For me & spouse, it’s pretty clearly a cultural difference in what normal, healthy drinking looks like.
For my cousin, it’s pretty clear that drinking was at least in part self-medication from something that was probably both neurological and psychological. In none of these cases would changing the age of access make / have made any difference. What would have made a difference was better accessible resources to treat addiction and its proximate causes.
I suspect that, mutatis mutandis, this goes for smoking, too.
Minors drank before it was changed too. If the limit is 19, 18 & 17 yo drink.
Yeah. My buddy was a non smoker, but he liked to go to clubs once in a while. His wife gave him a really cool suede jacket- which he found out absorbed tobacco stench like crazy. Of course you can’t just pop it in the wash, and hanging it in the closet was OUT, so it had to hang in the garage.
So the new Labour government in the UK has just announced they intend to implement the smoking ban as outlined above (the minimum legal smoking age going up by one year every year).
This was a Rishi Sunak idea that didn’t have a chance to be debated before the election but it turns out that Labour fully supported it and in greater numbers. With a new mandate and a whopping majority there’s a strong possibility this will be passed.
This is nonsense. For ten years after I stopped smoking, I craved it and imagined that I was diagnosed with some disease that gave me 6 months to live and thought, well at least I could smoke again for those six months. It is fiercely addictive.
On the other hand, while I used to drink, although rarely to excess, I just hardly drink any more. Maybe a half glass of wine once in a while, or split a beer with my wife. And I don’t crave it or even miss it. I guess there are people addicted to alcohol, but it just doesn’t seem nearly as addictive.
And, by the way, for either tobacco, or alcohol, or presumably any addictive substance, it seems that if you don’t start till your 20s, it will be much easier to break the habit. I started smoking around 14 (quit when I had a heart attack at 28) but never had more than a sip of Passover wine till after I finished college.
The law I’d like to see is a ban on all flavored nicotine products. That’s one of the ways they’re getting kids hooked on vaping. I think some states already have that, and Ohio is working on it.
