> yet society and policymakers do very little about it depending on where you are.

I think your focus is misplaced. It is not policy issue, it is the general public itself that is the problem.

Policymakers tried, via prohibition, would you mark this as a success?

I dont drink, and never have so i am on the outside looking in. It is astonishing how "alcohol" is front and center in many things.

Hard day at work and you want to go out with coworkers.. Where do you almost always end up?

Want to celebrate something? Head over to the bar?

The root issues with alcohol are the same with other drugs, smoking, etc. Peer pressure, societal norms, etc.

Policymakers hands are basically tied.

On one hand they LOVE the revenue. Here (Canada) we have "sin taxes" and alcohol is heavily taxed. No government will want to forfeit this revenue.

Manufacturing alcohol provides jobs, inspecting it provides jobs...

If it is not legal, bootlegging will return.

I would also like to see a decline in Alcohol consumption, much as we saw with smoking.. but you need to take the successful aspects of the "quit smoking" program and apply them to alcohol.

> Policymakers hands are basically tied.

> I would also like to see a decline in Alcohol consumption, much as we saw with smoking..

Exactly and one way to do that is to ban advertising. And that's totally in the power of policy makers I'd say.

I wouldn't be so sure. There seems with most substances to be a cultural hedonism-puritanism cycle. Alcohol and tobacco have both been through many of these.

> It is astonishing how "alcohol" is front and center in many things.

Alcoholics love to normalize their behavior and there are a lot of them in the media making subtle decisions that promote their lifestyle.

> Alcoholics love to normalize their behavior

This!!

I personally don't drink, nor do i advocate those i meet not to drink because that isn't my job. Flip side when i go out with a group, they often advocate that i drink?

I've had a few people tell me i am odd for not drinking, getting drunk is "fun" and i should try it sometime, etc.

This is just cultural norms at work. I guess you can see this as "alcoholics normalizing their behavior" if you think everyone who drinks is an alcoholic. I get similar comments when I say I don't like chocolate. My son gets flak (including from me!) because he doesn't eat pizza.

If you lived in a teetotaler culture, you would experience exactly the opposite (strange looks/comments for drinking a beer), or possibly worse (since many teetotaler cultures see drinking as a punishable offense).

I dont think of them as "alcoholics".. But the aspect of them normalizing their behaviour is spot on.

This "cultural norms at work" drinking has followed me across 5 companies and two countries.

Fellow teetotal Canadian here. Glad to know that I'm not the only outsider.

I grew up in a small northern town, so had early first-hand exposure to the devastating effects that rampant alcohol abuse can have on families and communities.

> policymakers do very little

They're constrained. There aren't terribly many policy levers to pull! At the extreme, we outright tried banning it in North America once; that didn't work very well. Taxes and minimum pricing do work to reduce consumption, but they're quite unpopular with the public. A political party in my part of the world recently won an election by promising to expand retail availability of alcohol and to lower the price.

I'd note that the majority of the cost of alcohol is already taxes. The untaxed cost of alcohol is kind of frightening and is enough to make me reconsider my more libertarian inclinations with drugs. Pure grain alcohol of the kind used to make cheap spirits or for industrial purposes is literally around $1 a litre to make. Sells for $30 a litre here -- swill vodka has a 3000% markup imposed due to tax policies designed to curb consumption. Cranking it up higher has negative consequences too. I know that with tobacco, among the most dedicated cigarette smokers, increases in prices have little impact on consumption; the addicts we'd want to incentivize the most to quit with price signalling are the most resistant to price signalling due to their addiction -- they just get poorer. It becomes a dichotomy/trade-off. How how hard do we kick the homeless alcoholic when he's down vs. how much we stop college kids from taking up binge-drinking? Booze is also pretty easy to make at home so there's the consideration of prices being high enough to push people to the grey/black market, too.

I would like to see our governments go after alcohol advertising; it's basically a free-for-all in many jurisdictions. It's interesting to compare the new regulations in Canada on cannabis advertising (essentially banned in all forms) vs. the regulations on alcohol advertising (what regulations?) Yet which is the more addictive and compulsive drug?

> It's interesting to compare the new regulations in Canada on cannabis advertising (essentially banned in all forms) vs. the regulations on alcohol advertising (what regulations?) Yet which is the more addictive and compulsive drug?

I'm Canadian as well.

You know why cannabis was deregulated? Tax revenue and to kill off the illegal sales. They knew there was a demand for the product and finally caved in and opened up legal sales so they could get in on that action.

As you rightly point out, it is already taxed to death and yet the demand continues? Outright prohibition wont work.. what are the options available?

We saw what happens with Cigarettes and taxes, black market.

Canada did a study and counted butts outside a courthouse - a very high percentage were contraband.

I'm genuinely curious what can/should be done. If we ban it, people will still make it illegally, there will be violence, and we are in the same place that cannabis is now.

I think many countries were successful in reducing the popularity of smoking cigarettes and if I'm not mistaken a big part of that was to ban advertising. As with cigarettes, we do know that alcohol is addictive and destructive. An advertising ban might be a good first step.

You could erase one of the mechanisms by making America a place where you can walk to a party or a bar, instead of driving there and then killing yourself with your car afterwards.

Also possible benefits from making America be a place where fewer want to commit suicides.

This isn't the responsibility of policy makers.

It's fathers and mothers who should be teaching their children about the dangers of alcohol and living an example worth following.

A moral high horse is great, but if you're stuck in the cycle where you learn destructive habits from your parents that are hard to overcome in adulthood, how do you break that cycle with out a nudge from society and policy makers?

Let's start with smoking

Unlike alcohol it have no positive value

Weight loss via appetite suppression and (speculating) giving you something else to do with your mouth.

Admittedly that doesn't balance out the downsides, but there is that.

Non-smoker, for the record.

I think we were pretty successful with smoking at least where I live(d). I don't know anybody who smokes cigarettes.

I'm envy as hell

90% of my friends smoke

30% of them smokes a lot

I wish this shit got banned worldwide and tobacco's industry C levels were gunned down

Smoking where i am from has fallen drastically.

Both my parents smoked a lot (my dad smoked two packs a day). I dont know anyone who smokes.

"In 2017, the overall prevalence of smoking in Canada was 15.1%, equivalent to approximately 4.6 million Canadians. This represents a significant increase from the 2015 estimate of 13.0%."

here's a nice chart showing the gradual decline before a spike in usage??

https://uwaterloo.ca/tobacco-use-canada/adult-tobacco-use/sm...

The government has been VERY aggressive at curbing it.

https://www.tobaccocontrollaws.org/legislation/country/canad....

I noticed it is still a "cultural" issue? My ex is Chinese and when i went to China it seems everyone smokes there?

If the government is willing to accept the loss of revenue from taxes.. They can hammer away at something and make changes.

Policymakers tried to do something about it in the United States - alcohol was made illegal by a constitutional amendment (the 18th), which means that 2/3 of the legislative body had to vote for it.

Predictably, people continued to consume alcohol in less safe ways, illegal "speakeasy" bars flourished, and moonshining became a very popular occupation. NASCAR was born when bootleggers started racing the cars that they had modified to outrun the police.

Eventually, the 21st amendment was passed to repeal the 18th.

That was 100 years ago. Since then many countries have successfully reduced the usage of other harmful substances, for instance tobacco which was done by prohibiting advertising. It doesn't need a ban to change the public's behavior.

Yes, an all out ban is foolish, there are smarter ways to deal with it.

Why not slap a significant tax on alcohol advertising just as we do with alcohol sales?

Indeed why not. Yet another possibility: remove copyright restrictions on any work featuring alcohol or an alcohol brand.

The taxes on alcohol are already quite high; vice taxes are good politics.

I am all for a complete ban on alcohol ads, even if it seems about as likely to happen as a ban on car ads.