Is Playing Poker Professionally Ethical?

[JimMorris]

This is a very important question to me, and I have not yet found satisfactory intellectual discussion of it in the forums. I've been an Internet pro for close to a year, making about $75 per hour, 30 hours per week. I love the lifestyle, and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. But... Is my making a living this way ethical? Am I hurting people by taking money that they need? How much of this money is contributed by problem gamblers that can't afford to lose it, yet dig themselves deep into debt trying to win back their money? How many people are deceived into poker addiction by the TV shows saying "anybody can make a final table"?
Many winning players probably try not to think about these questions or they don't care. Or they have some simple justifications like:
"I'm providing people entertainment and action"
"It's their own fault if they can't afford to lose"
"If I wasn't winning it someone else would be"
Do these justifications hold up under ethical scrutiny? There is a massive flood of money flowing into the online poker sites' accounts and into winning players' pockets. What are the various precepts under which this money flows in, and what are the effects on society?
Poker is fundamentally a game of deception and trickery. You want people to believe that you're bluffing when you have it, and you want them to believe that you have it when you're bluffing. This is the way to make money: deception and trickery, both are considered unethical in most contexts. Yet in poker they aren't, because everyone knows that this is the basis of the game.
However, there is a different kind of deception that goes on: *** "When players are winning, they generally think it's skill. When players are losing they generally think it's bad luck." *** Based on this, the up and down swings of the game are very deceptive and confusing to most players. I think this is why there are so many accusations that "online poker is rigged". Most people don't have the ability to push their understanding of the game deep into the realms of probability and frequency analysis, they are caught up in the emotions of individual hands rather than long term EV.
Most players will lose, that's all there is to it. But how many of them actually willingly accept that they're paying an acceptable amount of money for entertainment? In essence, I think what an online pro does is increase the average amount of money that losing players will pay for their entertainment, by decreasing the average amount of time that their money lasts. Again, is this ethical?
In addition to the question of playing professionally, what kind of ethical analysis can we apply to the poker boom in general? Can the recent poker outbreak be compared to an outbreak of opium, cocaine, or other expensive, addictive substances within a society? Is it possible that poker is having effects on society similar to these types of drugs, but we just don't realize it? (Not to say that drugs are bad, just to say that addiction is bad.)
I look forward to hearing other people's thoughts on these issues. Let's try to be as unbiased as possible, even though we're all poker players.