Addiction.
I’d wager that drug addiction is worse than alcohol addiction because drug addiction is expensive on top of damaging to your health, social life, ability to be a productive member of society, etc. Alcohol isn’t that expensive however alcohol seems to damage your health more than heroin (other than heroin OD).
Of the drugs, which is worst? I don’t know. Heroin, meth, benzos, etc all have serious negative repercussions.
I’d say gambling, in large part because it seems that compulsive gamblers are as addicted to the carnage their addiction creates as they are to gambling itself.
In other words, they LIKE seeing their kids go without, etc.
Cigarettes are by far the worst because they kill you. They kill about 480,000 people per year; one in 5 deaths.
It’s all going to come down to how you weight the categories of effect. Health. Financial. Social. Professional. etc. All of your vices are going to have different values in each category. And even then how much effect is going to depend on other factors.
A thousand dollar a week gambling habit is going to be pocket change for a million dollar a year investment banker and probably have no social impact at all. On the other hand it’s going to eat up everything an 80k salaryperson brings home and will mean mortgage payments aren’t being made.
Excessive alcohol is going to have a health cost no matter where you are socially or financially. As will tobacco.
Alcohol and pot will ultimately have a professional cost in addition to health and social damage.
It’s all going to come down to where your values lie.
Cell phones.
Hey, you done wit dat?
Which is worst?
For whom, in what circumstance?
Each and every one has been both a matter of:
“Yes, but he’s a good husband and father otherwise”
and
“I left the bastard as soon as I found out and took the kids with me”
My opinion?
Paying for sex.
If you have never had the incredible experience of actually “making love”, the service of a hooker may be mistaken for the real thing.
And that is simply pathetic.
Unless your 16 year old friend is dying and does not want to die a virgin, there are few situations in which a pro can be morally justified.
The rest are just variations on “choose your poison” - if you are a loner, your life is yours to waste as you see fit.
If you promise another your lifelong love and affection, you really should take care of yourself…
Or not
That’s a good idea. I was unable to figure out a way of measuring “worst” before your post.
Seen this way, I would rank those vices, from most worrying to less worrying, this way : Alcohol, gambling, tobacco, marijuana, paid sex.
Huh? What makes you think that? We’re talking about gamblers, not sociopaths.
I find these responses interesting, and in particular the real lack of consensus.
For me, the only one of the vices that I mentioned that does not have a pretty clear possible path to destroying yourself and/or your family is the marijuana. Not saying it is great, but it seems like it would take some effort to ruin things with pot.
But ironically, of all of those, pot is the only one that is close to universally illegal…
Many interesting thoughts so far. Here’s one that somehow has been overlooked.
Setting aside the impacts on the addict and his/her immediate family, the greatest societal impact *on the rest of us *is probably the drunk driving death toll.
So if we’re asking the question “What single vice could we magically eliminate to help everybody else not directly connected with a vice-ridden person?” the answer (from the OP’s restricted list) would probably be alcohol. And of course our magic wand would also bigly help the addict and his/her immediate family as well.
The various illegal vices (MJ, cocaine, etc) the OP excluded have a similar risk of car crashes when driving while wasted. What they don’t have (yet) is the sheer numbers.
They also bring with them the social scourges of violence and property crime. Which is arguably enough to offset the relatively fewer innocents killed by illicit drug-impaired drivers.
Legalization and regulation would eliminate the violence between various suppliers, but would do nothing for the unemployable junkie or zoned out stoner doing muggings or burglaries to feed his/her habit. Particularly with a government interested in maximizing tax revenue while suppressing demand there’s no *a priori *reason to believe legally sanctioned MJ or harder drugs would be any cheaper than today’s black market prices.
In my view, most of the vices listed in the OP fall under a larger category of addictive behavior, pretty much any sort of addictive behavior is awful, though depending on what the addiction is and how strongly one is addicted, is really what determines how bad it is. That is, in some cases, someone with a massive addiction to gaming can be far worse than someone with a milder addiction to cigarettes or alcohol. Hell, people can and have died (directly or indirectly) from all sorts of addiction, including gaming, binge-watching, even addiction to typically good things like excessive exercise.
That said, there’s plenty of other vices besides addiction, though I’d probably lean toward addiction being among the worst. For example, having a temper can easily make someone intolerable, hurt their relationships with family, friends, their ability to hold a job, or even end someone up in jail. Laziness can hurt relationships and job prospects, someone’s health.
I don’t think there is a single right answer, because it really depends on the individual and their circumstances. If you make a million dollars a year, there is really nothing wrong with having a $1,000-per-week gambling habit; if you make $50,000 per year, there is a lot wrong with it. Some pack-a-day smokers get lucky, and die of non-smoking-related causes at the age of 90; many do not.
Hmm, in reverse order:
Weed: You would have to work very hard to ruin your life with it. Imbibed in the less harmful manners, I see it about as bad thinking astrology might have something to it. Not a great pastime, but about as bad as playing the banjo. If you do it inappropriately, people are going to get annoyed. Full disclosure: I practically breathe marijuana, and own a banjo.
Booze: Downing 6 drinks every evening isn’t healthy, but it won’t kill you for a good long while. Also, it’s possible for a person to consume 6 drinks a day and not be drunk at any point in the day. My grandfather would be at the breakfast table with a whiskey and 7up, move to beer later in the morning, then back to mixed drinks as sundown approached. I only recall seeing him drunk a couple of times. He died of a heart attack in his 60’s. Early for the time, but not terribly so.
Hookers: I actually find this to be the most distasteful in the list of vices. I really can’t imagine employing one myself, unless we can somehow work some genuine cuddling and maybe a relationship in afterward*. However, in a world where it was legal and well regulated, I’d just think that a person who frequented them didn’t want a relationship, but still wanted sex. Not the kind of person I’d want to date, but it’s still a pretty mild vice in that idealized situation.
Gambling: This one is dependent on your income. If you’re able to blow $1k a week on entertainment without harming your family, and gambling that money is your favorite way to spend your entertainment dollar: more power to ya. I know people who can do this, but most people would be ruined in short order. So, not for everyone, but some people can do it. I list it so high because it’s one of those problems that can appear to be its own solution - that’s a seriously screwed up cycle.
Cigarettes: Easy to start, hard to quit. This one’s close to home, as I smoke cigarettes and struggle with stopping. That it usually kills you is bad, but that’s far from the worst part. It killed both of my parents, but watching them suffer for the last 20 years or so was the worst part from the outside. It’s no great shakes from the inside, either.
For anything other than very light household use I’d say, going by the reviews, its this one out of the Harbor Freight line.
I don’t get along with Pride, Gluttony or Sloth. Not thrilled about Greed or Envy, but if you have those I can work with it. If Lust or Wrath are your jam, we can hang out.
If you’ve got the money for all of them without affecting the people around you, then I can ignore that.
To me it would be the alcohol. If you’re my parent, you can get online and bet $1000 on a horse in five minutes. If you drink six drinks every night, you’re not at my soccer game, we’re not reading together, or playing board games together, or even talking together. You’re just drunk every night. So I’d say alcohol.
[Sees white liquid coming from corpse’s nose] Yeah, she’s full anyway.
I’m not really understanding the lists where attending a prostitute on a weekly basis is the most destructive of the choices. Spend an hour, take the edge off and move on with life and relationships with a clear mind. Now, if you’re still visiting the brothel after entering a relationship, that’s a very different story. But there might be a lot less tension and anger in the world if young men who struggle to have sex with any kind of frequency could safely release the kracken once in a while.
Based on the OP talking about “familial impacts” I think most everybody is assuming the vice do-er is married and has dependent children.
But for sure that’s just an assumption and the ranking of harms for a single person may well be different.
Smoking DOES affect other people. Not only does it divert resources from the household, it’s filthy, can cause fires (including forest fires), and secondhand smoke can be as destructive as “direct” smoke. And don’t get me started on the speshul snowflake employees who HAVE to have their smoke breaks while their co-workers who don’t smoke do not get them? :mad: