6 ms·

I don't think we should go down the road of prohibiting alcohol (or most other drugs) again, but I think it is clear to anyone who has been out with groups of p

I don't think we should go down the road of prohibiting alcohol (or most other drugs) again, but I think it is clear to anyone who has been out with groups of people drinking that a sizable portion of the population has no ability to behave when under the influence and probably shouldn't be drinking. I don't know what the solution is, but we should probably start with not glorifying and promoting regular drinking as much as we do.

empyrrhicist 3y ago
We banned tobacco advertisements in most places - it seems like alcohol should probably be in a similar category.
- soligern 3y ago
  [dead]
- ericmay 3y ago
  We should work toward banning most advertisements in most public places really. If you admit that these ads manipulate people into buying or consuming products they might not otherwise buy or consume, it's easy to extend that down to other products as well. Giant roadside billboards, for example, have no place in America.
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    Ban intrusive advertising entirely. Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
  - empyrrhicist 3y ago
    True
  - donatj 3y ago
    I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
    - User23 3y ago
      Since perhaps not everyone is aware, this exact line is one that gets pushed hard during the Google new employee orientation process.
    - lumb63 3y ago
      Have you ever found yourself humming a jingle from a company whose product you have no interest in, and will never have interest in? I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own. To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction. In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
    - maxerickson 3y ago
      So you regularly forget all about a product like Coca Cola?
  - manicennui 3y ago
    States such as Vermont have banned billboards.
    - Arnt 3y ago
      Norway hasn't had alcohol advertising since 1970 or so. Society hasn't collapsed as a result.
      - manicennui 3y ago
        The concern in the US is always that regulation will hurt corporate profits. It took decades before we did anything about cigarettes and the tobacco companies fought it every step of the way. People literally rather die/cause other people to die than give up profits.
- mr_00ff00 3y ago
  How the US tackled tobacco should be a case study in how to eliminate usage of a dangerous substance. Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    You may not have been part of the cool group.
    - mr_00ff00 3y ago
      Lol you may be right, but from my understanding, the older generations everyone smoked. For a while in my generation, a small minority did. Now though, everyone vapes. Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.
- civilitty 3y ago
  Absolutely. As a former smoker, that ban has probably done a lot more good than people realize - not just to prevent people from picking up the habit but also helping smokers quit. Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal. Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
  - kedean 3y ago
    > I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment. I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute. Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot. To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately. I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  Ads for alcohol beverage are almost[1] practically banned in France, despite our massive wine ans spirit industry, which proves that it's actually doable. It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success. [1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)
dfxm12 3y ago
The solution is to give people something else to do. The article makes Alice Springs seem like a remote city populated mostly by Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people tend to get the short end of the stick in Australia, and remote places are hard to deliver social services to. Alcohol is easy to turn to in the face of inequality, unemployment, little access to education or healthcare, etc. Addressing all of these issues will take longer to implement and be less politically palatable to the majority voter than something that looks more like a punishment.
- civilitty 3y ago
  I mean, what solution is there, really? What else can they do? Most of the professionals capable of providing such services don't want to move to a remote area to provide permanent services. Many of them could be convinced to provide mobile services working for the public good but most Western countries already struggle with chronic nurse, doctor, social worker, and teacher shortages so I assume Australia is following a similar trajectory. Even if there was political will to solve these issues, there simply isn't enough professionals to provide enough of these services to the urban areas, let alone the most remote ones. I think this is a much deeper problem with modern societies than just social and healthcare services in remote areas. We've got shortages of trained professionals across the board and we're not set up for any more growth, immigrant or native.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    > What else can they do? Cannabis?
Aerbil313 3y ago
Islam solved the problem. Complete ban, and it works, because it's a religious ban. Compare it with the American Prohibition which didn't work. I'm speaking from the most secularized Muslim nation in the world (Turkey), and it works to great extent even here. Note that it's legally free to drink here.
- stOneskull 3y ago
  > Note that it's legally free to drink here. for everyone or just non-muslims? like in malaysia, you have to be non-muslim to buy alcohol. malaysia has quite a unique population though. indonesia regulates it heavily, you need to have money to drink, but it is only totally banned in a couple of provinces.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    For everyone. And yet I don’t know any single person who have ever drank among all of my relatives.
- joker_minmax 3y ago
  Islam is the most practiced religion in Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania, but alcohol is widely available and consumed in those countries.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    You’re nitpicking. Only half of the Bosnia (%51) and Albania (%56) is muslim, and Azerbaijan is the most secular muslim country in the world according to wikipedia[1], and muslims there are mostly Shiis who are very different than the global widespread and common sect of Islam, Sunnism. Shia’s prohibitions/restrictions are often very lax and they often worship less, Shiism resembles a collection of rituals more than true Islam. Sunnis consider them deviants. All three of those countries were under Soviet rule for some time, and SSCB was known to censor and ban religion and outright murder religious people in especially Muslim countries she occupied. See the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844988 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Azerbaijan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Azerbaijan
ilaksh 3y ago
Imagine if _any_ other drug were described that way. "A sizable portion of the population using meth has no ability to behave when under the influence and probably shouldn't be doing meth." In other words, stop ruining it for the rest of us who can do meth responsibly. The alcohol industry has essentially brainwashed society into thinking that if you can't drink alcohol routinely without having some problem controlling yourself, then it's your own fault. And if you become addicted or have any other serious issues, you must have a serious genetic defect. Again, imagine if people said that about some other drug. "He can't hold his heroin. Runs in the family." Talk about effective marketing.
- thefz 3y ago
  Some people just have latent or submerged psychological issues that emerge with alcohol use and that's it. Angry drunks, sad drunks, horny drunks are all a symptom that uncovers.
- biomcgary 3y ago
  Society's perspective isn't just marketing. Alcohol engages the brain's reward center much less effectively / directly than heroin, so it is objectively less problematic. However, alcohol's prevalence means it has many more negative effects. I'd put sugar in a similar category.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    Alcohol is not “objectively less problematic”. Just because it is less addictive doesn’t suddenly make it less problematic. It affects the brain directly, reducing your ability to think critically both short-term due to its inhibiting effects and long-term due to brain shrinkage. Meaning you are more likely to hurt those around you when you consume alcohol. It enhances the likelihood of giving into your “bad thoughts”, which is exactly why we see crime decrease when it is banned. Affects of heroin on the brain are more closely related to seeking the drug itself, rather than lowering inhibition across the board. Of course this still leads to negative behavior, such as theft or assault, but it doesn’t lead to domestic/sexual violence like alcohol can. Sugar literally cannot be compared to either of them. Caffeine has more of a case, frankly. While sugar has an incredible amount of health problems related to it, and is highly addictive (highly recommend “Salt Sugar Fat” by Michael Moss), it is not in the same league as alcohol or heroin. You are not holding up a gas station for sugar money, nor assaulting someone because your drunken brain thought they laughed at you. While society’s perspective isn’t just marketing, it is just plain wrong. We have normalized alcohol so readily because its been with us for millennia, that even when presented to the mountains of evidence over its damaging effects we just ignore it or, worse, play it off as a “problem for lightweights”.

empyrrhicist 3y ago

We banned tobacco advertisements in most places - it seems like alcohol should probably be in a similar category.

soligern 3y ago
[dead]
ericmay 3y ago
We should work toward banning most advertisements in most public places really. If you admit that these ads manipulate people into buying or consuming products they might not otherwise buy or consume, it's easy to extend that down to other products as well. Giant roadside billboards, for example, have no place in America.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Ban intrusive advertising entirely. Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
- empyrrhicist 3y ago
  True
- donatj 3y ago
  I've never followed this line of reasoning. The whole point of ads is to introduce you to products you might want. It's not manipulative. It's "Hey! Check out this cool new thing." Followed by "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
  - User23 3y ago
    Since perhaps not everyone is aware, this exact line is one that gets pushed hard during the Google new employee orientation process.
  - lumb63 3y ago
    Have you ever found yourself humming a jingle from a company whose product you have no interest in, and will never have interest in? I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own. To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction. In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    So you regularly forget all about a product like Coca Cola?
- manicennui 3y ago
  States such as Vermont have banned billboards.
  - Arnt 3y ago
    Norway hasn't had alcohol advertising since 1970 or so. Society hasn't collapsed as a result.
    - manicennui 3y ago
      The concern in the US is always that regulation will hurt corporate profits. It took decades before we did anything about cigarettes and the tobacco companies fought it every step of the way. People literally rather die/cause other people to die than give up profits.
mr_00ff00 3y ago
How the US tackled tobacco should be a case study in how to eliminate usage of a dangerous substance. Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
- ipaddr 3y ago
  You may not have been part of the cool group.
  - mr_00ff00 3y ago
    Lol you may be right, but from my understanding, the older generations everyone smoked. For a while in my generation, a small minority did. Now though, everyone vapes. Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.
civilitty 3y ago
Absolutely. As a former smoker, that ban has probably done a lot more good than people realize - not just to prevent people from picking up the habit but also helping smokers quit. Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal. Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
- kedean 3y ago
  > I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment. I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
  - civilitty 3y ago
    > I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute. Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot. To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately. I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
littlestymaar 3y ago
Ads for alcohol beverage are almost[1] practically banned in France, despite our massive wine ans spirit industry, which proves that it's actually doable. It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success. [1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)

dfxm12 3y ago

The solution is to give people something else to do. The article makes Alice Springs seem like a remote city populated mostly by Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people tend to get the short end of the stick in Australia, and remote places are hard to deliver social services to. Alcohol is easy to turn to in the face of inequality, unemployment, little access to education or healthcare, etc. Addressing all of these issues will take longer to implement and be less politically palatable to the majority voter than something that looks more like a punishment.

civilitty 3y ago
I mean, what solution is there, really? What else can they do? Most of the professionals capable of providing such services don't want to move to a remote area to provide permanent services. Many of them could be convinced to provide mobile services working for the public good but most Western countries already struggle with chronic nurse, doctor, social worker, and teacher shortages so I assume Australia is following a similar trajectory. Even if there was political will to solve these issues, there simply isn't enough professionals to provide enough of these services to the urban areas, let alone the most remote ones. I think this is a much deeper problem with modern societies than just social and healthcare services in remote areas. We've got shortages of trained professionals across the board and we're not set up for any more growth, immigrant or native.
- scotty79 3y ago
  > What else can they do? Cannabis?

Aerbil313 3y ago

Islam solved the problem. Complete ban, and it works, because it's a religious ban. Compare it with the American Prohibition which didn't work. I'm speaking from the most secularized Muslim nation in the world (Turkey), and it works to great extent even here. Note that it's legally free to drink here.

stOneskull 3y ago
> Note that it's legally free to drink here. for everyone or just non-muslims? like in malaysia, you have to be non-muslim to buy alcohol. malaysia has quite a unique population though. indonesia regulates it heavily, you need to have money to drink, but it is only totally banned in a couple of provinces.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  For everyone. And yet I don’t know any single person who have ever drank among all of my relatives.
joker_minmax 3y ago
Islam is the most practiced religion in Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Albania, but alcohol is widely available and consumed in those countries.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  You’re nitpicking. Only half of the Bosnia (%51) and Albania (%56) is muslim, and Azerbaijan is the most secular muslim country in the world according to wikipedia[1], and muslims there are mostly Shiis who are very different than the global widespread and common sect of Islam, Sunnism. Shia’s prohibitions/restrictions are often very lax and they often worship less, Shiism resembles a collection of rituals more than true Islam. Sunnis consider them deviants. All three of those countries were under Soviet rule for some time, and SSCB was known to censor and ban religion and outright murder religious people in especially Muslim countries she occupied. See the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844988 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35844988 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Azerbaijan https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Azerbaijan

ilaksh 3y ago

Imagine if _any_ other drug were described that way. "A sizable portion of the population using meth has no ability to behave when under the influence and probably shouldn't be doing meth." In other words, stop ruining it for the rest of us who can do meth responsibly. The alcohol industry has essentially brainwashed society into thinking that if you can't drink alcohol routinely without having some problem controlling yourself, then it's your own fault. And if you become addicted or have any other serious issues, you must have a serious genetic defect. Again, imagine if people said that about some other drug. "He can't hold his heroin. Runs in the family." Talk about effective marketing.

thefz 3y ago
Some people just have latent or submerged psychological issues that emerge with alcohol use and that's it. Angry drunks, sad drunks, horny drunks are all a symptom that uncovers.
biomcgary 3y ago
Society's perspective isn't just marketing. Alcohol engages the brain's reward center much less effectively / directly than heroin, so it is objectively less problematic. However, alcohol's prevalence means it has many more negative effects. I'd put sugar in a similar category.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  Alcohol is not “objectively less problematic”. Just because it is less addictive doesn’t suddenly make it less problematic. It affects the brain directly, reducing your ability to think critically both short-term due to its inhibiting effects and long-term due to brain shrinkage. Meaning you are more likely to hurt those around you when you consume alcohol. It enhances the likelihood of giving into your “bad thoughts”, which is exactly why we see crime decrease when it is banned. Affects of heroin on the brain are more closely related to seeking the drug itself, rather than lowering inhibition across the board. Of course this still leads to negative behavior, such as theft or assault, but it doesn’t lead to domestic/sexual violence like alcohol can. Sugar literally cannot be compared to either of them. Caffeine has more of a case, frankly. While sugar has an incredible amount of health problems related to it, and is highly addictive (highly recommend “Salt Sugar Fat” by Michael Moss), it is not in the same league as alcohol or heroin. You are not holding up a gas station for sugar money, nor assaulting someone because your drunken brain thought they laughed at you. While society’s perspective isn’t just marketing, it is just plain wrong. We have normalized alcohol so readily because its been with us for millennia, that even when presented to the mountains of evidence over its damaging effects we just ignore it or, worse, play it off as a “problem for lightweights”.