Hacker News Reader

It would be impossible to have any degree of control over the black market though. Unlike other drugs where you need difficult-to-obtain seeds or extremely convoluted chemical synthesis processes, alcohol can be made by accident with stuff you normally buy at the grocery store.

Are they going to make grape juice illegal, too?

Plus bread yeast and any sort of food that has easily accessible carbs: fruits, grains, refined sugar, etc.

Prohibition tried to ban booze, and it failed for those reasons.

> if alcohol was "invented" today there's no way it would be legal

I see it as a good reason to legalize things invented recently rather than making alcohol illegal. The prohibition and the war on drugs should have taught people something.

Part of the problem is that alcohol is very easy to manufacture. It's hard to enforce a law on manufacturing something if anyone with a very small amount of knowledge can easily make it in their bedroom closet out of legal materials.

Alcohol was grandfathered in, as Elon Musk said in that interview where he hit the blunt.