In my opinion, humanity would be better off fighting our self destructive tendencies instead of letting those with power take advantage of their situation and squeezing the ignorant dry.
Fighting them means offering less destructive ways to release those urges, and for the vast majority of people, that's what casinos are.
If we're talking about destructive urges, another popular one would be alcohol, and yet we have many many examples of how it needs to be accessible to an extent to serve as a release, even if sometimes it still causes serious damage.
In the US, famously the prohibition era, and there are similar cases all over the world, eg cases in Iran of people getting ethanol poisoning from homebrewed alcohol, and very common similar occurances in various states of India, where the government sometimes spuriously decides to temporarily ban alcohol consumption.
Put differently, the societal cost of outright banning some self-destructive things ends up being higher than just regulating them because a ban doesn't actually stop much.
We even seem to be heading towards a similar realization for many drugs (eg Marijuana).
