Taxing pleasures that do damaging amounts of physical, psychological or social harm is sensible. To help understand this we may imagine society as a word document. Taxes help in regulating the syntax needed to keep society functioning efficiently.
When words are disrupted by bloated punctuation: explanation marks, hyphens and other excitements, or the sentence becomes to fat with adverbs, adjectives, and repetition, then efficiency and understanding are lost. The meaning, the functionality, begins to fail. So it is if the syntax of human society enjoys excessive pleasurable freedom.
Sugar, nicotine, and caffeine are like flamboyant words, which when used over liberally disrupt the sentence. However, they also add greatly to enjoyment, to our raison d'être. So tax to discourage their overuse, but don't outlaw them. Gambling is throwing in words that few gain by and alcohol is well known for confusing order, disrupting senses.
These taxes are unavoidably regressive; hurting most those that can least afford them, just as less 'empowered' people are handicapped by grammar. So they rebel, with drugs, the invented language, and by using short-cuts, avoiding normal routes; or roots. But society needs taxes, as words need syntax, and taxing excesses of fun makes plenty of sense.
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