1. Gambling in fact has many negative externalities. If someone gets addicted, the likelihood is much higher to be depressed. Depression is factor, which leads to high costs for the society.
2. Gambling addiction leads to economic costs because of crime actions. Other market actors have to increase their security standards, which means higher costs.
3. Many gambling addicts go as a consequence to jail. Jail means EXTREMELY high costs to society.
What are your thoughts on this topic?
Unfortunately, government do not look at this kind of stat they are more looking at the revenue they can collect from the taxes they impose on these casinos and from their workers and from companies that are associated with gambling casinos, they allocate a small portion of funds from the victims of gambling and they still have a big chunk of the revenues
Look at it this way: the people that gamble are gonna gamble one way or another, only if this business isn't legalized it will all be black market. Thus, uncontrollable and bringing no revenue to the government, but still running and having only a negative impact on the economy.
While legislation not only will bring money but also the possibility for the government to create statistics regarding gambling, truly evaluate the positive and negative effects, propose proper programs to deal with serious cases of addiction (that can be funded by that very revenue), not to mention the fact that this will reduce the risks of people getting involved with criminal groups that might run gambling underground.
If we look from your perspective, then it would be logical to assume that alcohol, cigarettes, nightclubs, etc. should be banned as well, as they bring in chaos, deteriorate public health, and overall can have a bad impact on society and economics, but we're past those times for the aforementioned reasons.
P.S. The term "victims of gambling" is clearly exaggerated, it's not that people are forced into gambling, people choose it themselves because it's fun and entertaining.
I really like your point of view that we have to count into the effects from people not participatinng in criminal (non-legal) gambling groups. This would be super hard to estimate but I suppose we already have in this thread the right amount to write a dissertation about the economic costsog gambling.