Kind of. Those examples are often trotted out as discussion killers a la “regulating these vices didn’t work, so don’t bother trying to regulate $whatever (addictive dark patterns in this instance)”.

But that’s not exactly true, is it?

Calling out alcohol and tobacco ignores all the vices that were made durably illegal all over the world: prostitution, blood sport, slavery, forced marriage, and so on—and yes, institutionalized slavery was a vice, an economic one rather than a habitual one, but every bit as behaviorally seductive for slavers as speculative investing, MLM, or subprime asset flipping are for some people today.

Sure, not all of those things are illegal everywhere, and reasonable people may disagree as to whether illegality is appropriate for some of them (e.g. prostitution). But in total they do indicate that vice regulation can “stick” better than it did for alcohol and tobacco.

Hell, we used to put cocaine in soda! Whether or not you believe that the current prohibition/penalty practices around that drug are good, I assume most folks agree that it’s better now that we can’t get addicted to it via products available at the supermarket. Even as addiction-engineered as current-generation hyper-processed foods are, it was once much worse, and that was pretty successfully addressed via regulatory prohibition.