Eg Americans today smoke a lot less tobacco and drink less coffee too. Education works!
Government propaganda, a good deal of it channelled through TV and Hollywood have so thuroughly established unrepentant drug users as villians that many people want it prosecuted on its face for its immorality.
Lawmakers find it difficult to let up on drug crimes because they are quickly painted as weak and enablers of other crimes. It's the same tirh the death penalty. The problems with it are plain for all to see. But lawmakers feel the need to signal the virtue of "justice" or "strength" and enough voters still respond to that signal. Even in the supposedly lefty stare of Washington where I reside, progress on criminal justice issues has been glacially slow.
The “solution” of locking someone up and then walking away is easier than it is to help someone, work through relapses and end up with a healthy individual after X years. The latter is obviously better, and cheaper, but it costs patience and empathy. Things that are in short supply these days.
Really? Curious about this, because everyone around me (including me) drinks a metric crap ton of caffeine, either in tea, coffee, or energy drinks.
A nice upside to remoting.
Still quite a lot of coffee, but it tastes much better.
Coffee consumption has dropped more than 50 percent in 70 years https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/u-s-coffee-consumption-had...
Why??
Also, in recent years total coffee consumption started to increase again, driven by hip coffee shops.
It's hard to win against billions in marketing.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consum...
https://qz.com/quartzy/1287862/american-coffee-consumption-i...
Are there any scientific facts which would back this?
To me it feels like there have been several other causes to that which were much more relevant. Not allowing people to smoke inside, vaping and smoking getting "out of fashion" were much more successful.
It's just not cool anymore and those who still want to smoke are being confined to disgusting places to do it. Soo...it kinda works against your argument because it was a bad example. The only thing we may take away from it would be that if we'd have made smoking tobacco illegal everywhere, it would have remained cool to do so secretly...maybe.
The decline started decades before vaping and bans on smoking inside. It started when the message changed. In the US "peak smoking" occurred in the 1960s and consumptions has been decreasing ever since [1]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK294310/figure/ch2.f1/
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2019/06/19/price-of-a-p...
Other things (bans on ads, bans on smoking in venues, health information) do help, but they're a smaller part of the picture.
National culture plays a huge role in what vices people take on.
Consumption per capita up here in the wonderful Nordics is quite high, with Finland typically leading at 12 kg/person. The corresponding number for the US is around 4.2 kg (9.3 lbs). The Telegraph has a fun list [2] showing the top 20 consumers.
[1] https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/coffee/trade-statistic... [2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/maps-and-graphics/countri...
The food is soooo sweet, sugar, sugar and sugar everywhere.
Other places like Salzburg are different in so many ways. Viena has always been a political, bureaucracy center.
Cafeterias in Viena are political institutions, you can imagine Freud or Lenin or Stalin, Stefan Sweig, Carl Jung, Hitler, Marx, Goethe, just there, because they went there.
This is history now. But I agree that it was very bad, it was part of Austria's "coffee house culture" to have the stale smoke odour everywhere (furniture, curtains etc.). It was much worse in the 80's and earlier though.
The sugar addiction is mainly due to the influence of bohemian cuisine and popular sweet snacks like "Manner Schnitten".
Practically everyone around me thinks they need caffeine to get through the day. I'm one of the only people I know who are caffeine-free.
Long ago, I thought caffeine gave me headaches, and I refused to drink it. Then I started having trouble staying away during the day and nothing the doctors did mattered. So I turned to caffeine reluctantly, and it helped for a while. Eventually I was drinking so much caffeine each day that I was getting sick from it.
So I cut back, and then I was falling asleep during the day again. (Or at least feeling exhausted and that I needed to sleep and kind of took a waking nap.)
So I cut off the caffeine again and, no big surprise, it's the same as when I was drinking caffeine. Except that I don't get any caffeine-withdrawal headaches when I can't get enough or forget to drink enough.
I know from the past that telling people they don't need caffeine doesn't work, though. They just won't listen. They have to figure it out themselves.
So yeah... If there's an anti-caffeine education here, it's very subtle.
Is this a good thing?