{"id":7048837,"date":"2026-08-27T04:56:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/angel-investor\/americas-vice-problem-isnt-the-vices-its-the-hypocrisy\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:56:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:56:20","slug":"americas-vice-problem-isnt-the-vices-its-the-hypocrisy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7048837","title":{"rendered":"America’s Vice Problem Isn’t the Vices \u2014 It’s the Hypocrisy"},"content":{"rendered":"


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I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too\u2014even if we won\u2019t admit it. We have this strange love-hate relationship with them, one that starts young and never really resolves. We tell ourselves that we are a puritanical country. But the numbers say something else entirely. We\u2019re not prim. We\u2019re just pretending.<\/p>\n

Start with the basic absurdity. You can go to war at eighteen. You can vote at eighteen. You can be trusted with a rifle and a ballot, but not a beer. You have to wait until twenty-one to touch most of our sanctioned vices. Compare that to Europe, where enjoying a drink or a smoke is treated as something you learn to do responsibly, not something inherently sinful that you\u2019re finally permitted to access once you\u2019ve crossed an arbitrary finish line. We\u2019ve built a culture where even *thinking about* a vice gets coded as bad behavior \u2014 while the behavior itself quietly thrives in the background, untouched by all that moralizing.<\/p>\n

\u2013 Roughly 54% of American adults drink alcohol \u2014 down somewhat from a high closer to 65%.
\u2013 An estimated 44 million Americans use cannabis regularly.
\u2013 Around 57% of Americans gamble in some form.
\u2013 About 20% of married men and 13% of married women admit to infidelity.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t need a stats sheet to know this, though. Just look at what we watch. True crime documentaries, murder mysteries, prestige dramas built entirely around vice and its consequences \u2014 we can\u2019t get enough of watching other people indulge.<\/p>\n

As always in America, it\u2019s a story about money. The alcohol industry doesn\u2019t want cannabis competing for shelf space and social occasions. Cigarettes still find their way into hands they\u2019re not supposed to reach, because there\u2019s too much profit in looking the other way. Gambling moved online and exploded practically overnight, because someone figured out how to monetize it faster than anyone could regulate it. And cannabis \u2014 cannabis is a regulatory disaster, a patchwork of fifty different state approaches that will probably take a century to reconcile even after federal legalization finally happens, because no one wants to give up their piece of the pie first.<\/p>\n

My father worked as an engineer on Cold War-era projects \u2014 the whole absurd theater of secrets and posturing between Russia and America \u2014 and his line was: the smartest thing we could do is just dump every classified document we have on top of Russia and let them read all of it, because they\u2019re reading it anyway. In hindsight, he was onto something bigger than he probably even meant. That\u2019s basically how our government treats vices, and a lot of other personal choices too \u2014 abortion, healthcare, you name it. They tell us how we\u2019re supposed to behave, hold back information or access \u201cfor our own good,\u201d while everyone quietly goes and does what they were going to do anyway, and much of it is underground because of the laws. Of course, if you have the means, it appears nothing applies to you these days. <\/p>\n

So why not build a system that actually accounts for how people really behave, instead of how we wish they behaved? A realistic budget doesn\u2019t ignore your actual spending habits \u2014 it works with them. Vice policy should work the same way: embrace the fact that people gamble, drink, smoke, and use, and build infrastructure around that reality. Give people a legal, intelligently regulated way to buy what they\u2019re going to buy anyway instead of pushing them onto the street. And give the people who want out a real path \u2014 funded social programs, actual support \u2014 instead of pure prohibition dressed up as virtue.<\/p>\n

We already know what people do. The only question left is whether we\u2019ll keep pretending otherwise but more than likely we will just give it to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too\u2014even if we won\u2019t admit it. We have this strange love-hate relationship with them, one that starts young and never really resolves. We tell ourselves that we are a puritanical country. But the numbers say something else entirely. We\u2019re not prim. We\u2019re just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7048838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12034],"tags":[17103,36955,4771,4106,2448,211487],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7048837","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-angel-investor","tag-americas","tag-hypocrisy","tag-isnt","tag-problem","tag-vice","tag-vices"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerica's Vice Problem Isn't the Vices \u2014 It's the Hypocrisy - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7048837\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"America's Vice Problem Isn't the Vices \u2014 It's the Hypocrisy - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too\u2014even if we won\u2019t admit it. We have this strange love-hate relationship with them, one that starts young and never really resolves. We tell ourselves that we are a puritanical country. But the numbers say something else entirely. We\u2019re not prim. 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