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Comment by ck425 | Hacker News Reader

Is it not a bit soon to be drawing conclusions? Also there are so many other factors involved. I'm a scotsman and I'm personally not a fan of this law, nor the 10am-10pm licensing laws. They're blunt instruments that fail to tackle the root causes. I'm not saying they don't work or that they're not relatively easy to implement but I wouldn't be surprised if we soon see an increase in deaths from other drugs.

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How should they tackle the "root cause?" It is fine to criticize the existing solutions, but this isn't offering a counter proposal that could be used when they're scrapped (and until this proposal exists and comes on-tap, they're better than nothing).

Well here in America we don't pass regulatory laws until there's a proven solution that has consensus from all parties.

How do you prove a solution without trying it?

My comment was to be taken as a joke and also not untrue. The current state of our Congress is that one Party controls the Senate and refuses to bring any legislation to the floor, and the other Party controls the House and refuses to hold anyone accountable for anything using the excuse that it won't make it through the Senate.

So because no one agrees on anything, nothing gets done.

I think it was sarcasm.

When did that start?

Uh... I'm guessing Neoconservatives in the 60s? There have been many strategies over the years to make the Federal Government ineffective. In the 80s they did the whole Starve the Beast thing. More recently it's locking up budget talks and shutting down the government.

These days Moscow Mitch just sits on his hands and does nothing.

* I'm not blaming Republicans, Nancy Pelosi and her buddies have been doing similar shenanigans in the House. Currently she refuses to address any serious legislation in the House using the fact that it will never make it through the Senate as an excuse.

Honestly the behavior of both leaders has the same net effect and makes you wonder if they're both working towards the same goal.

The root causes vary, but include mental health issues and poverty in general. We should instead focus on those issues more.

The main alcohol related root cause is the culture of binge drinking. The way to tackle that is to create and encourage a culture of moderate drinking. Change licensing laws to make it easy for families to go to pubs for example.

And also have more sources of entertainment for early-20s adults than bars. I've lived in many smaller towns in the USA where the only entertainment after 8pm was a bar.

> binge drinking. The way to tackle that is to create and encourage a culture of moderate drinking

In scotland?? Drinking culture is tied in to masculinity at least in the UK midlands ('beer or queer' - that kind of shit though thankfully fadin) and I'll bet it's the same in scotland. And you've got an entire drug industry, the drinks industry, working hard to get people to abuse, NOT use, to ABUSE to excess, their product.

It's a deep problem with very difficult solutions. Externalised costs of capitalism, shitty lives, poverty, people who can't see a way out and if offered won't take it...

From what I've seen the beer is manly culture is going away. There's also a lot more awareness of drinking levels and sobriety. It's far easier and more socially acceptable to drink moderately now. These changes are mostly driven by healthy living concerns.

Educating people about lifestyle is proving effective.

Jordan Peterson had a really good point when asked about alcohol and drugs, and he said the question should be why aren't we all doing them? His proposed solution to that was that people had to have some specific thing in their lives, that was powerful enough that it was more important to them than alcohol.

It is like societies response to suicide prevention: put up a fence, don't make the people who want to jump not want to jump.

I actually support anything that makes alcohol harder to get, but I agree it's too soon to draw a conclusion.

I would be interested in seeing if there's been a decline in domestic violence and other forms of crime that have a strong historical relation with alcohol consumption.

My bet is that there's no such evidence.

I'm also curious to see how much variation in deaths there are year over year. Maybe 20% changes aren't uncommon, in which case this study is just picking up noise and no signal.

I'm also curious why they just don't implement a tax instead of minimum pricing, that way they could take that revenue and dedicate it to alcohol-related problems, at least somewhat offsetting the alcohol's cost to society.

I think they chose this method because Scotland isn't able to change the alcohol duty; that's set by the UK to be equal everywhere.

But it also has benefits that raising alcohol duty doesn't: supermarkets etc can't absorb it by selling for a lower price or below-cost, pubs become more competitive with supermarkets, and the highest amount of alcohol for lowest price value pack disappears in theory.

I'd also be interested to see what the correlation is on family violence for different kinds of alcohol -- beer versus liquor versus wine for example.

> 10am-10pm licensing laws

I didn't know this was a thing until going to Edinburgh for the first time a couple of years ago. The queue and item makeup at 9.45 made me see the flaw in this plan quite quickly.

Ugh. Now it's like England. I didn't know that either but I suppose because I'm old I've not tried to drink after 10pm recently.

England gave up on the mandatory hard cut-off at 11pm a decade or so ago exactly because it seemed counterproductive.

Agreed, correlation is not equal to causation. I think alcohol, drugs, mental illness and suicide should all be looked at together (at the very least). I suspect they might be just moving the problem elsewhere. Of course their statistics on drugs abuse will be approximations because people won't want to share their illegal habits.

I was told a funny story from my Russian friend where they introduced some law to prevent people buying hard liquor after 10pm to curb alcoholism. He was quite amused to see people running into the shop at 9:55pm with a trolley and back out just before 10pm with a trolley full of hard liquor.

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