Unpopular Opinion

Hey actually unpopular, nice.

Alcohol killed my father. Ruined multiple relationships of mine. Severely impacted my life in multiple ways. I've yet to touch a drop.

I mention all this because if someone was gonna have beef with Alcohol laws, I'd be one of them lol.

If it wasn't Alcohol the addicts would have found something else. They're running from mental issues and masking with things to forget.

Banning never works. The issues are almost always more complex and nuanced.

Thank you again for the unpopular opinion!

Have you studied prohibition in the USA? People don't stop partaking in vices that are consumable when they become illegal, they just turn to illegal means to obtain them. Prohibition in the 20's led to the rise of organized crime, drugs won the war on drugs, and in countries where alcohol is banned it just means the rich can partake while the poor go to jail.

Also humans are more than their immediate biological bodies. They are part of communities and cultures that may have deep ties to alcoholic beverages as part of their heritage. British pubs, Christian wine, Mexican pulque, Mongolian Airag, and numerous other examples are essential for cultural and community cohesiveness going back for miilinia. It is ethnocentric of you to dismiss their needs and identity for your convenience.

I say all of this as a son of a junkie. I've witnessed first hand the destruction of personal prosperity and the husking of the human soul that comes from imbibing narcotics. I also wish I could put the evils of decadence back in Pandora's Box, unfortunately it was opened way before civilization existed.

What people consume is none of your fucking business is why.

lol, yeah that went reeeeally well. "Banning" anything is the stupidest, least effective way of stopping a thing from happening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States

You're going to need to ban a lot of other things, including fruit, because people will just make it at home. Except it'll be unregulated, then people will start dying even harder.

There is not a single reason for any human to get access to alcohol.

But there is. Because people enjoy it. Because it is a carrier of culture, tradition, and history. There are many things that people do that have risks, negative health effects, etc. Should all of that be illegal? Rock climbers sometimes need rescue, whose cost is often born by the public. Cell phones cause distracted driving. Processed foods make it easier for people to overeat, become obese, die, and create costs for society along the way.

Your premise is that there isn't some transactional, functional value of alcohol. But people aren't robots and we get value from the emotion and experience of things.

Tax alcohol to cover negative externalities, enforce drunk driving laws, force disclaimers about the health impact, and let people make informed, but free, choices.

Good unpopular opinion though. Good discussion! Have a great day!

It’s a mystery why no-one has tried this before.

So, I agree in the sense that studies have found that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, although I'd advocate for the are to be raised to 25 (when the brain finishes developing).

The problem with banning alcohol is that you can easily make it at home, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can kill yourself or others.

Throughout human history, prohibition on mind altering substances has utterly failed. The brain likes drugs and people will find a way to do them.

All prohibition is going to do is open up a black market and increase the danger to the population by putting money in the hands of criminals.

Portugal did it right and decriminalized everything, then set up a robust rehab infrastructure. They've seen problem drug use plumit as a result. Legalization and regulation will always be a better option than prohibition.

Your example of speeding doesn't fit because drugs, alcohol, and guns are a commodity. You can't manufacture and smuggle speeding.

How would you ban alcohol without repeating all the problems when they tried it in the USA in the early 20th century?

Widespread smuggling caused massive crime because it turns out making it illegal doesn’t make people want to stop drinking.

Whether or not you think that, actually enforcing a ban has proved very difficult in the past. Better resources for addicts of all nature is proven to be much more effective than outright banning things.

Even isopropyl, cooking wine, and naturally fermented fruit?

Sure, same with refined sugar, caffeine, condoms, weed, nitrous oxide, tobacco, vapes and processed foods. Also plastics, fossil fuels, teflon and PFAS in general. And while we're at it plastic surgery, tattoos, piercings, maybe music?

It is not up to you to decide what I have access to. There is such thing as responsible drinking. It is not like nuclear bomb when the only possible use is damage of other people lives.

absolutely right, only weed should be legal

this is in response to your edit:

banning things really doesn't work . sadly you even stated examples in your edit.. ban guns? only criminals get guns. ban alcohol.. we tried that in the U.S. that failed epically (bad booze and no real way to trace where it came from). ban drugs? yup the drugs still exist and since we outlawed them it makes it very difficult to go to the hospital without fear of being arrested. speeding? it makes most slow down... not really most still speed just hope they don't get caught. at least when you speed (if there is a police officer nearby and if they spot you and if they spot you in a way that they can give you a ticket) then they can give you a ticket. but at least it slowed down some of the problem. but the alcohol.. if it's banned we have no way to trace where it's made and there is no regulation or oversight. it's better to tax the shit out of it and use the money to help educate people.

Tried it. Didn't work.

All this talk of tasty beverages is making me thirsty.

The result of banning drugs in the real world (including alcohol) have repeatedly been demonstrated to be:

Users continue to get their drug
What they get is no longer of a reliable potency or purity. Many users are harmed by this
Black market sellers who are providing the product of uncertainty potency and purity have no access to peaceful legal systems for settling disputes, and resort to violence, hurting and killing each other and bystanders

The net effect is significantly worse than if you spend the effort providing education, assistance getting clean, known safe units, and quality of life increases - most people use to escape their lives. If their lives are better, there's no need to escape.

I believe the law of offer and demand apply here, as if you ban alcohol there still be demand what will happen it's illegal fabrication and distribution of it will lead to the surge of alcohol mobs and smuggling, which at the same time will lead to absence of regulation ergo alcohol will be worst for public health. So according to my logic making alcohol illegal will be worst at the middle and long term, maybe if you end with the demand you can end offer too but I believe it's hard to do because usually humans are complicated and always there will be someone who would want to slowly kill themself at exchange of evading a shitty reality.

So maybe if we collectively end with the shitty reality then eventually we will end with substance(included alcohol) abuse WO having to ban anything at all.

People enjoy it.

That's the only reason that's necessary.

There needs to be some means for people who cannot-otherwise reach, to experience/release, emotion, to do-so.

Multiple times in my life it is the only method that has worked to reach some emotion ( pain, recently grief ), that is too locked-out for me to experience otherwise.

It, itself, isn't inherently-bad or inherently-good, it is inherently costly, in-that it wears-down a person's health, and it enables ( due to the way it's culturally-identified/used ) much harm, but anybody who's read about the difference between binge-culture ( some anglo-Celt cultures, just look for a bar with the word "Arms" in its name ) vs the French-style have-a-glass-with-our-meal style, and the difference in assaults, etc, it becomes stinkingly obvious that it's a cultural-thing, not just alcohol-itself that is the problem.

There is research on criminality as an outlet, a means of blowing-off-steam.

1 item in that research was on prison-culture, and how you had to allow the inmates to have some slack, XOR your "tightening-the-screws" on them forced them, predictably as clockwork, into rioting.

I hadn't understood that.

The problem is human-nature.

Human-nature requires the ability to "break the rules", to some degree, so therefore responsible government's obligation becomes .. making it so that the breaking-the-rules causes as little harm as possible.

I'd outright criminalize alcohol & marijuana before age 21, because of the road-slaughter than under-21 drivers do while having alcohol in 'em, and because of the amplification-of-psychosis that marijuana does to any forming-brain, and the hell-cost of the amplified schizophrenia resultant from that.

However, I'd have SacredHelper, aka Peyote, legal, if treated with care.

Not as a street drug, but as a means of asking another-dimension-of-mind for a lesson in one's growing-up.

So, it is both the objective-harm/cost and it is the relationship/process that matters, to me, based on the evidence.

Just an opinion, tho.