Ask HN: License to Drink?

Most states will take away a person’s driver’s license for drunk driving and several other drinking offenses (public drunkenness, underage drinking, etc). But in those cases, the person really has a drinking problem, not a driving problem. So wouldn’t it be prudent to penalize a person by suspending their right to drink and buy alcohol instead?

Taking away someone’s license could threaten their ability to get to work or school and provide for their families. That in turn could lead to depression and further drinking.

If States instead issued a license to drink, it would be possible to revoke that and allow them to maintain their mobility.

You could even go a step further and have separate permissions for gambling, lottery ticket purchases, marijuana, etc. A step further from that would be to use the data from card scans to predict patterns of addiction and direct people to treatment.

Nonresidents would be tricky, since you don’t want to prevent them from buying alcohol just because they don’t have a card. Any ideas on how to deal with that? What other potential problems with this idea are there?