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Comment by fartcannon | Hacker News Reader

That's all really neat, but same went for tobacco. Highly elaborate and detailed methods for ingesting poison.

I think alcohol is next, before coffee. But we shall see!

>I think alcohol is next,

I doubt it. There's a reason why it was considered an 'essential item' in a lot of places during the pandemic, why the soviets gave out vodka rations etc.

Alcohol's a useful tool for keeping a population compliant and sedated, people love it, it's super easy to make, hence why in many places the production and distribution of it tends to be highly regulated, otherwise just about anyone could do it, it's big business and in a lot of places, it brings massive tax revenues through sales so...I doubt it's going anywhere any time soon.

I mean what are they gonna do, ban yeast and sugar? Ban leaving fruit sitting too long? You can't really ever stop the production of alcohol. It just kind of happens naturally. It's not really possible to just ban the process of fermentation...

I think if people had to drink prison hooch or wait weeks to brew their own substandard beer, as opposed to drinking bottled craft beer or tasty wines there would be less alcohol consumption.

The history of the US prohibition says otherwise. Or rather, while overall consumption of alcohol probably did drop, the effect on society of pushing it underground was not positive.

From memory, alcohol consumption actually _increased_ during prohibition.

I suspect while that might be true initially people would soon get really quite good at it.

The Soviets gave out vodka rations because it was in their interest to keep their population addicted to alcohol. Like the nobles did before them, and like they did under Stalin. There’s actually a fascinating history about vodka and it’s use by the ruling parties in Russia over the last few centuries.

> Alcohol's a useful tool for keeping a population compliant and sedated

The same could be said for most forms of recreation.

I think the cat's already out of the bag with alcohol. At this point the issue is probably more that people just like cats.

We already know that alcohol is very harmful and that the "1 glass of red wine is good for you" was bull. Is there really anything but willfull ignorance keeping the myth alive at this point?

Humanity really lucked out on coffee, caffeine is pretty harmless all around. At max 3-4 cups a coffee a day is perfectly okay and not at all comparable to tobacco.

The coffee industry isn’t spraying chemicals and Bronchodilators on their products. At least to my knowledge.

Where's the best place to read more about this misuse of chemicals?

I’m quite sure they’re spraying a lot of chemicals on their products.

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