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Comment by MrZongle2 | Hacker News Reader

This part struck me as a little ominous: '"The extent to which we modify the availability of alcohol, the labelling of alcohol, the promotion of alcohol and the price of alcohol - those things should be on the agenda."

He said there was a similar argument to be had with sugar fuelling obesity, which in turn affected cancer risk.'

I'm all for educating the public, but why does it seem that education is never enough for some, and instead the next step needs to be behavior modification through scarcity?

Haven't we seen this fail in the U.S. with the ridiculous restrictions on some over-the-counter medications, the War on Drugs, and Prohibition?

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As someone that grew up in Southern Europe I am at times surprised and shocked by the relation Americans and Canadians have with alcohol.

In Portugal, Spain and Italy alcohol is food. We drink at home, with the family, a great amount of wine and a little beer. Wine and beer are openly sold in supermarkets, close to other food. However, the biggest alcoholism problem we have are American, British and Australian tourists binge drinking in our beaches.

OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.

> OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.

This isn't true at all. You're seeing the extreme cases and generalizing it to everybody. We may have a higher incidence of alcoholism and alcohol abuse (I don't know the numbers), but the vast majority of Americans use alcohol occasionally and responsibly.

Modification of promotion and pricing seem to make sense to me.

Education is important but for many people in the developed world their exposure to liquor ads on TV is a lot more prevalent than their exposure to education. You're fighting a losing battle if you're competing directly with the messages of liquor companies (same thing in tobacco industry).

As for pricing, in many countries including the US with their new insurance system the cost of healthcare is being shared across large groups. In Canada we tax liquor at a rate of about 130% and feed much of that revenue directly into our healthcare system. This way the more you drink the more you contribute to your future expense to the healthcare system.

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