6 ms·

There are many so-called "dry counties" in USA where the sale of alcohol is prohibited. And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do. B

There are many so-called "dry counties" in USA where the sale of alcohol is prohibited. And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do. But as we learned from Prohibition, it's basically impossible to impose that kind of ban on an entire western society. But localized bans? Fine. Do what you want.

jagraff 3y ago
Iirc dry counties tend to have more drunk driving accidents than wet counties. Reason being that people in those counties drive to neighboring counties, get drunk, and then drive home.
- dylan604 3y ago
  I grew up in a dry county. From my experience, most people drove to wet counties to purchase alcohol to bring back to the dry county to drink at home or at parties.
- nwienert 3y ago
  sounds like one of those just-so stories people want to believe
  - SkyPuncher 3y ago
    The Wikipedia article [0] has a nice summary of a few studies. Notably > Data from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed that in Texas, the fatality rate in alcohol-related accidents in dry counties was 6.8 per 10,000 people over a five-year period. That was three times the rate in wet counties: 1.9 per 10,000.[18][19] A study in Arkansas came to a similar conclusion - that accident rates were higher in dry counties than in wet [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county
    - _euqm 3y ago
      Any MS student could come up with several possibilities for statistical lies within that phrasing.
    - iosono88 3y ago
      [dead]
- _euqm 3y ago
  Assured to be 100% false
chaxor 3y ago
Culture can be a powerful tool for things like this. For example, smoking has decreased immensely over the past several decades. Were seeing similar drops in pregnancy due to youth of today having an immense aversion towards these activities. So if the youth decides alcohol is a no-go for social stature, that can be one way to reduce consumption for the future as well.
- jmopp 3y ago
  Related: if you look at a map of worldwide alcohol consumption, there's a pretty prominent dry belt stretching from North Africa to Pakistan.
  - HideousKojima 3y ago
    Also in Utah alcohol consumption is 1.36 gallons per adult per year, national average is 2.45.
    - anonporridge 3y ago
      The next step would be to do a cost benefit analysis of these places to see if the benefits of a low alcohol society outweigh the downsides of what it takes to get there. There are many bad things that come from living in states with heavy religious subjugation like the above examples of the Islamic world and the state of Utah, e.g. highly paternalistic and controlling attitudes toward women.
      - chaxor 3y ago
        It's important to separate variables appropriately here, since religion and/or bigotry is not the only way to make it to less alcohol. To make a statement such as less alcohol leads to bigotry would be ridiculous. Although on a somewhat unrelated note, unfortunately many areas of biological sciences make this category of error in publications often.
dylan604 3y ago
>And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community. that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  > there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others This is a natural consequence of living in groups larger than a handful of adults
- dghughes 3y ago
  >once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community That's the definition of democracy the majority rules if it's 49.9% vs 50.1% that's how it work. As for alcohol bans it is pointless since not everyone is an alcoholic. I think it's typically 3% for alcoholism, gambling addiction, most human seem to be predictable at 3%.
- p_j_w 3y ago
  >so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others. It seems to be that unless the votes were 100% then there's going to be some moral forcing. Does this mean no laws unless we have complete and total unanimity?
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  > that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others. And that cuts both ways. Consider someone who for whatever reason would want alcohol to be prohibited for their own sake. So they would like freedom from alcohol. Coincidentally though, what “freedom” is in the context of commerce ultimately boil down to the freedom of commercial outlets to sell things. If they can’t sell a thing? Well that’s unfreedom. But the so-called consumer is always pushed in front of them.
dangerwill 3y ago
> But localized bans? Fine. Do what you want. And if you happen to live in one of these areas and do drink then what? Sell your house and move or add a lot of onerous hassle in having to go to the next county over to get booze? Giving counties the power to be puritanical little enclaves only works theoretically if you imagine people are self sorting into their communities on an ideological basis, which is much less common than people think.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
  I don't believe that it's a constitutional right to sell alcohol wherever you want. Are you saying that it should be?
  - dangerwill 3y ago
    "wherever you want" is not the same thing as an entire county/municipality banning alcohol. And we kinda already did this rodeo in the 20s and the experiment with prohibition was soundly rejected.
chris_wot 3y ago
The reason Alice Springs have banned alcohol is that people from dry communities visit Alice Springs for grog. The localised ban has needed to be somewhat widened. What nobody here seems to realise is that almost the entire social fabric is destroyed by alcohol. It’s why it has to be banned.
- burner420042 3y ago
  This is what drives me nuts about Hacker News. It's easy to debate banning alcohol in a remote city most have only heard of, it's quite another to have spent a week there as a foreigner, gone for walks, saw the renal clinics, the doormen keeping Aborigines out of the bars, and witnessed drunk Aboriginal men and women sitting in the park midday and how they acted. I'm not here to sensationalize this issue, but it is incredibly ugly what alcohol has done to these people's lives. The place is fucked up. The local white people seemed completely fed up with the situation. I appreciated at the time that it's hard to empathize with a group of people when you consistently see them at their worst and your stuff keeps going missing and yet there was also clear racism and more than a few white people made their living maintaining government funded facilities for the various Aboriginal communities. In the present a total ban of alcohol is probably warranted. Maybe you disagree, and I encourage everyone to travel and form their own opinion.
aortailwjrt 3y ago
I grew up in a dry county in Texas. Want to see a ton of Southern Baptists who claim they never drink but actually binge drink once a week until they're blackout drunk? Go visit a dry county in Texas. Way, way more DUIs than surrounding areas.
- anonporridge 3y ago
  This brings up a great point that's really common in ultra religious communities. When you demonize some common human activity as sinful, and use social shame to try to keep people from doing it, what you actually accomplish is a lot of grandstanding and moral high horsing, and when individual self control fails, it fails hard and dramatically because there isn't a social structure in place to guide people on how to engage with vices as safely as possible. You get massive binge drinking and drunk driving. You get drug use with no culture of testing, so overdoses are more common. You get teenage pregnancy and STIs because abstinence only education doesn't work and kids don't know how to use birth control and STI barriers. You get men that don't know how to accept sexual rejection and women who aren't taught how to reject, both of which lead to sexual assault, intentional and not. Overcoming the demons of our human nature depends in large part on accepting the fact that they are an intrinsic part of us, and learning to dance with them is more effective than trying to ignore them.

jagraff 3y ago

Iirc dry counties tend to have more drunk driving accidents than wet counties. Reason being that people in those counties drive to neighboring counties, get drunk, and then drive home.

dylan604 3y ago
I grew up in a dry county. From my experience, most people drove to wet counties to purchase alcohol to bring back to the dry county to drink at home or at parties.
nwienert 3y ago
sounds like one of those just-so stories people want to believe
- SkyPuncher 3y ago
  The Wikipedia article [0] has a nice summary of a few studies. Notably > Data from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) showed that in Texas, the fatality rate in alcohol-related accidents in dry counties was 6.8 per 10,000 people over a five-year period. That was three times the rate in wet counties: 1.9 per 10,000.[18][19] A study in Arkansas came to a similar conclusion - that accident rates were higher in dry counties than in wet [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county
  - _euqm 3y ago
    Any MS student could come up with several possibilities for statistical lies within that phrasing.
  - iosono88 3y ago
    [dead]
_euqm 3y ago
Assured to be 100% false

chaxor 3y ago

Culture can be a powerful tool for things like this. For example, smoking has decreased immensely over the past several decades. Were seeing similar drops in pregnancy due to youth of today having an immense aversion towards these activities. So if the youth decides alcohol is a no-go for social stature, that can be one way to reduce consumption for the future as well.

jmopp 3y ago
Related: if you look at a map of worldwide alcohol consumption, there's a pretty prominent dry belt stretching from North Africa to Pakistan.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  Also in Utah alcohol consumption is 1.36 gallons per adult per year, national average is 2.45.
  - anonporridge 3y ago
    The next step would be to do a cost benefit analysis of these places to see if the benefits of a low alcohol society outweigh the downsides of what it takes to get there. There are many bad things that come from living in states with heavy religious subjugation like the above examples of the Islamic world and the state of Utah, e.g. highly paternalistic and controlling attitudes toward women.
    - chaxor 3y ago
      It's important to separate variables appropriately here, since religion and/or bigotry is not the only way to make it to less alcohol. To make a statement such as less alcohol leads to bigotry would be ridiculous. Although on a somewhat unrelated note, unfortunately many areas of biological sciences make this category of error in publications often.

dylan604 3y ago

>And that's perfectly fine if that's what that community wants to do once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community. that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others.

petesergeant 3y ago
> there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others This is a natural consequence of living in groups larger than a handful of adults
dghughes 3y ago
>once again, we confuse a simple majority as being the wishes of the community That's the definition of democracy the majority rules if it's 49.9% vs 50.1% that's how it work. As for alcohol bans it is pointless since not everyone is an alcoholic. I think it's typically 3% for alcoholism, gambling addiction, most human seem to be predictable at 3%.
p_j_w 3y ago
>so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others. It seems to be that unless the votes were 100% then there's going to be some moral forcing. Does this mean no laws unless we have complete and total unanimity?
avgcorrection 3y ago
> that's just not true. so unless the votes were >90% in favor of banning, there's always going to be someone's morals being forced upon others. And that cuts both ways. Consider someone who for whatever reason would want alcohol to be prohibited for their own sake. So they would like freedom from alcohol. Coincidentally though, what “freedom” is in the context of commerce ultimately boil down to the freedom of commercial outlets to sell things. If they can’t sell a thing? Well that’s unfreedom. But the so-called consumer is always pushed in front of them.

dangerwill 3y ago

> But localized bans? Fine. Do what you want. And if you happen to live in one of these areas and do drink then what? Sell your house and move or add a lot of onerous hassle in having to go to the next county over to get booze? Giving counties the power to be puritanical little enclaves only works theoretically if you imagine people are self sorting into their communities on an ideological basis, which is much less common than people think.

VWWHFSfQ 3y ago
I don't believe that it's a constitutional right to sell alcohol wherever you want. Are you saying that it should be?
- dangerwill 3y ago
  "wherever you want" is not the same thing as an entire county/municipality banning alcohol. And we kinda already did this rodeo in the 20s and the experiment with prohibition was soundly rejected.

chris_wot 3y ago

The reason Alice Springs have banned alcohol is that people from dry communities visit Alice Springs for grog. The localised ban has needed to be somewhat widened. What nobody here seems to realise is that almost the entire social fabric is destroyed by alcohol. It’s why it has to be banned.

burner420042 3y ago
This is what drives me nuts about Hacker News. It's easy to debate banning alcohol in a remote city most have only heard of, it's quite another to have spent a week there as a foreigner, gone for walks, saw the renal clinics, the doormen keeping Aborigines out of the bars, and witnessed drunk Aboriginal men and women sitting in the park midday and how they acted. I'm not here to sensationalize this issue, but it is incredibly ugly what alcohol has done to these people's lives. The place is fucked up. The local white people seemed completely fed up with the situation. I appreciated at the time that it's hard to empathize with a group of people when you consistently see them at their worst and your stuff keeps going missing and yet there was also clear racism and more than a few white people made their living maintaining government funded facilities for the various Aboriginal communities. In the present a total ban of alcohol is probably warranted. Maybe you disagree, and I encourage everyone to travel and form their own opinion.

aortailwjrt 3y ago

I grew up in a dry county in Texas. Want to see a ton of Southern Baptists who claim they never drink but actually binge drink once a week until they're blackout drunk? Go visit a dry county in Texas. Way, way more DUIs than surrounding areas.

anonporridge 3y ago
This brings up a great point that's really common in ultra religious communities. When you demonize some common human activity as sinful, and use social shame to try to keep people from doing it, what you actually accomplish is a lot of grandstanding and moral high horsing, and when individual self control fails, it fails hard and dramatically because there isn't a social structure in place to guide people on how to engage with vices as safely as possible. You get massive binge drinking and drunk driving. You get drug use with no culture of testing, so overdoses are more common. You get teenage pregnancy and STIs because abstinence only education doesn't work and kids don't know how to use birth control and STI barriers. You get men that don't know how to accept sexual rejection and women who aren't taught how to reject, both of which lead to sexual assault, intentional and not. Overcoming the demons of our human nature depends in large part on accepting the fact that they are an intrinsic part of us, and learning to dance with them is more effective than trying to ignore them.