We need to ban advertising for all addictive substances/activities. We’ve mostly come to terms with the fact that mixing addiction and marketing are horrible for public health when it comes to cigarettes. We need to extend that to gambling, alcohol, Marijuana, hell even sugary drinks.

Even ignoring the public health implications, it’s just cruel to recovering addicts. It must suck to see advertisements of attractive people having fun drinking beer if you’re a recovering alcoholic and are just trying to forget about it.

I’m opposed to prohibition as it just ends up jailing minorities and empowering the police, but just because we make something legal to consume doesn’t mean we have to give it over to the market and capitalism with its perverse incentives for growth at all costs.

They may not be more effective, how many consultants, contractors etc. are on the payroll since then?

A lot of time with these budget cuts some politician will come in and fire a bunch of people or a department, realize they actually do need that work done and then hire a contractor or a consultancy company to do the same work often for more . So the amount of people directly working for the federal government may be down but the amount of people who are working for the government through some middle man goes up to compensate.