>If we assume that people will in practice gamble whether or not it's legal, I'd rather the gambling not be run by organized crime free from the ability of everyone else to oversee and regulate.
I don't see why we should assume that. Making something annoying to engage in dramatically reduces the amount of people who engage in it. If illegal gambling rings operate, you'd have to 'know a guy' and the gambling ring would -- by definition -- have limited scope.
It's like saying "legalize fent" to protect people who use fentanyl. Like, yea, the problem isn't the addicts, it's that if you can sell the drug in a store, you're going to get 1000x the number of addicts. We need frictional barriers to prevent people from becoming addicted in the first place.
The previous system was fine. We had a couple highly regulated areas where you could travel to (Las Vegas, Reno, a few Indian casinos) for people who were obsessed with gambling. That meant the rest of us were mostly left alone, and not tempted to engage in the vice.
The approach of allowing a limited amount of some "vice" (or otherwise disfavored activity), highly regulated, combined with stiff penalties for illegal use is a pretty common approach to greatly reduce anti-social activity.
Yes... harm reduction approaches can be effective. The point is that they also need a "very annoying" frictional element to prevent harm reduction from creating worse outcomes than prohibition.
The existing Las Vegas & Indian casino system we had previously effectively achieved this goal by making any gambling habit include regular travel, which itself prevents the habit from becoming a daily or even weekly activity.
"Legalizing dangerous drugs" doesn't mean you can go to the store and buy meth. I mean we create a safe consumption site, where you have to go through harm reduction education, be offered alternatives, and likely have things like blood work done to check for potential disease spread and damage from the drugs themselves.
The point is that the harm reduction strategy has to be annoying enough where non-addicts would not engage in the process, whereas addicts would go through the process trivially.