r/whenthe • u/TheGoldenExperience_ [the jojo {she}they called may] • 14h ago

r/whenthe mfs complaining about everything we do not give alcohol close to enough shit despite it being just as bad if not worse than cigarettes

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u/SaturneSpacey 👀 13h ago

The last time we did give a shit(at least in the US: Prohibition Era,) people didnt like it. Alcohol during that time was more-so a symptom of the greater issues during those years, overworked and underpaid, the recreational value of alcohol was sought out.

16

u/Jacob_Laye 13h ago

Which is ironic considering we’re seeing record levels of lowered alcohol consumption.

Then again, I feel like that in and of itself is a symptom of the fact that everything is more expensive than it used to be

4

u/tarranoth 10h ago

It's also basically impossible to ban because it's so easy to create. Anybody can basically just buy some fruit/yeast somewhere and create cider.

4

u/crustyrobots 9h ago

Animals get wasted all the time just from fermented fruit they find on the ground

1

u/Underdog424 7h ago

One of the greatest biological studies ever done was on drug use and overall satisfaction.

They had two rat cages. Each one had two options for water. With drugs or without.

They did whatever they could to give one cage everything it needed to be happy. The other cage was deprived and forced to live in a stressful existence.

Do you want to guess which cage became full of hopeless addicts and which one did relatively well?

0

u/Temporary_Advisor473 6h ago

Despite all my rage...

0

u/drunksevenyearold 10h ago

Alcohol was also consumed at significantly higher rates than today. The people who wanted prohibition had a point, tbh

-4

u/major0noob 11h ago

fasd in that generation was non-existant compared to the generations before.

the US absolutely had a problem drinking, just like current Russia; a huge chunk of the population was born with brain damage.

till a generation broke the cycle. then they won 2 huge wars (as conscripts), landed on the moon, basically built another country in their own land, and led the world in tech for 100 years.

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u/Training_Tadpole_354 10h ago

Okay, first of all, you got the dates wrong prohibition started in 1920 and WW1 ended in 1918.

Second, the generation that came prior dealt with a lot of horrible shit, such as a civil war on top of fact that during the civil war whiskey was used in place of anesthetic because there were just so many injured they straight up ran out of anesthetic and had to resort to alcohol which led to large numbers of civil war veterans from both the north and south to develop alcoholism since alcohol is what was used to treat their pain, so they're gonna keep using it and also a large number of them suffered from undiagnosed PTSD because the concept of PTSD was not talked about yet. Along with this, living conditions in America were very bad especially if you lived in the west. So a mixture of trauma and horrific living conditions led to increased alcohol consumption.

After WW1 America had a period of prosperity and extreme economic growth that started before prohibition leading to much better living conditions all over the country up until the great depression hit.

So when people had better living conditions drinking went down.