, and whether the government holds the moral authority to regulate the behavior, and so forth. (And oh, by the way, is there any evidence that government regulation of the activity will achieve the intended goal?)

So, it might be surprising when a journal published in New England, The Daily Economy, publishes “A Libertarian Case for Regulating Sports Betting.” And a very convincing case it is. There are basically 4 choices the law can make in dealing with a “vice’:

Freely available and actively promoted.
Legal but subject to modest imposed costs or delays;
Illegal but only loosely policed
Illegal and aggressively suppressed

Eight years back, a number of American states took the full legalization route, leading to various results, and those results are scary. Serious academic research reveals that, among American men between the ages of 18 and 49, half of them have an active account with at least one online sports-betting service. And those accounts don’t just sit there being decorative. A total of 46% of those account holders said they were actively betting, and among that sub-group, 42% told researchers they were spending “more than they should”:

Americans wagered $13 billion on sports in 2019 and a staggering $167 billion in 2025 — a nearly 13-fold increase. In 2024, 19 out of every 20 sports wagers were placed online.

Only two years after legalization, credit card debt and bank overdrafts had risen like crazy:

Another study found legalized gambling increases the risk of bankruptcy by 25 to 30 percent. Online gamblers, as compared to in-person gamblers, were 15 times more likely to have missed a bill payment. And a 2024 study found that in states with legal online betting, bankruptcy rates rose 28 percent and debts reported for collection amounts increased eight percent.

From the cheapest to the most costly, each substance dependency has a built-in physical limit. An individual can use only a certain amount of it before s/he dies, or perhaps is sternly or even forcibly made to stop by family pressure, legal intervention, or medical necessity. Some users decide to stop their drug before it stops them, while others go the other way.

But a behavioral addiction is a whole different situation. There is no overdose limit imposed by nature. It’s all up to the individual and the society. And individuals and societies are suffering. Tantibanchachai goes into detail:

[G]ambling has been linked to anxiety, depression, and suicidality. A recent paper found that states that legalized sports betting documented a roughly nine percent increase in intimate-partner violence. Another study […] associated legalized sports betting with a five to seven percent increase in substantiated reports of child maltreatment…

Oh, and another thing…

[C]rime rates were higher during and immediately after games in states that had recently legalized sports betting, with especially pronounced increases following unexpected game outcomes.

This is not the place to decide what needs to be done, but it is a place to emphasize that behavioral addictions can do a huge amount of harm to individuals and to society; and of that certainty, sports betting is all-too-perfect an example. Tantibanchachai’s article goes into a lot more detail about how this matter could be handled in ways that preserve freedom but also reduce individual and societal harms.

Written by Pat Hartman. First published August 8, 2026.

Source:

“A Libertarian Case for Regulating Sports Betting,” TheDailyEconomy.org, July 31, 2016.

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