From the BBC article: "Men who are dependent on alcohol or drugs are six or seven times more likely to be involved in domestic abuse against women than others, according to an extensive new study."
That makes sense--alcohol decreases inhibition. It makes you do things that maybe you were inclined to do, but wouldn't do sober. (That is part of why people drink alcohol in the first place.)
I mean, from the same article you have, they bring up the same point I did:
> While undoubtedly there is some link between alcohol and drugs and domestic abuse, this research should be treated with some caution, said Dame Vera Baird, victims' commissioner for England and Wales.
She said: "Many perpetrators who commit domestic violence while drunk will also be violent and controlling while sober.
"And many perpetrators of domestic violence and coercive control do not have a drink or drug problem, and therefore it would be a mistake to divert resources from domestic violence perpetrator programmes to tackling drink and drugs misuse."
> dependent on alcohol or drugs are six or seven times more likely
NB: this does not mean actively using. Dependency creates significant stress when sober, which almost certainly amplifies violent dispositions. Hence my GP's comment.
> That makes sense--alcohol decreases inhibition. It makes you do things that maybe you were inclined to do, but wouldn't do sober. (That is part of why people drink alcohol in the first place.)
You’ve also got to be pretty miserable to get in that state in the first place. Maybe they are victims of abuse themselves or have untreated trauma/other mental health conditions.
That would be fine if drinking didn't affect people's ability to satisfy their social obligations (as coworkers, parents, friends, etc.) but that's not the case.
Drinking sometimes for some people impairs their ability to meet their social obligations. Prohibition was an unmitigated disaster and you have to be a special kind of idiot to think trying it again would produce a different result. People like to drink alcohol.
Prohibition is the go-to example of banning alcohol not working but I think this is blurry thinking. In no other area of policy would you just point to one big example of something not working and thereby declare the whole approach off limits.
The whole argument seems like a discussion-ending cover for people's emotional attachment to alcohol. It completely doesn't engage with the cost-benefit analysis of how alcohol affects the functioning of society at large or navigate any of those tradeoffs.
Fascinating that you keep getting downvoted for stating completely obvious observations. I would have thought your reasonable explanations could convince this supposed 'rational' crowd but apparently not.
Alcohol problems are not the same thing of alcohol consumption.
Also:
Scotland's alcohol consumption is among the highest in the world, according to World Health Organization data; on average, Scots consume the equivalent of more than 13 liters (3.4 gallons) of pure alcohol a year, about 40 percent more than Americans (2.4 gallons)
We in Italy consume less than 7 liters per year (less than 1.8 gallons).
Americans are much more compliant now, not to mention health and socially conscious. For example, the culture of alcohol use has disparate impacts on black and brown communities: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2771773/ ("African Americans and Hispanics bear a disproportionately greater burden of alcohol-related health problems compared to whites, as evidenced by higher rates of liver cirrhosis, death rates due to cirrhosis, and rates of overall alcohol-related mortality.") That is true even though, for example, black Americans begin drinking later and drink less than white Americans: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3758406/.
Are you saying prohibition is worth another attempt? Because we're currently in our 52nd year of the official start of the War on Drugs [1], which is just Prohibition by another name. Unofficially, the War on Drugs goes back much further, and it's a war that the government has been losing badly since the start [2]. Even per-capita, we're the biggest consumers of illegal drugs in the world [3]. So I'd be curious to hear what evidence of compliance you could give, which would outweigh the evidence of non-compliance going back to at least the Nixon administration.
It sounds like you're trolling, and that you're not seriously proposing a return to prohibition, but rather using it as a snarky frame with which to criticize unrelated beliefs.
I'm not trolling. I think America would be better if people didn't drink. I drink sometimes, but I also eat fried foods and skip the gym and do other things I'd acknowledge people shouldn't do.
Nor am I criticizing unrelated beliefs. I don't disagree with SJWs that we live in a society dominated by the attitudes and culture of white European Americans--including their drinking culture. I typically disagree with them on whether that's a bad thing, or how we should frame that for kids, or how that should affect legal relations between people. But I don't disagree with the notion that aspects of American culture adapted from Europeans--in this case drinking culture, but I'd also throw parenting culture in there, and individualism--can have negative impacts on minority groups.
If you look at the articles I linked, it's actually the opposite. Black people are almost twice as likely to report not drinking as white people. Alcohol use also increases with socioeconomic status: https://www.alcoholrehabguide.org/blog/socioeconomic-status-....
that's probably because drinking in the US is very expensive.
which is a form of prohibitionism in itself, but didn't stop people from binge drinking.
Here in Italy, where wine is very cheap, you don't see people drinking like the Americans do, especially not adult people.
Kids, maybe, sometimes, we have a problem with young people binge drinking, mostly because they gathered those habits from American culture which massively influence their daily content consumption.
Back in the day the American culture my generation has been exposed to was very different about who drank on screen and why.
