The High Stakes: Can America Balance Freedom and Responsibility in the Age of Accessible Vice?

The Triple Threat: Weed, Bets, and Content

Let’s be honest about what’s happened. In less than a decade, we’ve normalized three massive behavioral shifts:

Marijuana went from Schedule I narcotic to something you can buy with a rewards card. Thirty-eight states have legalized it medically, 24 recreationally. The industry pulled in $33 billion last year. Your neighbor probably has a vape pen in their car right now.

Sports gambling exploded after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates in 2018. What used to require a trip to Vegas or a guy named Sal now requires three taps on your phone. Americans wagered over $130 billion on sports last year—that’s billion with a B. DraftKings runs ads during kids’ soccer games.

OnlyFans and similar platforms turned personal intimacy into a gig economy hustle. The platform has 210 million users and paid out over $5 billion to creators last year. It’s not just adult content anymore—though let’s not kid ourselves about what built that empire—it’s become a legitimate career path that guidance counselors still don’t know how to discuss.

Each industry tells the same story: prohibition failed, demand existed, capitalism delivered, and now we’re sorting through the consequences in real-time.

The Freedom Paradox: Vice Yes, Voice No

Here’s where America finds itself in a genuinely bizarre moment. We’ve decided that personal freedom means you can do almost anything to yourself—smoke weed all day, bet your mortgage on a basketball game, monetize your body online—but if you say the wrong thing, express the wrong opinion, or challenge the wrong orthodoxy, you might lose your job, your platform, or your reputation.

Think about that for a second.

You can legally destroy yourself with substances and gambling. You can commodify the most intimate aspects of human existence. But question certain narratives about race, gender, vaccines, elections, or a dozen other topics? That’s when we suddenly care about consequences and social responsibility.

A college student can openly discuss their OnlyFans side hustle in the campus newspaper, but might face investigation for hosting a speaker with controversial views. A company will proudly sponsor Pride events and run ads on gambling platforms, but will fire an employee for a years-old tweet. We’ll defend Pornhub’s right to exist but demand Joe Rogan be deplatformed.

The same people who argue “my body, my choice” regarding marijuana or sex work will demand you lose your livelihood for expressing skepticism about the latest social justice campaign. The same voices that celebrate individual autonomy in vice will organize boycotts and cancellation campaigns over someone’s political donations or personal beliefs.

This isn’t about being pro or anti any particular issue. It’s about recognizing the absolute incoherence of our cultural moment.

How Did We Get to This Reflection Point?

The answer is complicated, but it basically comes down to this: we stopped believing in actual principles and started trading in power and profit.

The libertarian argument won on vice because corporations saw dollar signs. Once Big Business realized they could make billions from marijuana, gambling, and sexual content, suddenly personal freedom became sacred. State governments saw tax revenue. Venture capitalists saw returns. Progressive activists saw social justice. Everybody got something they wanted, so the coalition held.

But speech? Speech is dangerous because it’s free. You can’t monetize someone’s right to express unpopular opinions—at least not easily. You can’t tax debate. You can’t IPO free thought. Worse, speech challenges power structures, exposes uncomfortable truths, and forces people to defend their positions.

Cannabis doesn’t threaten anyone’s worldview. A betting app doesn’t challenge institutional narratives. OnlyFans doesn’t demand you reconsider your assumptions. But speech? Speech is genuinely dangerous to people in power.

Cancel culture emerged as social control disguised as accountability. When traditional institutions lost their authority—churches, civic organizations, even governments—social media mob justice filled the void. It’s not about making society better; it’s about exercising power over others. You can’t cancel someone for smoking weed anymore, but you can destroy them for a bad joke or an unfashionable opinion.

We commercialized vice but politicized speech. Marijuana, gambling, and sexual content got absorbed into the corporate-progressive consensus. They’re sanitized, regulated, taxed, and marketed. They’re safe for capitalism. But genuine free expression? That’s messy. It can’t be controlled. It might challenge the people writing the rules.

The Corporate-Government Partnership

Here’s what really happened: corporations and government found common ground on vice because both benefit from it.

Follow the money on marijuana. Big Cannabis lobbies hard. They donate to campaigns. They hire former politicians. States are addicted to the tax revenue—Colorado brought in over $400 million in marijuana taxes last year. That money funds schools, roads, and politicians’ pet projects. Nobody with power wants that revenue stream disrupted.

Gambling is a state revenue goldmine. New York made $1.6 billion in mobile sports betting revenue in 2023. Politicians get to fund programs without raising traditional taxes. Gambling companies get access to massive markets. Media companies get advertising dollars. Everyone wins except problem gamblers and their families.

OnlyFans and similar platforms are harder to tax but easier to ignore. They exist in a regulatory gray zone. They generate wealth. They keep people economically dependent on platforms rather than building careers that might threaten existing power structures. A generation of young people hustling for tips online isn’t organizing labor unions or demanding systematic change.

Meanwhile, free speech threatens all of this.

Someone questioning marijuana legalization might slow down tax revenue. Someone exposing gambling’s predatory algorithms might spark regulation. Someone criticizing the exploitation in content creation might hurt corporate profits. Someone challenging woke corporate policies might cost companies their ESG scores and investment dollars.

Free speech is expensive. Vice is profitable.

The Cultural Inversion

We’re living through a complete inversion of American values, and most people don’t even notice.

The counterculture of the 1960s fought for both personal freedom AND free speech. They wanted the right to smoke weed AND the right to protest the war. They demanded sexual liberation AND academic freedom. The whole point was that genuine freedom required both—freedom of body and freedom of mind.

Now? We’ve kept the hedonism but killed the dissent.

You can microdose psilocybin while betting on college football and posting thirst traps, but you better not question transgender ideology in women’s sports, vaccine mandates, or whether the 2020 election had irregularities. You can be as personally decadent as you want, as long as you’re politically compliant.

This is exactly backwards from what the Founders intended. They were actually pretty moralistic—they had serious concerns about vice and social decay. But they enshrined freedom of speech, religion, the press, and assembly as fundamental rights. They understood that a free society required the ability to challenge authority, question orthodoxy, and express unpopular views.

We’ve decided the opposite: maximize personal license while minimizing intellectual freedom.

The “Harm” Double Standard

The justification for this incoherence usually involves some version of “harm.”

We legalized marijuana because “it doesn’t hurt anyone else.” We legalized gambling because “adults can make their own choices.” We normalized OnlyFans because “sex work is work” and “don’t shame people’s choices.”

But speech? Speech can “cause harm.” Words are “violence.” Certain ideas are “dangerous.” Platforms must be denied, speakers must be cancelled, jobs must be lost—all to prevent “harm.”

Let’s be clear about what actually causes measurable harm:

Marijuana use correlates with impaired driving, workplace accidents, and mental health issues, particularly in young people. That’s actual, quantifiable harm to others.

Gambling addiction destroys families, leads to financial ruin, contributes to suicide, and generates crime. Problem gamblers don’t just hurt themselves—they devastate everyone around them.

The normalization of transactional intimacy rewires how young people understand relationships, love, and human connection. The long-term psychological and social consequences are still emerging, but early indicators aren’t great.

Meanwhile, someone expressing skepticism about critical race theory or questioning whether children should receive puberty blockers? That’s considered harmful and worthy of social and professional destruction.

The double standard is staggering.

The Real Cost: Who Gets Left Behind?

Here’s what makes this even worse: the freedom we’ve extended to vice and the restrictions we’ve placed on speech don’t impact everyone equally.

Lower-income communities get flooded with dispensaries, betting ads, and exploitation while simultaneously being told their cultural concerns about family structure, traditional values, or personal responsibility are bigoted and backwards. They’re encouraged to medicate and gamble while being shouted down if they express views that don’t align with progressive orthodoxy.

Working-class Americans watch elite institutions celebrate every form of vice while simultaneously being lectured about their “privilege” and having their speech policed. They can’t afford the consequences of gambling addiction or drug dependency, but they also can’t afford to lose their jobs for expressing traditional views.

Young people are raised in an environment that normalizes substance use, gambling, and sexual commodification while simultaneously teaching them that certain ideas are too dangerous to hear and that people who disagree with them are enemies to be destroyed rather than fellow citizens to engage.

Veterans—and I’ve watched this firsthand—are encouraged to use marijuana for PTSD, given easy access to gambling as entertainment, and told their traditional values about service, honor, and sacrifice are outdated. But if they express frustration with how the Afghanistan withdrawal was handled or question whether diversity training makes the military stronger? They’re labelled extremists.

So What’s the Balance?

We’re not going to re-prohibit marijuana, ban gambling, or shut down content platforms. That ship has sailed, and honestly, prohibition created its own problems.

But we also can’t keep pretending that celebrating every form of vice while restricting genuine intellectual freedom makes any kind of sense.

Here’s what a coherent approach might look like:

Actual principle, not selective application. If we believe in personal freedom regarding what people put in their bodies or how they make money, then we need to believe in freedom of thought and expression too. You don’t get to pick and choose based on what’s profitable or politically convenient.

Honest regulation of vice without hypocrisy. Marketing restrictions similar to cigarettes. No gambling ads during sports broadcasts. Age verification that actually works. Tax structures that fund treatment and education. But if we’re going to regulate these industries to prevent harm, we need to be honest about the harm they cause—not pretend it doesn’t exist.

Protection of speech without exception. The First Amendment doesn’t need an asterisk about “hate speech,” “misinformation,” or “causing harm.” Bad ideas should be defeated with better ideas, not by silencing speakers. If we’re worried about social consequences from speech, we should be far more worried about social consequences from normalized addiction.

Education without propaganda. Teach people about the actual risks of both vice and dogmatism without the nonsense. Tell the truth: some people can use substances responsibly, some can’t. Some ideas are wrong, some are right. Critical thinking requires the ability to encounter and evaluate bad ideas, not to be protected from them.

Corporate accountability across the board. If we’re going to demand corporations police speech on their platforms, they should also face real consequences for predatory marketing of addictive products. You can’t have it both ways—either companies have social responsibilities, or they don’t.

Cultural honesty. We need to acknowledge that we’ve created a society where you can destroy yourself with corporate-approved vices but not challenge corporate-approved narratives. That’s not freedom—it’s corporate feudalism with weed and betting apps.

The Bigger Question

The Founders understood something we’ve forgotten: genuine freedom is uncomfortable, messy, and sometimes dangerous. They didn’t just defend easy freedoms—they defended the hard ones. The freedom to express unpopular ideas. The freedom to challenge authority. The freedom to be wrong and learn from it.

They also understood that a free society required citizens capable of self-governance—people who could handle freedom responsibly. They would have been horrified by a society that maximizes hedonism while minimizing civic virtue and intellectual courage.

We’re essentially running two contradictory experiments simultaneously:

Experiment One: See how far we can push personal license regarding vice while extracting maximum profit from human weakness.

Experiment Two: See how completely we can control acceptable thought and speech while calling it progress.

The combination is toxic. We’re raising a generation that’s been taught consumption is freedom, disagreement is violence, and self-medication is wellness. We’re building an economy on addiction while building a culture on conformity.

That’s not the American tradition of freedom. That’s sophisticated control disguised as liberation.

The real question is whether we can recognize the contradiction before it destroys us. Can we build a society that defends genuine freedom—including the freedom to make mistakes, hold unpopular views, and challenge power—while also maintaining the social fabric necessary for human flourishing?

Or will we continue down this path, where you’re free to destroy yourself as long as you don’t question the people profiting from your destruction?

Because right now, we’ve built a system where you can smoke weed and bet on sports while posting content online, but you better not suggest that maybe unlimited weed, gambling, and sexual commodification aren’t actually making us happier, healthier, or freer.

And if you can’t see the problem with that, you might want to ask yourself who benefits from your blindness.

The conversation about American freedom shouldn’t be this complicated. Either we believe in liberty or we don’t. Either we trust citizens to make their own choices—about substances, money, content, AND ideas—or we admit we’re really just arguing about which freedoms serve power and profit and which ones threaten them.

What kind of freedom are we actually defending? And what kind of country are we becoming in the process?