Tobacco kills more than 400,000 Americans each year, while we temporize with smoking areas and excise taxes and Surgeon General warnings: ban the sale of cigarettes. Alcohol is responsible for some 75,000 deaths annually in the U.S., and yet we tolerate alcohol, even actively promote it. The manufacture of alcoholic beverages should be immediately banned. Pornography assaults us from every billboard, television, movie screen, Internet connection, and magazine rack. Even supposed “literature,” like D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, is sufficiently sullied with smut to make it unfit for human consumption: we can happily throw such soft-core babies out with the bath water of hard-core porn, by making it illegal to peddle filth. Adultery, premarital sex, sodomy, all sorts of sexual perversions, are not only common, they are celebrated – to the threat of our civilization. Signaling our disapproval through the criminal law would be a better policy than the current anything goes, “if it feels good (or even if it feels bad), do it” approach. Swearing has somehow managed to become de rigueur on the street, on the airwaves, and in the theater, immeasurably coarsening our social life. Public profanity could safely be countered with modest fines to encourage civility. Gambling is another vile yet pervasive presence, with state lotteries, Native American casinos, and Internet bookies at every turn, ruining countless lives, and for what gain? To enrich the hucksters who proffer such money-for-nothing schemes? We must take away the legal and societal imprimatur from wagering.