I have a problem with too many men suffering from alcoholism in my country. I tried putting large taxes and limiting the stores that sell alcohol but that led to cottage industry of low quality moonshine sold on the black market. Quote often with even worse effects.
Could you recommend some ways to decrease alcohol consumption?
(I guess since I got the comment upvotes I'll post it as an answer...)
Look at studies of Portugal and its decriminalization of hard drugs. Far better than anything we've found so far is the institution of social programs that help rehabilitate those who are suffering for little to no cost. Prohibition NEVER works, but legalization coupled with a strong socially accepting message does. Alcoholism is a recognized disease and needs treatment, not punishment.
Engineer a medicine, drug, bacteria, virus, or gene therapy, introduced into the food/water/air supply, that results in an intolerance to alcohol, similar to lactose intolerance or ipecac syrup.
Alternatively, a bacteria that is highly effective in rapidly breaking down ethanol so that no one can get drunk off of it.
Both methods intend to make drinking alcohol much less enjoyable, by either increasing its negative consequences or negating the positive effects.
Either method is a logical public policy similar to introducing Fluoride into the water supply, or adding bitterants to anti-freeze to make it unlikely for kids and animals to drink. A significant epidemic of alcoholism can make such an effort supported by the public. Or do it covertly.
Give them another way to be happy
Whether or not they suffer from alcoholism, people drink because they are not happy. Drinking is a short term and potentially hazardous solution but it is a solution nonetheless. You cannot take it away and hope for improvement if you don't offer something to replace it. Get your populace "addicted" to any of the below.
Physical activity: Formal or informal sports, working with animals, wilderness survival (think scouting). All give an excuse for physical activity. This provides the same dopamine and seratonin high that alcohol provides with none of the drawbacks. Except maybe addiction. People can get addicted to competitive sports but that's not as big a problem as addiction to drinking.
Aside: Drinking is bad for your health and is not advised for serious sportspeople! Another reason not to drink.
Other drugs: There are other drugs that provide a similar high but are less addictive and have less side-effects. One answer suggests cannabis. I'm not here to debate the pros and cons of cannabis over alcohol, since you are free to make up your own smart-drug and decide the effects for yourself. But four things you must decide are strength, addictiveness, side-effects (effects besides the high), and strength of withdrawal. Can you die from alcohol withdrawal? Can you die from cannabis withdrawal?
Communal activity: Social interaction and working as any sort of team also gives a serotonin/dopamine high. One answer suggests religion, and I agree. However it cannot be the monastic type of religion. If must be load and evangelic and involve teamwork. The religion forces you to work with people you otherwise wouldn't and that is its advantage.
Make common ink cap a staple dish.
Common ink cap is a common and edible mushroom. It contains a toxin that is not dangerous in itself, but it prohibits proper break down of ethanol, resulting, in mild cases, in immediate and extremely severe hangover, and in bad cases cardiac arrhythmia.
It is extremely unpleasant to drink alcohol for several days after ingesting the mushroom.
Disulfiram (tradenames: Antabuse, Antabus) in the water supply, or possibly in the air. It basically causes immediate hangovers by inhibiting an enzyme that finishes the degradation of ethanol.
It's discovery was something of an accident, if I recall correctly. Workers in rubber manufacturing plants where products were being vulcanized (disulfiram has a sulfur-sulfur bond that's presumably useful) began to notice intolerance to alcohol after work. I don't know if they were getting it on their skin and it was being absorbed, or if the high temperatures were aerosolizing some of it and they breathed it in
Disulfiram plus alcohol, even small amounts, produce flushing, throbbing in head and neck, throbbing headache, respiratory difficulty, nausea, copious vomiting, sweating, thirst, chest pain, palpitation, dyspnea, hyperventilation, tachycardia, hypotension, syncope, marked uneasiness, weakness, vertigo, blurred vision, and confusion. In severe reactions there may be respiratory depression, cardiovascular collapse, arrhythmias, myocardial infarction, acute congestive heart failure, unconsciousness, convulsions, and death.
It was featured in a story between Radiolab and Marketplace where some Russian clinics used it to scare people out of alcoholism. Maybe the view of alcohol in your society is more akin to the Russian sentiment than it is in North America.
Kai Ryssdal: Alcoholism and Russia have a long and destructive history together. Alcohol abuse costs that country half a million deaths a year, most of them men of working age. It also costs billions of dollars in lost productivity. Male life expectancy in Russia is just 60 years, and the Russian population is predicted to shrink nearly 20 percent by the middle of the century, in part because of the drinking. Every problem, though, creates a market for a cure.
Our health care correspondent Gregory Warner traveled to Moscow to track down one very popular cure -- and the doctors who sell it.
Gregory Warner: For me, this all started with a story I heard about a friend's ex-boyfriend. A Russian alcoholic who promised he'd never ever drink again. Story was he got a capsule surgically inserted under his skin. Some kind of chemical compound, such that if he drank that capsule would explode into his bloodstream, and kill him.
[...]
Eugene Raikhel [professor at the University of Chicago] says if it worked it's partly because Russians understand addiction differently.
Raikhel: Here's the distinction: in North America, the prevailing understanding of addiction is it's not about the substance as much it is about the face that you're out of touch with some truths about yourself and your condition.
[Whereas in Russia,] Many of the patients I talked to say, "I don't have to change myself in any way, I don't have to become a different person."
I just have to get rid of my addiction. Which is what Dr. Davidov offers. When he gives you that pill and he puts that drop of vodka on your tongue, he scares that part of you into submission.
— The killer cure for alcoholism in Russia, APM Marketplace, 3 March 2011
In the United States, smoking tobacco has been on the decline. This New York Times article explored how the most effective methods involved decreasing access to cigarettes (especially due to finances) and limiting public exposure. Also, these were gradual changes over time, not an immediate ban as happened with the US alcohol prohibition.
But educating people about the tobacco industry’s marketing efforts can have a big impact. “We now have empirical evidence that people who don’t like the tobacco industry are about five times as likely to quit, and a third to a fifth as likely to start,” [Dr. Stanton A. Glantz] says.
Anecdotally, I see this technique used heavily in my area, with an ad campaign of "big tobacco targets kids" to create a negative perception of the industry.
[Dr. Glantz] also notes the importance of smoking bans. “When you create smoke-free workplaces, bars, casinos and restaurants, it sends a strong message that smoking is out,” he says. “It also creates environments that make it easier for people to quit smoking.”
Also, fine those who violate this
[Dr. Mary O’Sullivan] says that many of her patients who are trying to quit head to city parks, where it’s been illegal to smoke since 2011; people caught smoking in parks face a $50 fine.
According to these experts, also at play may be increasingly graphic ad campaigns, including the “Tips From Former Smokers” campaign begun last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and fewer incidents of smoking in popular movies. Research shows that the more times a young person sees smoking in the movies, the more likely he or she is to take up smoking, and from 2005 to 2010, young people saw far less smoking in PG-13 movies. (Many of those youths are now adults and would have been captured by the new report, though smoking in movies has since increased.)
This has been a very effective tactic for reducing smoking, but you said that it had already been tried for alcohol. More research needs to be done to see if this would work if the other methods listed above were implemented.
Richard Grucza, an associate professor in psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine who studies tobacco policy, cited the 62-cent-per-pack federal tax increase that took effect in 2009, as well as laws that ban indoor smoking, cigarette vending machines, the sale of packs of fewer than 20 cigarettes and the distribution of free cigarettes, as major contributors to declining smoking rates.
In other words, increasing the tax, outlawing distributions of small quantities, and banning official distribution of free cigarettes worked together to make it more expensive.
and
[Dr. O’Sullivan said,] “In New York, we’ve gotten it down to 14 percent, and one of the big reasons is price. Here it’s $12 a pack. Even our schizophrenia patients, who are the most addicted, who used to smoke two and three packs a day, even they are smoking less because of the price.”
These turned out to be less effective than other methods.
School education programs, for example, don’t appear to be very effective, most likely because schools are difficult places to change social norms and it is hard to do the programs well given all the other demands in the school day, [Dr. Glantz] says.
Also, to my knowledge, there are no current efforts to prevent someone from growing their own tobacco or consuming it on private premises. These tactics were not effective for prohibition of alcohol in the US, so a society trying to reduce alcohol consumption would do well not to try.
Legalize marijuana.
Some people want to feel different. Like your men. MJ lets them scratch that itch. Weed is safer than alcohol in the short and long term: less organ damage, less potential to die of overdose or withdrawals, less aggressive behavior. People don't suffer from hangover related effects the next morning: less missed work. Marijuana is a superior recreational drug in comparison to alcohol.
The US is in the middle of an experiment about this. It is too soon to know for sure if legal MJ will really reduce alcohol use but one can hope. Here is Time stating beer sales are down in places with legal marijuana.
Prohibit anyone other than the government from selling alcohol. Put your government alcohol outlets in dingy warehouses on out-of-town industrial estates, staffed by civil servants who have customer service skills that are too poor for them to work anywhere else. That is pretty much guaranteed to make alcohol deeply unfashionable, while preventing large-scale black market sales, since its availability from the government will cap the prices that black market dealers can get.
I tried putting large taxes and limiting the stores that sell alcohol but that led to cottage industry of low quality moonshine sold on the black market.
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Commented
Jun 7, 2017 at 15:28
limiting the stores that sell alcohol could easily contain your argument
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Commented
Jun 7, 2017 at 15:47
Give people a chance to succeed. Keep corruption under control, and provide opportunities for education that leads to meaningful work. There will always be a few people that will turn to drug or alcohol abuse, but seeing the potential to have a meaningful future is the best deterrent substance abuse.
Up the penalty for consuming alcohol to death by being flayed alive in the public square along with five, randomly-selected family members, with a guarantee that whatever family member(s) reports them prior to their arrest will be spared. Further, when the government catches moonshiners, give them methanol-tainted moonshine to distribute to all their customers (which will kill them painfully.) In return, give any moonshiner who succeeds in causing a noticeable uptick in methanol poisoning in his area a swift execution instead of a painful one, and spare his family.
Expect people to turn to other intoxicants instead of alchol, but you didn't say anything about that.
Do note that figuring out why people are consuming excessive quantities of alcohol and addressing that issue will solve the problem with a much lower body count, but it will also take government officials who are actually competent, whereas the proposed method merely requires finding a core group of vicious psychopaths and giving them license to hunt.
There are several reasons for alcoholic consumption, and so there are several ways to stop it.
The main reason for alcoholic consumption is people being not happy with their lives, people who are homeless, idle and that are maybe in recent breakups, or recently lost someone they loved, are the most to be drinking alcohol, and so to reduce it, many regions have tried putting a fine on drinking, which clearly didn't work and in some cases, completely backfired.
So, seeing the reason they are drinking, the best way of making them stop drinking, is by fixing their lives, not telling them to stop, but making them stop, by maybe increasing physical activity, social interaction, etc....
This seems to be clearly the best way to stop alcoholic consumption in whatever region or place.
Simple answer - put heavy fines on making moonshine. Make sure this is enforced, and make sure police are kept on the alert about this.
