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It looks like you have good dopamine hygiene. You can probably also trust yourself moderate other dangerous things like World of Warcraft, Twitter, or cocaine--if for some reason you wanted to. Keep it up.

For me the real question is: can people who have unhealthy dopamine habits heavily etched into their neural pathways be taught to change that about themselves, or is replacing unhealthy addictions with healthier ones (i.e. exercise) the best that they can do?

I wish policy would focus less on specific vices and more on helping people along such a path (if it exists). Such a license would be a good way to explore that possibility.

Ideally it would be part of something broader though. You can get a commercial endorsement on your regular driver's license, why not a "drinks-responsibly" endorsement too? While we're at it we can have "can use the 3d printers at the library without supervision" endorsement and a "licensed realtor" endorsement. You can imagine all kinds of badges people might want to collect.

I think the trick is to savor the experience and to seek novelty. When I drink coffee, it has an almost uncomfortable effect, but it really wakes me up and the feeling is sort of fun. However if I drink it the next day, the effect will be greatly reduced. If I drink it for a week, I'll start to become dependent and feel less awake than when I started without it.

Coffee isn't really the enemy here, it's your own biology.

That said, I feel like you need enough dopamine to make it though the week and sometimes people get trapped by life circumstances. I'm luckily enough to have a beautiful wife, if I had to sleep alone in a cold bed and go out into the world, I might be the kind of guy who needs to cup of coffee in the morning to remain sane.

So in short I think you need to start with a life that is fulfilling enough that you can endure the slings and arrows of the world on a day to day basis. If you don't have that, it's going to be very difficult to not fall into the embrace of temptations that you'd rather avoid.

I'm reminded of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park experiments, which (to me) imply that addictive behavior is an indicator of problems elsewhere, rather than a problem to be solved directly. And by all means, we should work at addressing root causes. But I think there's also room for improvement re: how we respond to bad situations.

> you need enough dopamine to make it though the week

I think this is part of the story, but not all dopamine is created equal. Or rather, it's all created equal, but it ends up motivating different things. I don't have any studies to back this up, but I like to think in terms of fast-vs-slow dopamine. Fast dopamine motivates you to do something arbitrary in search of more dopamine, slow dopamine motivates you to do something that you also have other reasons for wanting to do.

I'm in the middle of fixing a fence that blew down in a recent storm. There will be some slow dopamine involved at gazing upon the finished product. I think it can count towards my enough-to-make-it-through-the-week allotment. But that's easy for me to say--I don't generally have problems with addictive behavior. I'm just interested because I'd like to find a way to share that quality with my friends who do.

This presumes that vices have no effects on anyone but the person partaking. Think about the secondary effects of smoking on those around you, or the societal effects of the opioid crisis, or even the effects on rescue workers who need to scoop up what remains of a person riding a motorcycle without safety gear.

> rescue workers who need to scoop up what remains of a person riding a motorcycle without safety gear

If it is an obvious death, it is a crime scene until proven otherwise. The police and coroner take care of things in this case. The ambulance is usually not involved after the declaration of death.

https://www.quora.com/Do-EMTs-and-paramedics-have-to-pick-up...

This could also be said for alcohol though. Alcohol is associated with higher levels of motoring accidents, assaults, and chronic disease.

The externalities of alcohol consumption can be largely mitigated by drinking in moderation.

The primary externality of smoking, secondhand smoke, can be mitigate by having people smoke outdoors, which most countries already require in public spaces.

The main secondary externality of smoking, increased strain on the healthcare system, is more complex. Smoking is more addictive than alcohol, so moderate consumption is less possible. Therefore, smokers are more likely to experience an illness directly related to their consumption than alcohol consumers.

In America, I'd suggest this externality could be addressed by removing the cap on the smoking health insurance surcharge (it's currently 50%). In countries with socialised medicine, this could be better addressed by adjusting cigarette taxes to fully reflect the average lifetime cost of treating smoking related illnesses.

There's no "secondhand" alcohol drinking like there is secondhand smoking - while the effects afterwards (if someone chooses to be irresponsible after becoming inebriated) can be severe, they are mitigated by choosing safer practices such as having a ride, drinking at home, and knowing to limit oneself if they exhibit behavior that is negative toward others. With smoking, this isn't a possibility.

> There's no "secondhand" alcohol drinking like there is secondhand smoking

Counterexample: drinking while pregnant.

I would go as far as to say alcoholic parents in general.

As I previously mentioned, secondhand smoke can be easily mitigated by smoking outside and away from other people.

I believe Japan has something similar to what you describe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taspo

If you want to buy cigarettes from vending machines, you have to get this card first.

Just start requiring it in regular convenience stores (or stop selling tobacco there altogether), and you're done.

I would love to acquire power and label a bunch of things I dislike as “vices” so I can control opposition.

Posting too much on social media is a vice. It releases dopamine according to my experts and can be harmful to others. It shouldn’t be done often. So now your “vice license” needs to have this “badge”.

I don’t want any part of the nanny state you describe.

> Posting too much on social media is a vice

Sounds like you'd love https://minus.social/ where you are limited to 100 posts, period.

The state of Maharashtra in India has a personal drinking license (min age 21 for Beer/Wine and 25 for the rest) that’s needed for drinking privately. I have never heard of it being enforced - I think it is a colonial-era leftover but I might be wrong.

A friend of mine spent some effort acquiring one , and shows it off very enthusiastically :)

https://www.wikihow.com/Obtain-an-Alcohol-Permit-in-Maharash...

You know what, that's the first good plan I've seen for handling the issue.

Would love to give myself a vice ban occasionally.

In a perfect world I'd be able to set a weekly calorie limit. Charge me double the cost and send the overage to the charity of my choice for any food over the limit.

A government body limiting who can buy food isn't really a good idea, so it only works in utopia. It could work for non-essentials though.

What if you could opt for a custodian, and the designation can't change very often (like open enrollment)?

Give a trusted friend the right to set your calorie limit, and if it doesn't work out, try a different friend next week--but you can only change it between 10AM and 2PM on Mondays.

Yeah I could see maybe a credit card sort of offering with these rules. I don't think credit cards get that granular level of data however. Then I would only have to commit to only carrying around that card.

Yeah, let's not hand that sort of data to the credit card companies. It might be a good use case for homomorphic encryption--where the transaction processor computes a go/no-go result without knowing why (and then you scan a QR code and decrypt on your device).

I was thinking of having it decoupled from payments, sort of a more customizable replacement for the ID-checks that we currently do when buying alcohol. I think you could do zero-knowledge trickery to avoid the privacy problems.

But then again, an API for a third party to cut off your access to resources might be too juicy of an abuse-enabler to be worth building.

I order from a service that provides me nutritionist-built meals every day; in the morning, I get exactly 2000kcal spread out across 3 meals and 1 snack. I also drink protein yogurt reaching around 2350kcal so that's my daily intake (and I guess calorie limit) with balanced macro and micronutrients.

What this means is that I am aware that anything above these meals is too much for me. Do I still do it? Yes, but I have an unhealthy relationship with food.

Speaking in terms of tech addiction, there are tools and strategies out there to manage. Anti-engagement tools you might call them. The "Digital Wellbeing" app on Android can be used to limit certain apps, such as to one hour per day. The unhook.app extension neuters YouTube's engagement by disabling things like suggested videos. I have also set a Windows Task Scheduler task to run shutdown /s /hybrid /t 60 in the evening. Having a reminder of goals to curb irresponsible behavior can often be enough to curb them.

The country of Oman has something like this. If you are not Muslim, you can apply for a permit which will allow you to purchase alcohol in restaurants and state-owned liquor shops.

UAE as well.

I’m not sure I want to live in a country that models its policies after religious fundamentalist regimes. I choose Liberty.

I don't think such an idea would have any practical benefit. A vanishingly small percentage of people would voluntarily limit access and even fewer would end up in courts. Motivated addicts would simply find workarounds to the system while non-addicts and suppliers would be burdened with additional regulation.