America’s Vice Problem Isn’t the Vices — It’s the Hypocrisy

I love vices. And honestly, the data says most of America does too—even if we won’t 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’re not prim. We’re just pretending.

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’re finally permitted to access once you’ve crossed an arbitrary finish line. We’ve built a culture where even *thinking about* a vice gets coded as bad behavior — while the behavior itself quietly thrives in the background, untouched by all that moralizing.

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

You don’t 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 — we can’t get enough of watching other people indulge.

As always in America, it’s a story about money. The alcohol industry doesn’t want cannabis competing for shelf space and social occasions. Cigarettes still find their way into hands they’re not supposed to reach, because there’s 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 — 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.

My father worked as an engineer on Cold War-era projects — the whole absurd theater of secrets and posturing between Russia and America — 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’re reading it anyway. In hindsight, he was onto something bigger than he probably even meant. That’s basically how our government treats vices, and a lot of other personal choices too — abortion, healthcare, you name it. They tell us how we’re supposed to behave, hold back information or access “for our own good,” 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.

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’t ignore your actual spending habits — 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’re going to buy anyway instead of pushing them onto the street. And give the people who want out a real path — funded social programs, actual support — instead of pure prohibition dressed up as virtue.

We already know what people do. The only question left is whether we’ll keep pretending otherwise but more than likely we will just give it to the highest bidder.