I believe that much like driving a car, people should be licensed in order to buy alcohol. If people can be shown to have a history of misusing the alcohol that they buy, whether personally or through their distribution to others who misuse it, they can have their license revoked. We may take away the driver’s license of a drunk driver, but it’s a lot harder to stop someone from driving a car they already own compared to significantly limiting their access to alcohol. And there’s no reason that it would be limited to drunk driving offenses; any drunk and disorderly conduct could give rise to a revocation of the license. If they didn’t have a license, we’d go after whoever provided the alcohol to them. True, there are ways of creating alcoholic beverages that are impossible to monitor, and they might get rather popular with people who have lost licenses, but I don’t think it should stop us from cracking down on people who abuse alcohol and thereby cause harm or even distress to others.
Feel free to tell me that there’s absolutely no way that this will ever happen; I agree it’s much like how we’re not going to get cigarettes banned despite all the harm they cause and the existence of safer alternatives to nicotine delivery. That doesn’t stop me from having my opinion on the subject, and I welcome debate as to whether it might be a theoretically good idea.
Really, banning alcohol would be perfectly reasonable in light of our other drug laws, but I think that a better solution in all cases is to allow people licenses of some sort for the purchases of drugs that are known to be a problem.
Would be a huge waste of government resources, with very minimal impact. And generally a dumb idea. Complete prohibition was a failure, this partial regulatory solution would be an even bigger failure.
More people die of heart disease from obesity related conditions than alcohol related diseases. How about a license to purchase carbs?
How would you enforce it? Would clerks be required to check for a license at the point of sale? Also, it would probably require a constitutional amendment since each state has its own set of liquor laws.
Well, it doesn’t really require a lot of investment, smarts or special ingredients to make alcohol, (good alcohol can be another story). So, I’d imagine the unlicensed would just brew at home. I’ve known more than one kid who did it in their closet in high school. All you need is some sweet liquid that yeast can eat, yeast, appropriately sized plastic bottles, and a balloon. Nasty stuff, but if you wanted to get drunk real bad, it was there.
Simple. You’ll have an Alcohol Drinking Bureau. You have to pass a drinking test.
Written and oral.
If you fail, you can take it again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
Or just tack it onto the DMV’s responsibilities. They already test and give out licenses. You could even just have a check box on driver’s licenses and IDs for “approved to drink.”
DMVs get a bad rap. Here in Washington, I think they (it’s the Department of Licensing here, actually) do a great job. I barely have to wait when I visit them, and one visit clears up any problem. Here we reserve our wrath for how WSDOT handles toll collection.
Courts already do take away peoples’ right to drink very frequently in the form of “no alcohol” being a condition on virtually every probation or parole arrangement. DUI’s and pretty much any other minor crime that’s even vaguely alcohol related also usually come with a lengthy court-ordered “no alcohol” restriction. Sure, there’s no real enforcement to make sure they never have a drink ever, but it makes it way easier for those folks to get sent to jail (or back to jail) if they’re not drinking responsibly.
Here we have the Liquor Administration Board which I think is a much more professional sounding name for a body concerned with administering liquor to people.
