It's not a strawman, and frankly I don't believe for a second that you don't already know it, so stop playing dumb.
You have no limiting principle except the subjective opinion of the individual. In other words as long as something can be shown to have measurable negative social, environmental, or health impacts that can be used as an excuse to 'control' (i.e. effectively attempt to ban it in the long term) anything that enough people in power deem abhorrent or atypical.
I, or rather my side of the argument, does have a limiting principle; as soon as something directly infringes on others rights and freedoms it should be controlled. In other words it ain't anybody's business unless you're hurting somebody else.
Gambling doesn't hurt anybody else except in an amorphous sense which we A. clearly aren't talking about when we talk about infringing on others rights and freedoms, and B. is impossible to try and control for without taking authoritarian measures.
The vast majority of societies throughout history have been authoritarian hellholes. Of those that weren't/aren't they either failed to live up to their principles (we are flawed beings after all), or they accepted the fact that if freedom is to mean anything at all then it must include the freedom to make mistakes...
You cannot legislate away stupidity, and history shows that it is in fact stupidity to even attempt it.
Except of course that you can't because that isn't how a representative democracy works, especially not a dual party representative democracy.
If you don't have somebody representing your position in politics/the halls of power then that opinion effectively doesn't matter politically. Even if you do have a representative odds are that you will still lose unless your rep is a mainstream candidate, because 90-95% of all voters are totally ill informed on the vast majority of issues, even the ones they proclaim to care about most, and as such fall into tribal patterns instead of actually making a decision based on an informed understanding of the issue. That problem is amplified in a lot of ways in a mandatory voting system as well, but that's an aside.
Utter ivory tower BS. The same nonsense crap people have been spewing since time immemorial, and the same lesson that certain parts of society seems incapable of learning.
All that those studies show is either that the problem has moved, or that it's become difficult to measure.
In the case of e.g. cigarettes, the restriction of cigarettes has directly lead to an uptick in other methods of consuming nicotine, or worse. So sure the number of smokers has dropped, however the number of vapers (currently) and other similar addicts rises to meet the demand.
In addictions like gambling it's even worse.
See the gambling addicts don't have anywhere else to get their high, but they don't go away either, so they are forced to find other ways of gambling, ways that can't easily be measured by dickheads whom were never taught to live and let live when they were kids...
In other words they turn to uncontrollable methods of gambling to meet the demand, i.e. illegal, organised crime, and online gambling operations, all of which have significantly worse outcomes for society than just allowing people to gamble and trying to fix the problems that ensue when they arise.
Prohibition, the war on drugs, outlawing gambling, the sex trade, abortions, even things like the outlawing of homosexuality, etc, etc, etc, how many ruined lives and unintended consequences before western society learns the bloody lesson; prohibition, in all it's forms, doesn't f**king work.
