I understand the point in OPs post, but I disagree with it based upon evidence we have available to us. I think first and foremost it is important to mention (I dont have the studies linked but it shouldnt be hard to find) that teenage drug use overall is trending downward, with that including underage alcohol use/abuse. If younger generations use it less, the problems caused by alcoholism will be less prevalent as time goes on. Secondly, weve been putting up with drunk drivers for a while but (as our younger generations have been told for about 20 years now) the consequences for drunk or impaired operation of a motor vehicle have become more and more severe. I do believe alcoholism is something that can and will be phased out given enough time. The only thing that is still a mystery is what vice is going to replace it, and whether it is going to be better or worse.
Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Yeah education and prevention were always the best measure against addictions. But when it's something deeply ingrained in society it takes time to move on. I like to think society is it's own living thing, evolving much slower.
Driving will end long before drinking will
Alcohol abuse is a symptom of trauma. Trauma begets trauma. That's the thing never solved. Take away alcohol, it'll find another avenue.
Not to mention it occurs naturally in rotting fruit. It would be like attempting to ban photosynthesis.
Are we gonna outlaw yeast, too?
During prohibition in the US, there was inoculated fruit juice being sold with the warning like: "do not leave unattended for 2 weeks at room temperature, as it may ferment".
Stay away from my bread.
Weed is illegal in many parts of the world, as are psychedelic mushrooms.
And those are even harder to make consumable than fruit literally fermenting on a tree, or yeast getting into some sugary drink.
So unless we’re gonna get rid of leavened bread and cut down every Marula tree we’re not getting rid of alcohol.
Studies have shown that not all alochol abuse is trauma-related.
That's an interesting article. I appreciate that they mention that the studies may be flawed because they attained wildly different data, probably due to methodology. They also mention that people with personality disorders are often not caught by these surveys.
Did you not read it? Personality disorders ARE caught by the studies. The article references a 2020 study by Elizabeth A. Evans et al., which explicitly examined the prevalence of personality disorders among people with opioid use disorder. It states, “55.1 percent of women and 57.0 percent of men with opioid use disorder were found to have a personality disorder, such as borderline, antisocial, etc." Also, the article mentions findings from 16 studies on antisocial personality disorder among people with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Seven studies explored borderline personality disorder in AUD populations, with prevalence estimates ranging from 6–66 percent and a median of 21 percent. These wide-ranging results reflect the inclusion of personality disorders in the research.
I'm certain you misspoke?
Sometimes alcohol abuse is just addiction. Trauma soon follows, though.
Crime. There'll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there's an "acceptable level of crime", beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.
Fix poverty and you fix crime. I mean there will always be people with severe mental disorders that make them violent or deadly, but this could also be potentially handled by making complete mental health check ups part of universal healthcare. People who are likely to become violent could be separated from the population and potentially cured.
I remember the case of a 6 year old girl who was adopted from a situation of severe abuse, violent, sexual, and neglect. She became a violence obsessed psychopath. She kept trying to stick needles in herself along with other self harm behaviors. She attacked her adoptive parents with a knife. After this they locked her in her room at night and put a lock on their bedroom door. She attempted to kill her brother, and tortured and killed animals.
There is a documentary about her called Child of Rage. Warning - this is extremely disturbing.
Eventually, as no progress was being made, she went to live with a therapist for intense behavior modification therapy. She was cured without the use of drugs. Now she is a successful RN and author.
I went way off track here but I wanted to reemphasize that poverty is the source of the vast majority of crime, and even the most broken psychopaths can be cured.
End poverty, end child abuse, end crime. End capitalism.
I have wondered this about certain harmful cultural values. Culture seems to be the "great enabler" when it comes to things we would wish would change about people (think of Japan's habit of overworking people or Greece's penchant of old inequality). And the fuel of the flame there is going to take a gamechanger to douse.
None. Society is constructed by us, including all of its "issues". We built it all.
“Random” events of “evil”. Basically I think we’ll never reach something like 0 murders, 0 rapes, 0 stealing for little greed and so on. Or even 0 addiction (edit: i'm not including addiction to the previous list of crimes, i wanted to add it as another class of issues for we will never reach a true 0)
We are very very far from the ideal situation tho, there is a looot of margin of improvement
Like your alcohol thing in the post: ban only makes it worse and still now you (as US, not you OP) have a very weird relationship with alcohol with the thing that minors cannot touch it and people have to drink from a paper bag lol. Let’s say that you are not really trying hard to improve the situation. We’ll never reach 0 alcoholists but society is not in a good shape and alcohol is cheap so ye
Addiction is often people trying to escape from pain using anything they have available. It's not evil.
yes, hence why i used a dot before it. i guess it's not clear and i should edit
tell me if it's better now :)
oh, ok, thank you
You know that thing, when you’re walking through an isle in a store and each person tries to step aside and so ensues some of the most awkward moments? That.
The limited scope of human attention and the ineptitude it creates in governance is impossible for a mortal being to fix in our finite existence. We will eventually formulate an AGI that can address this primal flaw, but defining who or what is fixing the issue becomes an unsolvable philosophical paradox in the idealized fantasy world of philosophical definition.