"Sin taxes" on self destructive behavior and officially run regulated versions of things which are infeasible to reasonably ban (and the black market "cure" would be worse then the disease) can often be reasonably justified. But every single last one of them should always be completely revenue neutral. All money should be divided amongst the state's residents and sent right back without exception. There's clearly been a long standing temptation to give into the argument of "we'll use this money to make up for the negative effects" but in practice anything that feeds into the general fund directly or indirectly creates perverse incentives that are just too dangerous. Government should take no direct financial interest in whether money from sin rises or falls to zero. That's a big missing piece in a lot of these systems, and the risk of dependence seems similar to that of fines which are often effectively "sin taxes" too. There a number of examples of places [0] which came to depend on fines as a significant source of revenue to run government and in turn took actions to increase the take to great destructive effect.

----

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/08/29/nearly-6...