Do something illegal that involves alcohol, lose your drinking license for x years to forever. Get caught selling/serving alcohol to someone without a card, that's a 'crime' now.
Additionally, since you are not removing their driver's license as punishment, they can still do things like go to work, take care of kids/family and so on. they just can't drink legally. Obviously lots of issues and ideas, but that is the basic idea.
How so? Keeping a card is not much of a nuisance...
> It's very easy to make alcohol at home.
Sure and it's easy to find someone else that can get you some, we all know people underage that had no trouble getting alcohol. It's harder though to get though, and let say it's 10% harder, then you just may have saved 10% of the case, much better than doing nothing.
The think should be accessible, but its supply reduced and price a little high so that people begin to measure the pay off between buying and the pleasure they get from it.
These things happen with Sugar too. The amount of lives ruined by easy access to a addictive thing like sugar is just unbelievable.
The American price of sugar is generally around triple the price on the world market. How high do you think the delta needs to be before smuggling gets serious?
Compare cigarettes, where smuggling -- just from state to state -- is already highly profitable.
You can walk into a Walmart and Costco and end up buying lots of these things for very cheap.
The tricky part is the companies seem to be making it up on scale. I mean like you can get some one to buy a really big box of Cereal by just having them compare the price of buying a several smaller boxes.
Buy this small packet of lays for $2 Vs buy this large bag of lays worth 10 $2 packets for $6.5. Congrats, you just made the person buying the $2 lays packet stupid.
In my view a good estimate is to look at restaurants, as they are pretty good at figuring out the pain point of how expensive something can be and people will still buy it. If it cost more than that then the price is too high.
But there's still a limit to just how heavily you can tax cigarettes, because the higher the taxes are, the more profit smugglers can receive. They'll go out there to bring the price down even if smokers were willing to pay the higher prices, as long as their smuggling costs are covered.