It's hard to respect a legal system that jails someone who wasn't hurting anyone. Repealing a law that criminalizes victimless behavior, especially when so many people already break it, paradoxically increases respect for other laws. It reinforces that the law serves a purpose: protecting people and promoting the general welfare.
We mostly don't criminalize self-harm. Is it really better for those people to be in prison, with violent criminals, and have a record, than be stupid or poor from too much smoking? Who does that help?
Drunk people get into accidents and fights and even commit murder. Cannabis users mostly stay home and snack. And yet we don't lock up people for buying a six-pack.
Gambling is a victimless crime, if the gambler is a single person with no dependents. Most of the harms are when someone gambles away the family home or their kids' college funds.
Gambling is worse than cannabis. There's no limit, other than your credit, to how much money you can lose gambling. That's not true for cannabis. You can only consume so much and even grow it for free if you need to.
I support legalizing gambling too. Making all gambling illegal drives it underground and allows criminals to profit from it.
But I equally strongly oppose online gambling or gambling advertising (while we're on the subject, I think alcohol advertising shouldn't exist either). You can't smoke or drink anywhere, anytime. Why should gambling be any different? Go to an IRL casino or betting shop or racetrack and gamble. Regulate the hours and locations of these establishments.
Gambling, alcohol, and cannabis aren't good for you. So why allow them to be marketed to people? If they want to gamble (or drink or smoke) they'll find out about it and do it. No need to deliberately try to get people to do it.
The list is far longer than you've mentioned.
Here's a list of things you're allowed to profit on either as an investor or as a participant that are quite wild: Fighting with gloves (more lethal than bare-knuckle), bare-knuckle fights, kids in contact sports (even combat sports), throwing away perfectly good food in order to lower taxable income, not planting a crop specifically because it wouldn't make enough profit, gig-economy not paying living wages, a minimum wage below living wage, predatory lending, algorithmic social media that swings elections, targetted advertisement psyops, marketing to children, cosmetic surgery in general but especially for children, forced conversion 'therapy', experimental life saving treatments gate-kept by money, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging...
In combat sports, we're really not too far removed from the collisuem, just that it's "not meant to be to the death" even though it does often result in death or lifelong conditions. The fighters get paid, the organizers get paid, the arena gets paid, the advertisers get paid...All in the name of watching someone not quite kill someone.
Hell, we've even still got slavery tucked neatly away behind "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.", but we know that many sitting in prison are demonstrably innocent. The prison is allowed to require that every inmate works. You're allowed to run an organization that profits from these slaves. You are not legally required to pay in some states.
It's curious to me that so many progressives or soi-disant leftists are in favor of dissolving these types of moral and social traditions while being fervently anti-capitalist. It seems that they (meaning the subset who are always looking for new fenceposts to tear down) are in fact the shock troops of Capital.
Your morals have nothing to do with what others do with their own body.
Probably. We don't call it prostitution anymore it's now called, "sex work."