> People with substance misuse disorders have huge impacts on other people - often spouses and children - so the state has a role to play in protecting those pe

> People with substance misuse disorders have huge impacts on other people - often spouses and children - so the state has a role to play in protecting those people from violence. What about forcible vaccination? Forcible quarantine? This issue hits close to home, but I still don't see how it is better to prohibit lawful access to alcohol to the poor than it is to support CPS in their overlapping duties. > Minimum unit pricing is a good way to do this, especially if the money raised is hypothecated for alcohol treatment programmes. Why do middle class alcoholics get to risk abusing their families more readily than poor alcoholics? Added: We have (33.5%, per capita [similar difference in median]) lower household disposable incomes in Canada, and very high minimum unit prices. In 2015, the rate of death due to conditions entirely caused by alcohol was around 8.6 per 100,000; about 150% the rate of death in motor vehicle accidents. It's hard to compare the stats between the two countries since the U.S. tends to track "alcohol-related deaths", whereas Canada tends to track "hospitalization due to conditions entirely caused by alcohol" and "death due to conditions entirely caused by alcohol". The National Hospital Discharge Survey indicated in 2010 that approximately 390,000 hospital discharge episodes for persons ages 15 and older had an alcohol-related principal diagnosis, so assuming the worst, one person per discharge, an annual rate of ~126 per 100,000 2010 census persons; in 2015 there were ~77,000 hospitalizations entirely caused by alcohol (a stricter subset, I think), assuming again one person per hospitalization, an annual rate of ~214 per 100,000 estimated Canadians. I do not think it is settled that particularly high unit prices will reduce rates of death and hospitalization; and as far as I'm aware, we don't have the comparable numbers between the U.S. and Canada (let alone the U.S. and the world at large relative to minimum unit prices), let alone finer grained jurisdictional comparisons, to draw any conclusions like that. And all of this notwithstanding, I think it is unamerican (as a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S.) to tell free adult people what personal risks they are not entitled to, especially in the form of a regressive price fixing scheme, and I think this is not a proper or appropriate solution to alcohol-related domestic violence.