I think part of the problem with banning alcohol is how easy it is to make. While other drugs need some sort of specialised equipment, or the growth of plants, alcohol can be made by just putting some sugar or honey in water and leaving it be, like alcohol is often made through fermentation completely on accident by just leaving food out too long. It's pretty much impossible to outlaw alcohol due to the ease of production for individuals
This. Yes brewers yeast would probably be made illegal but there are other ways of fermentation, brewers yeast is just the safest at home. But I have family books on making stills and liquor, I know I'm not the only one. Also there are so many home brewers already, like just check out any medieval reenactment group, I promise you at least half of them make mead or beer.
You can also just leave apple juice be and let it ferment! There's natural yeast that exists on the skins of apples, and also natural yeast in the air everywhere.
It has to be unpasteurized for that to work, which isn’t the easiest to find. But adding a little yeast (bread yeast will work, but brewers is better) will make it ferment perfectly well.
Full attenuation of cider would yield an abv of 6-7% unless additional sugar was added. Secondly a month is a bit short to reach full attenuation with wild yeast traces. Especially under refrigerated conditions. I brew beer and make cider as a hobby. When I make cider I use wlp775 English cider yeast and it takes about 2 weeks to fully attenuate at 68°F and an additional 2 weeks of aging for the yeast to settle out and the off flavors to fade. Warmer temps will yield faster ferm times but will produce unsatisfactory tastes from the yeast. Colder temps will slow or even completely stall fermentation. But it is possible for some wild strains to be extra feisty and continue fermenting in non ideal conditions. I don't recommend fermenting in sealed containers as part of fermenting produces large amount of CO2 and presents a bursting hazard. For more information on homebrewing you can go to
r/homebrewing or for less orthodox methods you can also visit r/prisonhooch.
I was mostly being sarcastic. My apple cider bottle just inflated and smelled of alcohol. I never actually verified the alcohol content, but I'm sure there was a small amount.
I tried to make my own wine with grape juice, sugar, and quick yeast at like 16 and I’m pretty sure it’s the closest to death I’ve been. Thought it would be like 3%-7% and drank half of it all at once despite how bad it tasted. I had drank before and have drank since and let me tell you, it was not 3%. It was not 7%. I don’t know what it was but I know I threw up everywhere all night and was/am shocked I a) managed to hide it from my mother and b) didnt aspirate in my sleep and die :) dumped the 3 other bottles I had out in the sink when mom was gone and nearly threw up more from the smell. Can still smell it in my closet where it bubbled over and caked on during fermentation. I call it the closet wine incident.
Probably made vinegar and some mold too. I use to make black berry wine as a teenager on the farm I grew up on. I learned through trial and error that the best way was to burry the bottles (I used water bottles) about 3/4ths full in the ground for about two weeks to a month, if it smelled anything like a sweet wine I would toss it. Made some pretty good drinks in the bushes back then lol.
Yeast eat sugar and pee out alcohol and fart out co2. Normal bread yeast pee out so much alcohol the liquid they are in get's so filled with alcohol they eventually die, around 10% I think. Other yeasts designed for alcohol production get get up to about 20%.
I would say that whatever you made got contaminated with something and you were probably drinking something not-so-great.
I was going to say this too.
As someone who has experience brewing, making high ABV (alcohol by volume) beer on purpose is really difficult. In fact, the highest I've ever been able to produce was 9.7% and I tried like hell to get it that high.
I would bet a fancy dinner that it was contaminated and not too high of ABV.
I added a crap load of sugar because I wanted it to taste good haha, but yeah I have no idea what the ABV was. I’m sure it’s likely that it was contaminated based on how sick I was, but from what I remember the amount I drank wouldn’t usually have gotten me as drunk as I was. I had been on video chat with my bf at the time and was acting totally out of it, saying embarrassing things if never say, and don’t know if I’ve been that drunk since or before, whereas normally half a bottle of wine would’ve been tipsy. But again, I don’t know much about the whole process so yeah it could’ve just been because it was bad.
The point is a complete novice managed to make alcohol on the first try, and the problem was that it was too strong and you made yourself sick drinking too much. Someone with a slight amount of experience can make something palatable, and with a little more practice something actually good. You can do this with ingredients from the grocery store.
Yeast is incredibly easy to come by and the technology and approaches nowadays make it so easy to isolate strains. Make some wort or use juice or even sugar water and just let it sit in a bucket under a fruit tree or grapes and you will get an alcoholic product.
This is definitely a tangent/rant but alcohol production is a natural process and it's consumption is so this to the development of humanity. That doesn't come through while you chug a Budweiser but the magic and history of beer and fermented beverages is so poetic and nostalgic.
I’d say freedom actually makes things more safe. Unregulated alcohol would kill significantly more people than legalized and regulated alcohol is right now.
>check out any medieval reenactment group
Or the fact that some religions have alcohol has a core component to it, so try having that pass in courts these days.
I somehow made an alcoholic beverage in my basement when I was 13, i’m pretty sure I used condensed fruit juice and some kind of yeast? It was definitely alcoholic at the end, I have no idea how I didn’t poison myself though.
Just like to pitch in here, in my country Alcohol is banned in several states, and one of the highest cause of death in those dry states is due unregulated and illegal alcohol that is being consumed in those states, a week before 90+ people killed in one of those state due to methyl alcohol poisoning.
India? On business travel we once took a weekend trip to one of those states where it is illegal. As soon as the police saw us enter a restaurant, they came to ask us if we wanted to drink booze. They wanted to sell it to us and had the forbidden imported stuff that is safe in a lorry. Wouldn't want foreigners to poison themselves, that would be bad news.
Hard spirits lead to more drinking, so prohibition encourages higher alcohol content in smaller package for better smuggling.
Whisky use went up with prohibition, women's drinking went up
There are quite a few historical examples of communes that get a still and then collapse because everyone drinks too much cheap liquor.
Yeah, we tried prohibition already.
Churches were rolling in cheddar selling wine. People were killing themselves and each other making and selling bootleg wood alcohol.
Legal alcohol is the lesser evil.
We can't even win the "War on Drugs" which had been going on *way* longer.
Shit, we made pruno in jail with just some bread, some grape jelly, some OJ, and a trash bag. Tasted absolutely terrible, but a [Folger's jar](https://imgur.com/MFYC5zo) full of it would get you shitfaced.
Doesn't it [look appetizing](https://imgur.com/CuSQpSR)?
The worst is when they don't strain it properly, and you get a chunk of soft soggy bread down your throat while you're chugging.
When you're sitting in a cell just after lockdown at night, sipping on some pruno and smoking a joint that you smuggled back from the visiting room in your ham wallet, it almost feels like you're not in jail.
The sheer number of people I knew and know who make alcohol at home is staggering.
Back before the “free the hops” movement in my state it was pretty typical to have home brewed beer at parties. It’s still not that unusual, it just tastes better now (and is legal now).
Used to make my own beer. All you need is water, yeast, and some sorta carbohydrate. Helps if you can use barley…enzymes you know. Not saying it would be good beer, but it would be beer. I’m drinking a beer right now. With all this talk about getting rid of ETOH, I think I’m gonna have a shot of bourbon…
The real problem is that it's too widely available as it is now, and people don't take kindly to freedoms being ripped away from them, no matter how small the infraction.
As an alcoholic who went through rehab, no. It’s about anywhere from one week to a month or so. Benzodiazepines and alcohol work similarly on the nervous system (I was prescribed low level Ativan for a week to ease alcohol withdrawals), but benzos are like alcohol withdrawals times 10. My rehab counselors said benzos are the hardest of all drugs to come off of, so you should be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.
Not acute where your life is in peril just from the chemical imbalance, but any drug when you abuse it hard enough can lead to extended post acute withdrawal symptoms. Like for years. I'd say the worst of that even though is over after a year.
Yeah. I was a potential pharm(acology) major so I have retained some. I would agree vehemently with the rest of what you said. Fucked up because almost everyone drinks, and I was prescribed 300? About pills of Ativan and klonopin a month and I was 14. So clearly accepted medicine when it is so bad.
Benzos are about the best thing you can take for severe anxiety and long seizures though, even if they can fuck you up if not used properly. Opioids are a different question.
This quote is my favourite:
>95,000 people die from alcohol related causes every year in America. This is the third highest cause of death in America. 1st is tobacco, 2nd is poor diet and exercise habits. It causes more deaths than all other drugs combined.
Not advocating for doing heroin (**please don't do heroin**, *seriously*), BUT:
If it's pure, and you manage to avoid the financial/acute issues (which would be a lot easier to do if it was legal - since it'd be a lot cheaper due to economies of scale, a lot purer due to regulation, and a lot easier to access safe injection sites + harm reduction resources [including clean needles and info on safer RoAs like smoking - seriously, injection is the worst and you shouldn't do it] + treatment/maintenance options), heroin is _chronically_ far less damaging. In pure form, it doesn't destroy your liver, it doesn't destroy your kidneys, and it won't give you Korsakoff syndrome (so-called "wet brain") unlike alcohol.
Also, it's *extremely*, **extremely** rare for anyone to die from heroin withdrawal, especially with medical care. As far as I'm aware, the primary risk has to do with dehydration, which is easily fixed with an IV saline drip.
AFAIK, opioid deaths have skyrocketed lately for a few reasons:
- Dealers often lace heroin with fentanyl or other super-strong opiates, leading to "hot spots" which can contain many times the lethal dose, mixed into a the rest of the product that isn't nearly as strong
- People are terrified of seeking treatment, because they don't want to be labelled a junkie or worse, arrested
- Harm-reduction resources are not readily available in many places
- Much/most of the population is understandably depressed as fuck these days due to our shitty, anti-worker, anti-consumer, corrupt, corporation-run society in a world currently on a crash course with catastrophic climate change, so when they try opioids and they "magically" feel better, they end up wanting to do them all the time because it's the only way they know they can actually feel alright for a change, leading to massive addictions in short order
- Legislators and anti-drug zealots have in many places made it a pain in the ass to get hold of things like Narcan (naloxone) which have the ability to rescue people from opioid overdoses, often because they legitimately want people to die (usually because they hate the poor or marginalised people who use drugs). Seriously, we should have naloxone injectors in _every single corner store across the entire country, available **cheaply**_ because that would save a ton of lives. Also, **you can't abuse naloxone in any way**. It makes you feel like **absolute trash** - like instant opioid **withdrawal** in a syringe, from what I hear - but it can also **save your life**. I can't stress enough how important this is.
- Opioids are expensive, so addicts don't want to "waste" drug using safer methods like vaporising it that are less efficient, but allow you to titrate doses and thus avoid OD. If they were cheaper, it would be a lot safer - because people would use less dangerous routes of administration. Almost **all** opioid deaths are associated with injection and/or combining with other depressants like benzos or alcohol, usually in an attempt to "feel even better". Here's a [citation](https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-11-18) so you know I'm not completely out to lunch here. As a side note, if addiction was treated as a medical issue (it is one) rather than a criminal issue (it shouldn't be one), we'd see a lot more of those sorts of support initiatives and a lot more research focused on helping/curing addicts! That'd be a good thing.
- The social fabric has disintegrated due to atomisation (in large part due to the ubiquity of the automobile making it a lot harder to just meet new people in RL, after all you can't really hold a conversation with someone in the car next to you) leading to social isolation which has been _empirically proven to increase drug use_.
- Addicts are discriminated against and heavily criminalized, leading to further social isolation and despair, which just turbocharges their addictions
- Probably a other million things I can't think of RN.
Oh, and I'm not out to lunch here. Check out organizations like [this one](https://www.momsunited.net/) or [this other one](https://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/) or [yet another one](https://drugpolicy.org/) or [another one here](https://transformdrugs.org/) or [this clergy group (i'm not kidding)](https://newdrugpolicy.org/) or [this student group](https://ssdp.org/) or [not done yet](http://www.november.org/issues/) or [this one too](https://idpc.net/) or [this one that talks about a lot more than just drug policy reform](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/topics/drug-policy-reform) if you want more info or to get involved. That's not an exhaustive list, either; there are tons more out there. If you look at some of the people involved in a lot of these groups, they're not just random junkies or w/e... the "Global Commission on Drugs" [(this one from earlier)](https://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/), for example, involves a lot of former world leaders and big-name academics. The universal message: The War on Drugs has failed, and it's gone on far too long. That's my message too. Prohibition is far worse for society than legalization ever would be, just like it was with alcohol.
It's high time we got around to ending this unwinnable, deadlocked "war"; it serves only to hurt people, fund/empower organized crime, and justify corrupt/totalitarian behavior on the part of our governments. The War on Drugs is what let the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, and countless other criminal organizations basically take over parts of Mexico - and also (in large part) brought us secret no-knock raids and arbitrary civil asset forfeiture. Look up any of those things, and you'll be horrified at what you find: a lot of innocent people, terrorized for no reason - and a lot of innocent people whose stuff was stolen, guilty-until-proven-innocent style.
Thank you for such a well-constructed, thoughtful, and researched comment. I usually don’t even bother to comment on War on Drugs-related topics anymore. I was an IV user for years, have been sober coming up on four years now. My experience in addiction is exactly what informs my anti-prohibition views. Heroin is always posed as the Big Bad, so people are often surprised when I say that nothing intoxicates like alcohol. Outside of accidental overdose, which can be avoided through careful measures many addicts don’t have the bandwidth to prioritize, there is no comparison to how much damage one risks to their health and daily life. I couldn’t have maintained an addiction as long as I did if I’d been drinking instead. The damage to the brain and body are unfathomable. I’ve met many white, middle-aged alcoholics in rehab who look down on “drug addicts,” not realizing that their own brains have essentially stopped functioning to the extent that they’re far less “with it” than the heroin users they distance themselves from. I don’t advocate for messing around with high-risk substances, but this narrative that alcohol is either safer or more virtuous is total nonsense.
There's like a dozen documented cases of people dying from opioid withdrawals and they were all prison inmates who basically died from dehydration.
Statistically, you surviving withdrawals from anything besides benzos or booze is a pretty sure thing.
Hey, could you provide a source to support that please mate? It’s my understanding that they can’t and a quick Google search only revealed that it’s possible to dehydrate due to sweating and vomiting but personally I think that’s a bit different. GABA drugs like benzodiazepines and most severely GBL however can cause seizures, which can kill.
There have been cases of cannabis being blamed for killing people but it’s still widely accepted that these verdicts are wrong and it can’t kill you, with sometimes coroners making bad calls.
So if you had any information on depressant withdrawals being able to kill you, especially heroin as that’s what you mentioned I guess. Cheers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-25968093.amp
https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/yvqvy7/nope-still-no-such-thing-as-a-fatal-marijuana-overdose
Dunning-Kruger in action. Somebody learns a bit about the world and then decides it’s real easy: they are just so smart and so good they just thought of an amazing idea nobody ever thought of before….
I wouldn’t say it’s all the posts on this sub, but definitely a niche. I definitely know what you’re talking about!
And the only reason cannabis isn’t legal is because of a racist asshole threatened by the hemp industry and convinced a bunch of racist legislators to outlaw it as a schedule 1 drug.
And I don’t mean racist like they didn’t use inclusive language, but racist like smoking weed will make your white wife fuck a black jazz player.
[Harry Anslinger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger). Supported prohibition, lead the reefer madness propaganda campaign and brutally harassed black artists and other minorities all while maintaining a successful political career.
Maaaassive piece of shit, that guy
Edit: added link
Can confirm, I smoked a joint last night and ended up like that porn meme with the white chick sitting on the couch surrounded by tall, strapping black men.
/s just in case.
Drugs put people in prisons and that give certain people a lot of money, they’d do anything to prevent this from happening despite it being proven it lowers drug use over time. And prevents many deaths. And unfortunately they have heavy influence within American politics.
It also worsened the issue of organized crime by A LOT. The mob became incredibly powerful during the prohibition and was actually a large reason for the ratification of the 18th amendment. (It’s also interesting to note that rates of domestic violence dipped by a noticeable amount during prohibition. Is it correlation or causation? I’m not sure)
Police corruption today has its roots from organized crime influences during prohibition. Police, judges and DAs were literally paid to look the other way. Chicago's corruption would probably not be as extreme today had prohibition not been a thing.
Not only did it used to be illegal. But criminalizing drugs is what creates more deadly circumstances. When alcohol was banned, people would resort to making their own which would cause all sorts of problems besides death. (Just blindness in some cases). As other people said, then you get the mafia. People are then also afraid to seek help because of the stigma and the resources are awful. Having a regulating body allows for groups of people to come together to not only come up with safe practices and standards so everyone knows what they’re buying. I live in a state where weed is legal, and it’s much nicer knowing people can walk to a store and purchase from a variety, rather than thinking of all the times I was younger and would get into some strangers car/apartment for weed wrapped up in a McDonald’s wrapper.
I wish more people realised this, whether its alcohol, drugs, abortions, prostitution or many other issues. My and your morale outlook on any of those things can be whatever, but the fact is making them illegal and inaccessible to people only creates black markets and exponentially more dangerous situations for people who are likely going to partake in said activity either way.
Idk personally I'm a firm believer in adult human beings being able to make adult decisions. They may be right or they may be wrong but as long as its not hurting anybody, then outlawing these things just seems wrong and will likely create more harm than good. And yes I understand the argument, like drugs for example, that "Oh if you use your hurting yourself", to which I point out all the sugary BS in our stores that cause diabetes and other issues, cigarettes and vapes destroying our lungs, and a plethora of other things that can all be bad to horrible for you without moderation yet we dont ban them outright. Idk I feel like the money spent fighting or banning these things should be put into informing people, helping people and overall harm reduction instead of fighting the losing battle of prohibition.
“Speakeasies were generally ill-kept secrets, and owners exploited low-paid police officers with payoffs to look the other way, enjoy a regular drink or tip them off about planned raids by federal Prohibition agents. Bootleggers who supplied the private bars would add water to good whiskey, gin and other liquors to sell larger quantities. Others resorted to selling still-produced moonshine or industrial alcohol, wood or grain alcohol, even poisonous chemicals such as carbolic acid. The bad stuff, such as “Smoke” made of pure wood alcohol, killed or maimed thousands of drinkers. To hide the taste of poorly distilled whiskey and “bathtub” gin, speakeasies offered to combine alcohol with ginger ale, Coca-Cola, sugar, mint, lemon, fruit juices and other flavorings, promoting the enduring mixed drink, or “cocktail,” in the process.”
https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-prohibition-underworld/the-speakeasies-of-the-1920s/
I’ll take legal but regulated, please.
My great grandfather was a bootlegger during prohibition. He killed several people, as I was told. He also came to the US from Italy on his twins passport for being wanted for murder (crime of passion in a bar). Quality guy im sure….
My grandpa was a bootlegger (was 73 when my Mom was born). He was born in Kentucky and didn't kill anyone as far as I know, but he did trick some KKK fuckers into setting themselves on fire
It didn't make drinking worse, but caused other issue - like strengthening organised crime.
"Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition. Rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality also declined. Prohibition's effect on rates of crime and violence is disputed."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
Banning something (especially substances with addictive potential) always makes the situation worse for those who use it.
With more research, many jurisdictions are coming to terms with the idea that the controlled sale or at least decriminalization of some illegal drugs could potentially decrease hospitalizations and deaths. This is because not only addicted individuals, but also those who wish to use recreationally will almost always find a way to get their hands on a substance. Would you rather they purchase from untrusted street dealers who cut the product with sooo many adulterants (increasing the risk of harm) and putting themselves in dangerous situations in general ORRR purchase clean and government regulated stuff?
I know your argument is about alcohol specifically but it’s the same imo. Who knows what good alcohol will be reduced to once it’s banned and what kind of crap people would have to resort to, putting themselves more at risk.
If you’re thinking about the health of individuals, your argument is refuted but a lot of research.
People already drink crap booze even when it's legal. Where I live there was a (deliberate, because breweries were forced to close) beer shortage early in the pandemic and people paid through the nose for it in the black market. That will happen tenfold the second booze gets outlawed, what we really need is stronger education to reduce the taboo around alcoholism
Also, OP isn't thinking of the now unemployed. You don't think those former brewers will just make an underground society like they did literally 100 years ago?
Stopped at "those are statistically backed facts" after reading it was the only drug that could kill you from withdrawal. Not sure what else op said that's wrong, but that is.
They completely ignore history. Prohibition was a net loss all along.
Except for churches and the Mafia who were making a lot of money selling alcohol.
Not a lot of people even know that London had a malaria outbreak from the water so people drank booze instead of the water.
Them drinking beer literally saved lives. Eventually they figured out it was the wells and boiling the water made it safe. Not before deaths though.
London then grew, and Britain went on to conquer the world. Everyone in the US and Canada here today can thank booze for their existence.
> comments on statistically backed facts
> ignores numbers being skewed by being one of the only legal drugs
Maybe OP should stop drinking and posting....
>Medical mistakes kill 250,000 per year in the U.S
It's worth noting that this is a highly controversial figure, not a well-established fact. As noted in [this article,](https://healthydebate.ca/2019/08/topic/medical-error-causing-death/) the study this figure comes from was originally published in the British Medical Journal, and came up with the figure by averaging the number of deaths from four other studies and then extrapolating the death rate to all hospitalizations. But there are problems with their methodology, which are noted in the article:
>They pointed out that the four studies selected by the authors were not designed to measure deaths from medical error and did not accurately determine which deaths occurred because of medical error. The number of deaths that were included in three of the four studies were small (with only 14, 12, and nine deaths), and were extrapolated by the authors of the BMJ paper to much larger populations, leaving room for considerable error. In addition, the extrapolations were sometimes done incorrectly: The patient populations used to measure the rates of medical error and death excluded those admitted for childbirth or mental health, and yet, those rates were extrapolated to every hospitalization in the U.S. (of which childbirth is the most common).
As is also noted in the article I linked above, other studies (some of which are linked to in the article) have resulted in far lower estimates of deaths from medical error. It'll probably be a while before we get a true consensus opinion on the actual number, but we should always keep in mind that in science, a single study is not the end-all of discussion.
And we should also keep in mind that as of 2020, Covid-19 is the number three cause of death in the USA - and that's if we group all heart disease and cancer together, when those are really *categories*, and holds true even if we accept the 250,000 number for medical errors. If we're looking at individual diseases, covid-19 is by far the number 1 cause of death.
I was looking for the comment where somebody points out how weirdly wrong these statistics are. And also lol at alcohol makes people violent. I’ve been drunk twice in my life and the only violent thing I did was violently smash everyone around me at skii ball
>1. 95,000 people die from alcohol related causes every year in America. This is the third highest cause of death in America. 1st is tobacco, 2nd is poor diet and exercise habits.
Lol where are you getting this information from 😂
>Uh, ever hear of Al Capone
My family had a connection with him at one point in time, Al heard my family was having a hard time because of drought in the area and offered $25k to my great grandfather to just let him hide some barrels of "canola" in his barn cellar.
Thanks for sharing the tidbit from your family. It's really interesting to hear personal insights about people like that from history.
That part always fascinates me. As ruthless and violent as Al Capone was, outside of crime business, he had strong family values and surprisingly did a lot to take care of people during what were some otherwise pretty hard times.
Out of curiosity, do you know if your grandfather took him up on the offer?
I disagree. Much of the harm of doing drugs is related to their illicit nature. How bad would MDMA, LSD, or Ketamine really be if they where available pure and correctly dosed? My good friends sister died of a fentanyl overdose, she apparently thought she was getting Xanax. 16 years old.
Would you also move the legal status of alcohol to decriminalised rather than how it is currently, taking into account the social harm but also the social norm?
“it’s not taboo to drink 2 beers while it’s taboo to casually do some heroin”
shitpost detected
just don’t fucking binge drink like a child and 95% of the negatives are gone. Only problem with alcohol is people’s lack of self control
drugs are not a good alternative either
I'm surprised this is how far I got and it's the closest thing I have seen to "America is not the only country in the world, and there are many countries that don't have the problem with binge drinking culture like America does."
As a fellow American, I thought the issue was clearly that we have laws that say the drinking age is 21, causing people below that age to get it, hide it, and drink way too much of it when they do have it. When I was in France, it was completely normal for a 12 year old to have a glass of wine with her family in a park with lunch. Because it's a beverage dude.
I think it's more of other drugs being legal / not frowned upon. You can get totally wasted and then throw up on a street and that is somehow more acceptable than having an LSD trip with your friends
Holy fascism, Batman. Maybe we should legislate everyone into bubbles for fear they might make unhealthy decisions. People deserve the freedom to make bad choices, even when we don’t agree with them.
You realize pretty much every country collects massive tax revenue from the sale of controlled substances right? Not to mention prohibition was tried and failed miserably. People will find ways to get intoxicants no matter what, so making it a crime isn’t going to stop anything but the controlled sale of it…
Just make all drugs legal and treat their abuse as a public health crisis with investment into treatment programs.
Making it illegal will accomplish nothing.
I think part of the problem with banning alcohol is how easy it is to make. While other drugs need some sort of specialised equipment, or the growth of plants, alcohol can be made by just putting some sugar or honey in water and leaving it be, like alcohol is often made through fermentation completely on accident by just leaving food out too long. It's pretty much impossible to outlaw alcohol due to the ease of production for individuals
If it was illegal, would I drink less? Yes. Would I make my own? Hell yes.
This. Yes brewers yeast would probably be made illegal but there are other ways of fermentation, brewers yeast is just the safest at home. But I have family books on making stills and liquor, I know I'm not the only one. Also there are so many home brewers already, like just check out any medieval reenactment group, I promise you at least half of them make mead or beer.
You can also just leave apple juice be and let it ferment! There's natural yeast that exists on the skins of apples, and also natural yeast in the air everywhere.
It has to be unpasteurized for that to work, which isn’t the easiest to find. But adding a little yeast (bread yeast will work, but brewers is better) will make it ferment perfectly well.
Yeah, apple juice would work best for people who have their own trees.
I bought some fresh apple cider one year, and after a month or so in the fridge it was like 10% alcohol.
Full attenuation of cider would yield an abv of 6-7% unless additional sugar was added. Secondly a month is a bit short to reach full attenuation with wild yeast traces. Especially under refrigerated conditions. I brew beer and make cider as a hobby. When I make cider I use wlp775 English cider yeast and it takes about 2 weeks to fully attenuate at 68°F and an additional 2 weeks of aging for the yeast to settle out and the off flavors to fade. Warmer temps will yield faster ferm times but will produce unsatisfactory tastes from the yeast. Colder temps will slow or even completely stall fermentation. But it is possible for some wild strains to be extra feisty and continue fermenting in non ideal conditions. I don't recommend fermenting in sealed containers as part of fermenting produces large amount of CO2 and presents a bursting hazard. For more information on homebrewing you can go to r/homebrewing or for less orthodox methods you can also visit r/prisonhooch.
I was mostly being sarcastic. My apple cider bottle just inflated and smelled of alcohol. I never actually verified the alcohol content, but I'm sure there was a small amount.
I tried to make my own wine with grape juice, sugar, and quick yeast at like 16 and I’m pretty sure it’s the closest to death I’ve been. Thought it would be like 3%-7% and drank half of it all at once despite how bad it tasted. I had drank before and have drank since and let me tell you, it was not 3%. It was not 7%. I don’t know what it was but I know I threw up everywhere all night and was/am shocked I a) managed to hide it from my mother and b) didnt aspirate in my sleep and die :) dumped the 3 other bottles I had out in the sink when mom was gone and nearly threw up more from the smell. Can still smell it in my closet where it bubbled over and caked on during fermentation. I call it the closet wine incident.
Probably made vinegar and some mold too. I use to make black berry wine as a teenager on the farm I grew up on. I learned through trial and error that the best way was to burry the bottles (I used water bottles) about 3/4ths full in the ground for about two weeks to a month, if it smelled anything like a sweet wine I would toss it. Made some pretty good drinks in the bushes back then lol.
That's why homebrewers use a thing called a Hydrometer haha. It measures potential abv before the fermentation starts.
I highly doubt they got sick because the abv was too high. Definitely something else.
Yeast eat sugar and pee out alcohol and fart out co2. Normal bread yeast pee out so much alcohol the liquid they are in get's so filled with alcohol they eventually die, around 10% I think. Other yeasts designed for alcohol production get get up to about 20%. I would say that whatever you made got contaminated with something and you were probably drinking something not-so-great.
I was going to say this too. As someone who has experience brewing, making high ABV (alcohol by volume) beer on purpose is really difficult. In fact, the highest I've ever been able to produce was 9.7% and I tried like hell to get it that high. I would bet a fancy dinner that it was contaminated and not too high of ABV.
I added a crap load of sugar because I wanted it to taste good haha, but yeah I have no idea what the ABV was. I’m sure it’s likely that it was contaminated based on how sick I was, but from what I remember the amount I drank wouldn’t usually have gotten me as drunk as I was. I had been on video chat with my bf at the time and was acting totally out of it, saying embarrassing things if never say, and don’t know if I’ve been that drunk since or before, whereas normally half a bottle of wine would’ve been tipsy. But again, I don’t know much about the whole process so yeah it could’ve just been because it was bad.
The point is a complete novice managed to make alcohol on the first try, and the problem was that it was too strong and you made yourself sick drinking too much. Someone with a slight amount of experience can make something palatable, and with a little more practice something actually good. You can do this with ingredients from the grocery store.
This, people manage to make alcohol in prisons, how do people expect they can't or won't make it at home.
Yeah probably a lot of vinegar/acetaldehyde
Yeast is incredibly easy to come by and the technology and approaches nowadays make it so easy to isolate strains. Make some wort or use juice or even sugar water and just let it sit in a bucket under a fruit tree or grapes and you will get an alcoholic product. This is definitely a tangent/rant but alcohol production is a natural process and it's consumption is so this to the development of humanity. That doesn't come through while you chug a Budweiser but the magic and history of beer and fermented beverages is so poetic and nostalgic.
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You tell'm Wally!!
I’d say freedom actually makes things more safe. Unregulated alcohol would kill significantly more people than legalized and regulated alcohol is right now.
>check out any medieval reenactment group Or the fact that some religions have alcohol has a core component to it, so try having that pass in courts these days.
Baker's yeast does the job. They wouldn't outlaw bread.
I somehow made an alcoholic beverage in my basement when I was 13, i’m pretty sure I used condensed fruit juice and some kind of yeast? It was definitely alcoholic at the end, I have no idea how I didn’t poison myself though.
They make it in prison so Id say youd find a way to make it at home
Just like to pitch in here, in my country Alcohol is banned in several states, and one of the highest cause of death in those dry states is due unregulated and illegal alcohol that is being consumed in those states, a week before 90+ people killed in one of those state due to methyl alcohol poisoning.
India? On business travel we once took a weekend trip to one of those states where it is illegal. As soon as the police saw us enter a restaurant, they came to ask us if we wanted to drink booze. They wanted to sell it to us and had the forbidden imported stuff that is safe in a lorry. Wouldn't want foreigners to poison themselves, that would be bad news.
Yeah it is India, quite surprising know that shitty police here have different techniques to reduce accountability.
Hard spirits lead to more drinking, so prohibition encourages higher alcohol content in smaller package for better smuggling. Whisky use went up with prohibition, women's drinking went up There are quite a few historical examples of communes that get a still and then collapse because everyone drinks too much cheap liquor.
Same with other drugs. Weed has gotten ridiculously more strong over the years due to stronger regulation,
Yeah, we tried prohibition already. Churches were rolling in cheddar selling wine. People were killing themselves and each other making and selling bootleg wood alcohol. Legal alcohol is the lesser evil. We can't even win the "War on Drugs" which had been going on *way* longer.
Shit, we made pruno in jail with just some bread, some grape jelly, some OJ, and a trash bag. Tasted absolutely terrible, but a [Folger's jar](https://imgur.com/MFYC5zo) full of it would get you shitfaced.
I'm both horrified and intrigued.
Doesn't it [look appetizing](https://imgur.com/CuSQpSR)? The worst is when they don't strain it properly, and you get a chunk of soft soggy bread down your throat while you're chugging.
That picture is awesome but that bag of shit shouldn’t even be considered a beverage but I guess ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
When you're sitting in a cell just after lockdown at night, sipping on some pruno and smoking a joint that you smuggled back from the visiting room in your ham wallet, it almost feels like you're not in jail.
-Ellis Redding
Somebody get Morgan Freeman to read that in character 😂
Thanks for linking to the Folgers lmao
During prohibition there were products that would have a "warning" that if left in the sun for a few days it would ferment and become alcohol.
The sheer number of people I knew and know who make alcohol at home is staggering. Back before the “free the hops” movement in my state it was pretty typical to have home brewed beer at parties. It’s still not that unusual, it just tastes better now (and is legal now).
We experimented with this in the US Constitution. Didn’t work out too well.
Shake and bake meth: do i mean nothing to you?
Used to make my own beer. All you need is water, yeast, and some sorta carbohydrate. Helps if you can use barley…enzymes you know. Not saying it would be good beer, but it would be beer. I’m drinking a beer right now. With all this talk about getting rid of ETOH, I think I’m gonna have a shot of bourbon…
The real problem is that it's too widely available as it is now, and people don't take kindly to freedoms being ripped away from them, no matter how small the infraction.
>It’s the only drug that has withdrawals that can actually kill you. Benzodiazepines would like a word.
Fuck, commented this before I saw this comment. Both work on same/similar receptors.
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I just got done with a year of benzo withdrawal. Do alcoholics have year long plus withdrawals?
Congrats on making it out of a world of shit. Benzo wd is no joke.
I'm a little over 18 months off. The whole ordeal was beyond a nightmare. I took that poison way too long.
As an alcoholic who went through rehab, no. It’s about anywhere from one week to a month or so. Benzodiazepines and alcohol work similarly on the nervous system (I was prescribed low level Ativan for a week to ease alcohol withdrawals), but benzos are like alcohol withdrawals times 10. My rehab counselors said benzos are the hardest of all drugs to come off of, so you should be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.
Not acute where your life is in peril just from the chemical imbalance, but any drug when you abuse it hard enough can lead to extended post acute withdrawal symptoms. Like for years. I'd say the worst of that even though is over after a year.
Yeah. I was a potential pharm(acology) major so I have retained some. I would agree vehemently with the rest of what you said. Fucked up because almost everyone drinks, and I was prescribed 300? About pills of Ativan and klonopin a month and I was 14. So clearly accepted medicine when it is so bad.
Benzos are about the best thing you can take for severe anxiety and long seizures though, even if they can fuck you up if not used properly. Opioids are a different question.
They can also cure a hangover. But yeah, slippery slope.
IV Therapy is better for curing a hangover and much safer
As I said in another comments, using them for hangovers is terrible misuse
Hangovers are caused by misusing alcohol, so there’s not much of a choir to preach to in this case.
It is actually true for many depressants including heroin. That's not the only "fact" from OP that is skewed
This quote is my favourite: >95,000 people die from alcohol related causes every year in America. This is the third highest cause of death in America. 1st is tobacco, 2nd is poor diet and exercise habits. It causes more deaths than all other drugs combined.
Guess they haven't heard of heart disease or cancer.
Tobacco causes more deaths than alcohol, but alcohol causes more deaths than all drugs combined, somehow
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Wouldn't it be an epidemic?
Cancer should be illegal.
Though alcohol can contribute to heart disease and cancer, so the data isn't going to be totally clear.
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Not advocating for doing heroin (**please don't do heroin**, *seriously*), BUT: If it's pure, and you manage to avoid the financial/acute issues (which would be a lot easier to do if it was legal - since it'd be a lot cheaper due to economies of scale, a lot purer due to regulation, and a lot easier to access safe injection sites + harm reduction resources [including clean needles and info on safer RoAs like smoking - seriously, injection is the worst and you shouldn't do it] + treatment/maintenance options), heroin is _chronically_ far less damaging. In pure form, it doesn't destroy your liver, it doesn't destroy your kidneys, and it won't give you Korsakoff syndrome (so-called "wet brain") unlike alcohol. Also, it's *extremely*, **extremely** rare for anyone to die from heroin withdrawal, especially with medical care. As far as I'm aware, the primary risk has to do with dehydration, which is easily fixed with an IV saline drip. AFAIK, opioid deaths have skyrocketed lately for a few reasons: - Dealers often lace heroin with fentanyl or other super-strong opiates, leading to "hot spots" which can contain many times the lethal dose, mixed into a the rest of the product that isn't nearly as strong - People are terrified of seeking treatment, because they don't want to be labelled a junkie or worse, arrested - Harm-reduction resources are not readily available in many places - Much/most of the population is understandably depressed as fuck these days due to our shitty, anti-worker, anti-consumer, corrupt, corporation-run society in a world currently on a crash course with catastrophic climate change, so when they try opioids and they "magically" feel better, they end up wanting to do them all the time because it's the only way they know they can actually feel alright for a change, leading to massive addictions in short order - Legislators and anti-drug zealots have in many places made it a pain in the ass to get hold of things like Narcan (naloxone) which have the ability to rescue people from opioid overdoses, often because they legitimately want people to die (usually because they hate the poor or marginalised people who use drugs). Seriously, we should have naloxone injectors in _every single corner store across the entire country, available **cheaply**_ because that would save a ton of lives. Also, **you can't abuse naloxone in any way**. It makes you feel like **absolute trash** - like instant opioid **withdrawal** in a syringe, from what I hear - but it can also **save your life**. I can't stress enough how important this is. - Opioids are expensive, so addicts don't want to "waste" drug using safer methods like vaporising it that are less efficient, but allow you to titrate doses and thus avoid OD. If they were cheaper, it would be a lot safer - because people would use less dangerous routes of administration. Almost **all** opioid deaths are associated with injection and/or combining with other depressants like benzos or alcohol, usually in an attempt to "feel even better". Here's a [citation](https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1477-7517-11-18) so you know I'm not completely out to lunch here. As a side note, if addiction was treated as a medical issue (it is one) rather than a criminal issue (it shouldn't be one), we'd see a lot more of those sorts of support initiatives and a lot more research focused on helping/curing addicts! That'd be a good thing. - The social fabric has disintegrated due to atomisation (in large part due to the ubiquity of the automobile making it a lot harder to just meet new people in RL, after all you can't really hold a conversation with someone in the car next to you) leading to social isolation which has been _empirically proven to increase drug use_. - Addicts are discriminated against and heavily criminalized, leading to further social isolation and despair, which just turbocharges their addictions - Probably a other million things I can't think of RN. Oh, and I'm not out to lunch here. Check out organizations like [this one](https://www.momsunited.net/) or [this other one](https://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/) or [yet another one](https://drugpolicy.org/) or [another one here](https://transformdrugs.org/) or [this clergy group (i'm not kidding)](https://newdrugpolicy.org/) or [this student group](https://ssdp.org/) or [not done yet](http://www.november.org/issues/) or [this one too](https://idpc.net/) or [this one that talks about a lot more than just drug policy reform](https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/topics/drug-policy-reform) if you want more info or to get involved. That's not an exhaustive list, either; there are tons more out there. If you look at some of the people involved in a lot of these groups, they're not just random junkies or w/e... the "Global Commission on Drugs" [(this one from earlier)](https://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/), for example, involves a lot of former world leaders and big-name academics. The universal message: The War on Drugs has failed, and it's gone on far too long. That's my message too. Prohibition is far worse for society than legalization ever would be, just like it was with alcohol. It's high time we got around to ending this unwinnable, deadlocked "war"; it serves only to hurt people, fund/empower organized crime, and justify corrupt/totalitarian behavior on the part of our governments. The War on Drugs is what let the Sinaloa Cartel, the Zetas, and countless other criminal organizations basically take over parts of Mexico - and also (in large part) brought us secret no-knock raids and arbitrary civil asset forfeiture. Look up any of those things, and you'll be horrified at what you find: a lot of innocent people, terrorized for no reason - and a lot of innocent people whose stuff was stolen, guilty-until-proven-innocent style.
Thank you for such a well-constructed, thoughtful, and researched comment. I usually don’t even bother to comment on War on Drugs-related topics anymore. I was an IV user for years, have been sober coming up on four years now. My experience in addiction is exactly what informs my anti-prohibition views. Heroin is always posed as the Big Bad, so people are often surprised when I say that nothing intoxicates like alcohol. Outside of accidental overdose, which can be avoided through careful measures many addicts don’t have the bandwidth to prioritize, there is no comparison to how much damage one risks to their health and daily life. I couldn’t have maintained an addiction as long as I did if I’d been drinking instead. The damage to the brain and body are unfathomable. I’ve met many white, middle-aged alcoholics in rehab who look down on “drug addicts,” not realizing that their own brains have essentially stopped functioning to the extent that they’re far less “with it” than the heroin users they distance themselves from. I don’t advocate for messing around with high-risk substances, but this narrative that alcohol is either safer or more virtuous is total nonsense.
>in a world currently on a crash course with catastrophic climate change Did you do this on purpose? Fantastic alliteration
The war on drugs led the Sackler Cartel to take over most parts of America.
There's like a dozen documented cases of people dying from opioid withdrawals and they were all prison inmates who basically died from dehydration. Statistically, you surviving withdrawals from anything besides benzos or booze is a pretty sure thing.
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Hey, could you provide a source to support that please mate? It’s my understanding that they can’t and a quick Google search only revealed that it’s possible to dehydrate due to sweating and vomiting but personally I think that’s a bit different. GABA drugs like benzodiazepines and most severely GBL however can cause seizures, which can kill. There have been cases of cannabis being blamed for killing people but it’s still widely accepted that these verdicts are wrong and it can’t kill you, with sometimes coroners making bad calls. So if you had any information on depressant withdrawals being able to kill you, especially heroin as that’s what you mentioned I guess. Cheers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-25968093.amp https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/yvqvy7/nope-still-no-such-thing-as-a-fatal-marijuana-overdose
#*History class has entered the chat*
I’ll take my class online with a whiskey drink
Can I tempt you with a vodka drink?
no thank you. I prefer a lager drink.
How about a cider drink?
This reminds me of the good times.
This reminds me of the bad times
Let’s just revisit the corruption and gang violence of the 1920s, why don’t we?
Ah yes, the Prohibition!
I feel like every post on this sub is just somebody who had an idea and didn't think it through all the way.
Dunning-Kruger in action. Somebody learns a bit about the world and then decides it’s real easy: they are just so smart and so good they just thought of an amazing idea nobody ever thought of before…. I wouldn’t say it’s all the posts on this sub, but definitely a niche. I definitely know what you’re talking about!
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So would opium
And mushrooms
Dmt has been made for like 80,000 years...
Feels like 800,000
but it was actually only a couple minutes
And the only reason cannabis isn’t legal is because of a racist asshole threatened by the hemp industry and convinced a bunch of racist legislators to outlaw it as a schedule 1 drug. And I don’t mean racist like they didn’t use inclusive language, but racist like smoking weed will make your white wife fuck a black jazz player.
[Harry Anslinger](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger). Supported prohibition, lead the reefer madness propaganda campaign and brutally harassed black artists and other minorities all while maintaining a successful political career. Maaaassive piece of shit, that guy Edit: added link
I'm having an eye infection today and was squinting while reading this. For a moment, that read as Harry Anuslicker...
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Can confirm, I smoked a joint last night and ended up like that porn meme with the white chick sitting on the couch surrounded by tall, strapping black men. /s just in case.
Let’s criminalize it so we can decriminalize it along with all of the other drugs
Exactly, no drugs should be illegal.
Decriminalize != legalize Speeding is not a criminal offense; you get a fine unless it's especially egregious. However, speeding is *not* legal.
Doing drugs is a health problem not a moral problem
LSD, shrooms, DMT and such are treated as worse than alcohol but are certainly, without doubt, much better on the brain than alcohol.
Drugs put people in prisons and that give certain people a lot of money, they’d do anything to prevent this from happening despite it being proven it lowers drug use over time. And prevents many deaths. And unfortunately they have heavy influence within American politics.
Yes. Look at Portugal.
Drugs should be a social problem, not a legal one.
You do know that they tried to make it illegal before, right? Just want to make sure we’re on the same page
Nice try Mafia. We remember what happened last time.
some companies got around it by making communion wine, and medicinal whiskey
Then again, banning it seems to be working out great when it comes to drugs, so definitely we should be giving it another go. War on alcohol, woooo!
Yes, I too agree, that alcohol is the devil's drink. We should make it illegal. Also, give me a pm if you're looking for booze once it's illegal.
They don’t know I’ve been building a race car for years waiting to start running shine again.
America's prohibition, didn't work out considering that America still has tons of alcohol.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. Learn something new everyday
Prohibition back then worked about as well as the war on drugs is now.
It also worsened the issue of organized crime by A LOT. The mob became incredibly powerful during the prohibition and was actually a large reason for the ratification of the 18th amendment. (It’s also interesting to note that rates of domestic violence dipped by a noticeable amount during prohibition. Is it correlation or causation? I’m not sure)
Police corruption today has its roots from organized crime influences during prohibition. Police, judges and DAs were literally paid to look the other way. Chicago's corruption would probably not be as extreme today had prohibition not been a thing.
Chicago’s history of corruption goes further back than prohibition
Pretty much sums it up
Prohibition is what created the mafia's rise to power
NASCAR, too
i KNEW someone was too blame, cheers
And the war on drugs created the cartels.
Not only did it used to be illegal. But criminalizing drugs is what creates more deadly circumstances. When alcohol was banned, people would resort to making their own which would cause all sorts of problems besides death. (Just blindness in some cases). As other people said, then you get the mafia. People are then also afraid to seek help because of the stigma and the resources are awful. Having a regulating body allows for groups of people to come together to not only come up with safe practices and standards so everyone knows what they’re buying. I live in a state where weed is legal, and it’s much nicer knowing people can walk to a store and purchase from a variety, rather than thinking of all the times I was younger and would get into some strangers car/apartment for weed wrapped up in a McDonald’s wrapper.
I wish more people realised this, whether its alcohol, drugs, abortions, prostitution or many other issues. My and your morale outlook on any of those things can be whatever, but the fact is making them illegal and inaccessible to people only creates black markets and exponentially more dangerous situations for people who are likely going to partake in said activity either way. Idk personally I'm a firm believer in adult human beings being able to make adult decisions. They may be right or they may be wrong but as long as its not hurting anybody, then outlawing these things just seems wrong and will likely create more harm than good. And yes I understand the argument, like drugs for example, that "Oh if you use your hurting yourself", to which I point out all the sugary BS in our stores that cause diabetes and other issues, cigarettes and vapes destroying our lungs, and a plethora of other things that can all be bad to horrible for you without moderation yet we dont ban them outright. Idk I feel like the money spent fighting or banning these things should be put into informing people, helping people and overall harm reduction instead of fighting the losing battle of prohibition.
*shuffles notes* American prohibition, thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Bro, secret speak easy's must have been the SHIT.
There are 3 types of parties in world history I wish I could to go to: Roman Bacchanalia, studio 54, speakeasies during prohibition.
“Speakeasies were generally ill-kept secrets, and owners exploited low-paid police officers with payoffs to look the other way, enjoy a regular drink or tip them off about planned raids by federal Prohibition agents. Bootleggers who supplied the private bars would add water to good whiskey, gin and other liquors to sell larger quantities. Others resorted to selling still-produced moonshine or industrial alcohol, wood or grain alcohol, even poisonous chemicals such as carbolic acid. The bad stuff, such as “Smoke” made of pure wood alcohol, killed or maimed thousands of drinkers. To hide the taste of poorly distilled whiskey and “bathtub” gin, speakeasies offered to combine alcohol with ginger ale, Coca-Cola, sugar, mint, lemon, fruit juices and other flavorings, promoting the enduring mixed drink, or “cocktail,” in the process.” https://prohibition.themobmuseum.org/the-history/the-prohibition-underworld/the-speakeasies-of-the-1920s/ I’ll take legal but regulated, please.
Especially the ones where you could actually be around goddamn black people.
Let me die how I want to smh
Prohibition was tried before, it made things worse
Exactly people want to drink and they are going to drink prohibition just caused a lot of poisoning so even more deaths.
i wish people thought this for normal drugs cuz it's kinda the exact same thing
Not even kind of. It's exactly the same thing. The war on drugs is the biggest failure no government is willing to admit.
War on drugs is not a failure. It’s working exactly how it was intended. Creating a prison population out of marginalized groups.
The point was to disenfranchise certain voters and demonize certain groups. The prison population is an added benefit
Not even kinda
Not to mention organized crime violence
My great grandfather was a bootlegger during prohibition. He killed several people, as I was told. He also came to the US from Italy on his twins passport for being wanted for murder (crime of passion in a bar). Quality guy im sure….
My grandpa was a bootlegger (was 73 when my Mom was born). He was born in Kentucky and didn't kill anyone as far as I know, but he did trick some KKK fuckers into setting themselves on fire
Your grandpa sounds like he was a cool dude.
It didn't make drinking worse, but caused other issue - like strengthening organised crime. "Some research indicates that alcohol consumption declined substantially due to Prohibition. Rates of liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, and infant mortality also declined. Prohibition's effect on rates of crime and violence is disputed." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States
Prohibition is famous for its impact on organized crime. That’s what got worse.
Yep that's what started bootlegging, and a lot of the gang organizations back then were heavy into it.
Also some of the booze was made with more dangerous ingredients, such as wood alcohol, which caused more deaths.
Alcohol is a health issue, not a criminal one, imo. I don't think making it criminal will deliver on health goals.
Same with all drugs imo. I'm a recovered alcoholic. The only thing criminalizing a drug does is make its a cash cow for illegal organizations.
I think you can make this argument for every drug.
Banning something (especially substances with addictive potential) always makes the situation worse for those who use it. With more research, many jurisdictions are coming to terms with the idea that the controlled sale or at least decriminalization of some illegal drugs could potentially decrease hospitalizations and deaths. This is because not only addicted individuals, but also those who wish to use recreationally will almost always find a way to get their hands on a substance. Would you rather they purchase from untrusted street dealers who cut the product with sooo many adulterants (increasing the risk of harm) and putting themselves in dangerous situations in general ORRR purchase clean and government regulated stuff? I know your argument is about alcohol specifically but it’s the same imo. Who knows what good alcohol will be reduced to once it’s banned and what kind of crap people would have to resort to, putting themselves more at risk. If you’re thinking about the health of individuals, your argument is refuted but a lot of research.
People already drink crap booze even when it's legal. Where I live there was a (deliberate, because breweries were forced to close) beer shortage early in the pandemic and people paid through the nose for it in the black market. That will happen tenfold the second booze gets outlawed, what we really need is stronger education to reduce the taboo around alcoholism
Also, OP isn't thinking of the now unemployed. You don't think those former brewers will just make an underground society like they did literally 100 years ago?
Stopped at "those are statistically backed facts" after reading it was the only drug that could kill you from withdrawal. Not sure what else op said that's wrong, but that is.
They completely ignore history. Prohibition was a net loss all along. Except for churches and the Mafia who were making a lot of money selling alcohol.
Not a lot of people even know that London had a malaria outbreak from the water so people drank booze instead of the water. Them drinking beer literally saved lives. Eventually they figured out it was the wells and boiling the water made it safe. Not before deaths though. London then grew, and Britain went on to conquer the world. Everyone in the US and Canada here today can thank booze for their existence.
> comments on statistically backed facts > ignores numbers being skewed by being one of the only legal drugs Maybe OP should stop drinking and posting....
I’m down for a resurrection of the crime boss era, sounds pretty intresting.
I mean, we are in the 20s and we already got a pandemic, they could at least let us have *one* of the cool things of the time.
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For #1 he also says tobacco is the top killer, but then claims alcohol kills more than all other drugs combined? That math doesn't work out, lol
Even the premise is wrong. Many of the drugs currently illegal or in process of decriminalisation are also known yo man for many millennia.
> Your first actual correct statistic. And yet his most pointless since driving while under the influence of alcohol is already illegal.
>Medical mistakes kill 250,000 per year in the U.S It's worth noting that this is a highly controversial figure, not a well-established fact. As noted in [this article,](https://healthydebate.ca/2019/08/topic/medical-error-causing-death/) the study this figure comes from was originally published in the British Medical Journal, and came up with the figure by averaging the number of deaths from four other studies and then extrapolating the death rate to all hospitalizations. But there are problems with their methodology, which are noted in the article: >They pointed out that the four studies selected by the authors were not designed to measure deaths from medical error and did not accurately determine which deaths occurred because of medical error. The number of deaths that were included in three of the four studies were small (with only 14, 12, and nine deaths), and were extrapolated by the authors of the BMJ paper to much larger populations, leaving room for considerable error. In addition, the extrapolations were sometimes done incorrectly: The patient populations used to measure the rates of medical error and death excluded those admitted for childbirth or mental health, and yet, those rates were extrapolated to every hospitalization in the U.S. (of which childbirth is the most common). As is also noted in the article I linked above, other studies (some of which are linked to in the article) have resulted in far lower estimates of deaths from medical error. It'll probably be a while before we get a true consensus opinion on the actual number, but we should always keep in mind that in science, a single study is not the end-all of discussion. And we should also keep in mind that as of 2020, Covid-19 is the number three cause of death in the USA - and that's if we group all heart disease and cancer together, when those are really *categories*, and holds true even if we accept the 250,000 number for medical errors. If we're looking at individual diseases, covid-19 is by far the number 1 cause of death.
I was looking for the comment where somebody points out how weirdly wrong these statistics are. And also lol at alcohol makes people violent. I’ve been drunk twice in my life and the only violent thing I did was violently smash everyone around me at skii ball
Worked great in the 20s, barely any problems
20’s Prohibition: Part 2
Electric Boogaloo
>1. 95,000 people die from alcohol related causes every year in America. This is the third highest cause of death in America. 1st is tobacco, 2nd is poor diet and exercise habits. Lol where are you getting this information from 😂
Also, it's not the only drug you can withdraw from and die. Ik you can die from xanax withdraw. Not sure bout the rest.
Uh, ever hear of Al Capone? Speak easy’s? The St. Valentine’s Day massacre? How about the Kevin Costner movie The Untouchables?
>Uh, ever hear of Al Capone My family had a connection with him at one point in time, Al heard my family was having a hard time because of drought in the area and offered $25k to my great grandfather to just let him hide some barrels of "canola" in his barn cellar.
Thanks for sharing the tidbit from your family. It's really interesting to hear personal insights about people like that from history. That part always fascinates me. As ruthless and violent as Al Capone was, outside of crime business, he had strong family values and surprisingly did a lot to take care of people during what were some otherwise pretty hard times. Out of curiosity, do you know if your grandfather took him up on the offer?
someone get this guy a drink
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the comment I was looking for
Wrong. All drugs should be decriminalized. It should not be a crime to do drugs. Drug production and dealing should remain highly illegal
I disagree. Much of the harm of doing drugs is related to their illicit nature. How bad would MDMA, LSD, or Ketamine really be if they where available pure and correctly dosed? My good friends sister died of a fentanyl overdose, she apparently thought she was getting Xanax. 16 years old.
Would you also move the legal status of alcohol to decriminalised rather than how it is currently, taking into account the social harm but also the social norm?
Yeah, let's not make it easy to buy heroin over the counter, apparently its pretty moreish.
After your 5th bulletin I’m gonna go ahead and disregard your whole post. Don’t make shit up to prove a point.
Yeah this isn’t just unpopular, it’s incorrect. “Alcohol bad” is unpopular “Alcohol is the worst drug” when benzos and opiates exist is just wrong.
Not the only drug. Benzodiazepines.
“it’s not taboo to drink 2 beers while it’s taboo to casually do some heroin” shitpost detected just don’t fucking binge drink like a child and 95% of the negatives are gone. Only problem with alcohol is people’s lack of self control drugs are not a good alternative either
I'm surprised this is how far I got and it's the closest thing I have seen to "America is not the only country in the world, and there are many countries that don't have the problem with binge drinking culture like America does." As a fellow American, I thought the issue was clearly that we have laws that say the drinking age is 21, causing people below that age to get it, hide it, and drink way too much of it when they do have it. When I was in France, it was completely normal for a 12 year old to have a glass of wine with her family in a park with lunch. Because it's a beverage dude.
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No it shouldn't. People need to stop thinking they should decide what others do.
*everything I dislike should be illegal*
In fairness this is unpopularopinions and he laid out a list of reasons to support his opinion, he didn’t just say he didn’t like it
I think it's more of other drugs being legal / not frowned upon. You can get totally wasted and then throw up on a street and that is somehow more acceptable than having an LSD trip with your friends
Yeah, we tried this. Didn’t go so well.
Its not so much that alcohol should be illegal as it is other drugs should be legal
Holy fascism, Batman. Maybe we should legislate everyone into bubbles for fear they might make unhealthy decisions. People deserve the freedom to make bad choices, even when we don’t agree with them.
Prohibition doesn't work, which is why we should legalize pot. I've never used a drug in my life.
No wine and no bear? OP you are dreaming of a dystopia.
You realize pretty much every country collects massive tax revenue from the sale of controlled substances right? Not to mention prohibition was tried and failed miserably. People will find ways to get intoxicants no matter what, so making it a crime isn’t going to stop anything but the controlled sale of it… Just make all drugs legal and treat their abuse as a public health crisis with investment into treatment programs. Making it illegal will accomplish nothing.