I don't think the problem of young people having difficulty moderating their consumption of spirits is primarily advertising. People have been drinking more t

I don't think the problem of young people having difficulty moderating their consumption of spirits is primarily advertising. People have been drinking more than they ought ever since we figured out how to make alcohol in quantities sufficient. Of course, much like obesity, the abundance of food (and alcohol is almost always made from food) has made this a much bigger problem, just because at this point in time almost all of us can afford enough alcohol every night to cause ourselves real problems; something that hasn't been true for much of history. the "Coffey still" in the 19th century really accelerated this, making even strong distilled spirits way cheaper than they historically have been. Regardless of advertising, you are going to have this problem on college campuses going forward, simply because alcohol is a widely available and fun drug where the difference between fun dose and a dose that causes yourself problems even if you are drinking somewhere safe isn't huge; It's not as tight a band, say, as nicotine, but alcohol diminishes your judgement in ways that make moderating your intake a lot more difficult. I think most people have a hard time moderating their intake the first time they consume a significantly psychoactive dosage of alcohol, and developing that skill takes time. College-age people who drink are pretty likely to drink too much for that reason alone. I think we should promote a "If you are too drunk to calculate your approximate BAC without scratch paper, you have had more than enough" slogan in colleges, along with a "anyone who pressures you to drink isn't really your friend" campaign. (I personally have experience of that learning curve, and the difficulty of moderating one's intake; I have seen peer pressure, but haven't experienced it from people I'd really call peers. This is largely because I didn't start drinking until my '20s, after I had figured out how to choose my peers. It's different when someone you call "other" is pressuring you to drink. ) I don't think drinking at work is new, either. I do think that who gets to drink has changed, and that has changed where they drink. It used to be only sales and management got the 'three martini lunch' - and they mostly went off-site for it. With the rise of the prestige of the Engineers and Technicians, we now get alcohol at work, an I think that our culture is more comfortable in our own spaces; We are not as comfortable going out as the sales teams are, so you see more affordances for drinking in the office itself. Really, there's a lot to recommend that; You know there are cameras everywhere, the code of conduct is explicit and dramatically more clear than you will get almost anywhere else, and most businesses even have a whole department dedicated to dealing with violations of that code. I mean, you are making more work for them, but compared to drinking off-site, I think you will see fewer problems. (Note to employers; if you are hiring food technicians, and I strongly encourage you to do so, I strongly prefer them to prepare me food than to prepare me alcohol. The difference between food prepared on site by someone who knows what they are doing and food that is mostly pre-assembled is huge, while the difference between a beer pulled by an expert and one I grab from the fridge is small, and no employer I've yet seen has hired bartenders skilled enough to craft cocktails worth drinking. Just my opinion.)