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Comment by bnralt | Hacker News Reader

What's interesting is that alcohol will probably kill far more people this decade than Covid or opioids, yet very little attention gets paid to this. It's an enormous negative influence on our society, yet there's a lot of social pressure pushing for alcohol use, and we allow advertisements that encourage it. I wonder if in the future we'll look back on this the way we now look back at how ubiquitous smoking was a few decades ago.

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I doubt it. We've been using alcohol for thousands of years. COVID-19 for example has 0 societal benefits. And although opioids do, they were abused and that's what people are upset about.

People have been smoking (in various ways) for thousands of years, yet there has been a substantial shift over the past few decades as to how prevalent it should be in our society. Smoking inside restaurants was common just a few decades ago, and now people will often look at you askew if you smoke outside.

I think this view is fairly American centric. Go to any bar in Tokyo and you will be given an ashtray to smoke cigarettes with your drink. In China they have museums dedicated to tobacco cultivation and use. And even here in America, we mostly just switched to vaping tobacco and smoking marijuana.

Yea, not to mention cigarettes versus tobacco being a bit different.

> I think this view is fairly American centric. Go to any bar in Tokyo and you will be given an ashtray to smoke cigarettes with your drink.

From March this year: "Japan’s ban on smoking inside restaurants and bars takes effect this week"[1]

Seemingly entrenched cultural trends can and do change.

[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/japan-s-ban-on-smoking-inside-r...

Alcohol deaths may have a high mean but lower variance, covid deaths have an unknown mean and potentially a much higher variance. So we have to prevent it from blowing up before seeing proof it could.

The powers that be will ban alcohol and encourage replacing it with weed. Bezos & co. will swill their wine much more contentedly when the population's nice and doped up, rather than drunk and wild.

this sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in

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