Any thoughts on how to avoid the folly of restriction on alcohol? There seems to be multi-pronged issues, one being that the chemical messes up our body and is largely incompatible, and even if we altered the chemical someway and left the fun effects, we still have the issue of people being taken advantage of while experiencing the effects. But the trade in alcohol is so great that any state sponsored curbs on consumption results in a worse illicit reality.
Public health/education campaigns, however, can be wildly effective with enough funding. Smoking cessation in particular has been massively successful even with no change to legality and billions of dollars of tobacco industry money doing everything they can to reverse it. The public health campaign in the US managed to turn cigarettes from chic to trashy and have made prohibition unnecessary. I could imagine the same happening with alcohol (and other problematic substances) on a long enough timeline.
Admittedly, most anti-obesity campaigns also seem to be neutered by lobbying. "Stop drinking soda" becomes politicized and turned into "move" by lobbyists. Taking a 30 minute walk is great advice for overall health, but will do absolutely 0 to address obesity.
I guess overall, there's no guarantee of success here, but I tend to view the shift in public sentiment about tobacco as a direct result of public health efforts. Which leads me to believe it's at least possible for other issues (obesity, alcohol). But certainly it is difficult and with unknown risk of failure.
The campaigns against obesity don't make people thin, because half the time they don't even promote stuff that makes people thin. Half the time they promote diets that makes situation worse in the long term.
Campaigns against smoking did worked in the past. Drug use is down. Teenage v pregnancies are down. All stuff that involved campaigns.
they are all heavily controlled, and benzodiazepines are considered some of the most damaging and addictive substances of abuse.
i don't recommend trying it