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Comment by lb1lf | Hacker News Reader

From my experience, (Norwegian, but have spent a year or so in Germany over a couple of dozen visits), the Germans have found a quite good balance:

Drinking in public is OK.

Being drunk and a nuisance in public is not OK.

I wish we could adopt the same attitude back home - here in Norway you are likely to be fined for drinking in public (though the extent to which drinking is tolerated vary considerably from place to place), whereas you can be in a drunken stupor and mostly be left alone as long as you're not drawing a lot of attention to yourself.

Then again, our drinking habits are mostly a DDoS attack on law enforcement - everybody going out Friday and Saturday night at around midnight, bars close at 2:30-ish at which point thousands of drunk-as-can-be people crash onto the streets.

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> Drinking in public is OK.

> Being drunk and a nuisance in public is not OK.

In my experience, this is basically the way it already is in many places in the US. As long as you put even a modicum of effort into complying with the letter of the law in front of cops (ie using a brown paper bag, putting alcohol into a non-obvious container, etc) and you're in compliance with the spirit of the law (ie not being a loud and disruptive drunk asshole in public), the cops will generally leave you alone and you can responsibly consume freely in public venues.

Drinking from a brown bag is not "responsibly consuming freely", it is "covertly consuming".

I would argue that it is not really covert as brown bagging for public consumption is a well known social convention. Most Americans (especially those enforcing the law) know or assume that when you are obscuring a bottle with a bag and consuming from that bottle in public, you are consuming alcohol. It is not much more covert than not placing the drink in a brown paper bag.

But you can't _not_ use the bag, that's the point. You know they know it's alcohol, they know you know, etc., yes. But you still have to pretend. I find it a substantial difference to be honest.

At a summer "Shakespeare in the Park" type of event up here in Puritan Massachusetts, it seems totally appropriate to bring some wine along if you like and judging from the throngs of people around me, many people agree. It's not "freely" in the sense of "you can't get hassled for it", but it is "freely" in the sense of "you likely won't get hassled for it" which is probably what GP meant.

This is the American mentality - it's accepted that you will break the law, because it isn't being law abiding thats important, it's not getting caught. It's quite a different attitude to many places in Europe, where obeying the law is the default.

The problem with this approach is that you're still in violation of the letter of the law which means it's up to the cops to decide if they will pursue or not which means now they can pursue you for your skin color, accent, etc and use the letter of the law as an excuse.

> Being drunk and a nuisance in public is not OK.

IME the result is the same. When we're young and stupid we drink in public because we have to and tend to over do it, then we learn that drinking in public is illegal and the lesson tends to stick even when we're older and not out to get blind drunk.

Typical of Northern Europe and much of the US, unfortunately. Blame moral crusaders and prohibitionists. I like the German approach. I can sit on the street in Germany, play music for tips, and drink a beer without being hassled by anyone. And I do.

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