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Interesting to hear. I've heard the opposite in that in dry counties in the US the incidence of alcohol related driving accidents is 3x that of wet counties. A quick look at the Wikipedia[0] article corroborates this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_county#Traveling_to_purcha...

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The causality could go

Dry County -> Lots of Drink Driving (Unhealthy relationship with alcohol)

Or it could be

Lots of Drink Driving (Unhealthy relationship with alcohol) -> Dry County

You’d need to do historical research to see if the bad relationship preceded the alcohol ban. A first pass would be historical murder rates seeing as drunkenness leads to violence, which leads to deaths.

Or it could go:

Dry county -> social drinkers must drive to the bar in the next county over, or even several counties over -> drunk drivers from the dry county spend more time and distance on roads than they would otherwise -> higher instance of drunk driving related accidents in the dry county.

A lack of healthy drinking culture and social norms leads to extreme, dangerous behavior. The same can be said for other ills of our society.

I think it's more: if you have to drive farther to drink or buy alcohol and people drunk drive at the same background rate, you simply get more drunk miles driven and proportionately higher incident rates.

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