I honestly don’t know. It seems as though alcohol has become a societal ill that we just can’t shake ourselves free of, but banning it outright would likely mean a level of authoritarianism that would leave society unrecognizable. It seems like a no-win situation.
I’d *like *to live in a society without drunken violence, but it seems as though we’d have to give up too much to achieve that.
Well, and more bacteria-laden. Not only is the cleanliness of our water not out of question 
- without Everclear or some sort of distilled spirits, I wouldn’t be able to easily sterilize the estate pipes I buy and smoke out of without poisoning myself. Alcohol is a chemical that really is used for other purposes than getting hammered.
On preview: Your mistake seems to be that you think alcohol is a particular evil separate from the other chemicals that will make us lose our senses. Trust me, even if you could eliminate all the alcohol from the planet tomorrow morning, people would be huffing paint thinner by sundown, and dying en masse by midnight.
There are huge costs to society because of high speed car accidents too, lets put speed governors on all vehicles that limit them to 55mph.
I see, so what you’re saying is that banning alcohol would make no difference because people will find other ways to kill themselves and each other, is that right?
Is this true though? If we banned alcohol tomorrow, would drug-related deaths increase sharply to make up the shortfall? Is the cost to society arising from intoxicants always static, regardless of the type of intoxicant?
A hell of a lot of people are killed by cars. Ban them!
And falling in swimming pools. Ban them!
And guns.
It would be manna from heaven for the criminal fraternity.
Remember what happened last time?
You’re missing a step. He’s saying that if people couldn’t drink alcohol, at least some of them would abuse other drugs for the exact same reasons they currently abuse alcohol.
If we’re just indulging in wishful thinking, it seems to me that wishing for a pony would be more productive than wishing for alcohol to disappear. At least your wish for a pony has a chance of coming true.
It’s a silly thought experiment, because even if we agreed that the world would be a better place if people didn’t drink alcohol, what does that get us? It doesn’t get us anything. The problems caused by alcohol are well known. The solutions to those problems are not. So if you’ve got some ideas about how to mitigate the harm caused by alcohol, then by all means let’s hear them. But wishing alcohol didn’t exist is not a plan, it’s the exact opposite of a plan.
You can’t effectively ban alcohol because to produce alcohol all you need is some source of sugar and a little bit of time. It is a natural process. How can you prevent people from setting a container of grape juice on the counter-top for a couple of days? Because that’s all it takes to turn grape juice into wine.
Plus all the illegal activity surrounding bootlegging and piracy, and the gang violence related. And the disrespect for the law in general because the majority would be violating this law.
Have you read any history of Prohibition? The cure is worse than the disease.
There is one big practical difference between alcohol and other drugs: Most drugs, you need to cultivate one particular plant, or mix together very specific and hard-to-get precursor chemicals. If you don’t have poppies, you can’t make opiates, and if you don’t have coca, you can’t make cocaine. But alcohol can be easily made in any kitchen starting with almost any foodstuff. You can’t crack down on alcohol production without cracking down on food.
I think that no, society would not be better off; the losses would ultimately outnumber the gains.
The big gain, of course, is that you get a complete elimination of alcohol-induced deaths, health problems, and crimes. That’s a pretty significant step forward right there, but what does society lose in the process?
(1) An important safety valve. Many people believe that they lead hard lives, and many of these people drink to make it easier to deal with. Take that away, and you now have seas of sober angry people looking to blame someone for their lot in life. It seems reasonable that this would lead to more crime, political upheaval, and whatnot. Face it - most drunk people become less dangerous, not more.
(2) Self-medication. Quite a few people have underlying mental/stress issues, and for many of them alcohol is a cheap, quick, effective way of dealing with them. Take away the booze, and what happens? Fewer DUIs, but more suicides…
(3) A major part of the economy. If you destroy alcohol in one fell swoop, you also obliterate the not-insignificant sector of the economy dedicated to producing and selling it. Breweries, distilleries, liquor stores, bars… All those businesses are completely done for (think of the tax revenues lost), and all their workers are now completely unemployed. And that is before you even begin to calculate the damage done to shipping companies, bottle and label manufacturers, restaurants, casinos, etc.
This is something I’ve wondered about. And taking it as a strictly hypothetical question (i.e. imagine waving a magic wand and making all alcohol, and/or its effect on human beings, disappear)…
I don’t know. For me personally, alcohol has done more good than harm, though it hasn’t done all that much of either. A world without alcohol would, I suppose, be comparable to a world without pizza.
But then, I’ve never experienced the ways alcohol can really mess up one’s life. I’ve never had to live with an alcoholic, for example, or had a loved one killed by a drunk driver. I’d be willing to live in a world without alcohol if it would save others from that kind of misery.
If you focus on the base goal (stopping the drinking of alcohol) and not on literally eliminating it, then it’s actually theoretically possible I think with the right technology. Forcibly genetically alter everyone so alcohol makes them extremely sick or causes them great pain would do it. However, the ethical problems with forcibly genetically engineering the human race are obvious. Plus, you’d need either a government tyrannical enough to do so (which is near certain to be tyrannical in many other ways), or something like the release of a retrovirus that can implant the needed genes. Which even if it can be done would likely be followed by the release of other, worse such viruses by imitators (and the success of the first implies there’s no defense against such things, another bad scenario).
The point is, the methods needed to actually pull off any such prohibition are in my opinion in themselves too much of a cost to justify it. And you can’t usefully estimate the costs and benefits of such a change without specifying how you are going to do it.
This is the wrong question. You are comparing the costs to society as a whole to the benefits one person gets from one beer. How about aggregating the benefits and pleasure alcohol bestows on drinkers society-wide when comparing the costs and benefits?
But here’s the thing: The utility I get from drinking is different from the utility you get, which is different from drinkers world-wide. It’s subjective. So which person’s utility is the correct one to use when weighing the pros and cons of drinking? That’s where freedom comes in. It just isn’t fair for me to make that decision for you, so I’ll decide whether alcohol is worth it for me, and you can decide whether it’s worth it for you. The only time society should get a say is when the decision affects the health and property of people other than the decision maker, such as with the decision to drink and drive.
The first thing that comes to my mind (a little surprised it wasn’t already invoked),
Beyond that, I find part of the OP a little mystifying,
How could a country we wouldn’t want to live in possibly be better off?
Yes, if you could magically make alcohol disappear society would be better. The same can be said for many things. Everyone has their own list.
Marshmallow’s Law: Any discussions regarding societal safety on any topic will eventually include someone sarcastically pointing to cars and acting that it’d be silly to change personal vehicles as some sort of analogy to the topic, despite the fact that it’d be difficult to make our transportation system less efficient, more violent, or more psychologically harmful.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate (as someone who enjoys a glass of wine once in a while, but could live quite happily without it).
If alcohol hadn’t existed in the U.S. during Prohibition, my grandmother and her mother and sisters might have starved to death, and I might never have been born. My great-grandmother, a non-Engish-speaking first-generation immigrant, after her husband died suddenly in the 1918 flu pandemic, supported her six (!) small children by bootlegging. Other than that, she basically didn’t have a safety net, and she really wasn’t qualified to do much of anything else marketable. (The same was true of my mother’s paternal grandparents, minus the dead grandfather; apparently I’m descended from a long line of bootleggers.)
Plus, red wine has been shown to have health benefits.
Since I don’t believe there would BE a society without alcohol (from what I understand the invention of beer was instrumental in the formation of early civilization and culture), I’m not sure how one could realistically get the genie back in the bottle, to be honest. Attempts to do so have just about universally failed…hell, I’d say that a large percentage of Muslims and supposedly dry Christian sects take a nip now and then, and for some of them there are some fairly dire (in theory) punishments associated with drinking.
If one could wave a magical wand and get rid of all alcohol and erase it from the collective memory, then my guess is that people would simply switch to some other recreational chemical instead…which means that many or most of the ills you are looking at here would still be with us, realistically.
Since you can’t possibly have such a magic wand or erase the memory from the collective memories of all people, I’d say that, realistically, it’s with us to stay, so the best thing is to try and mitigate the ills. IMHO we have done a pretty good job of this, though there is always room for improvement.
No, because you’d never come even close to attaining perfection. Plus, if people didn’t have alcohol they would find something else to use instead. My WAG is that it would cause so much disruption and be such an epic failure (just like it was when they tried this before), that it would cause more harm than it supposedly would help.
The benefits outweigh the harm, IMHO, since you have to look at the question from a realistic perspective. By a vast majority people in this country (and really throughout the world) use intoxicants, and by far the largest intoxicant is alcohol. There would be no widespread support for getting rid of the stuff…quite the opposite…so, in light of this reality, it’s going to do vastly more harm to TRY (and fail) to get rid of the stuff than to simply continue to try and mitigate the worst of the effects and then basically realize that, in the end, shit happens.
(Full disclosure: While I wouldn’t say I was an alcoholic, I certainly used to drink heavily on occasion. For me, personally, cutting way back on my intake of alcohol has been a benefit to my life and my health.)
-XT
What about some Muslim countries where alcohol is banned? How does that work out for them?
I’m actually sympathetic to the OP’s position, I just don’t think its feasible
Bibliovore, you have to understand that SDMB posters are mostly incapable of accepting something as true for the purpose of the debate. As soon as you ask for posters to take a premise as given, you guarantee an entire thread of people debating that premise. In fact, you’d probably have better luck with a thread along the lines of: “Assume getting rid of alcohol altogether is good, how do we do it?” Then you’d get a full debate on whether doing so is good.
To answer the OP, I think the answer is no. Alcohol is to rape and dangerous activities as tasers are to stupid people getting abused by police: there’s a relationship, but it ain’t exactly 1:1. So you don’t really capture all the benefits you see, and it would impose a pretty big cost on the rest of us.