I feel pretty conflicted.

On the one hand, I'm tee-total and look back on my drinking with regret. That is weird because I was never a problem drinker. I got involved with a Buddhist sect, stopped drinking for religious reasons and then noticed that drinking alcohol was stupid and always had been.

On the other hand, prohibition was tried and failed. It failed in practice. I think that prohibiting private vices also fails in theory. We might say that the seller of alcohol is the criminal and the buyer of alcohol is the victim, but we must remember the difference between vice and crime. The victim of a crime goes to the police to complain. And if the policeman takes a bribe from the perpetrator to ignore the crime, the victim complains harder. The "victim" of a vice colludes with the perpetrator to hide the "crime" from the police and if a vigorous and nosy policeman accepts a bribe to ignore the infraction, the victim is annoyed at the cost, but keeps quiet and plays along.

On the gripping hand, why did I drink alcohol? Because of late capitalism! If businesses make a profit selling something, they will advertise it. They will buy product placements if that is permitted. But if the something is a bad rather than a good nothing changes. There is no money to be made not selling something, so there is no anti-advertising, warning stupid young people (earlier me) against faith in what the TV shows me.

So I want to reframe the whole discussion. We would like young people to be free. Free to drink. Free to stay sober. But freedom is not available in our current framing. Either we have bossy laws, restricting freedom. Or we are hypnotized by late capitalist advertising and get drunk, without realizing that we didn't chose it ourselves.

Prohibiting public vices is very different from prohibiting private vices. The police don't have to pry and intrude. They just patrol public spaces as usual, prosecuting vices that are in their faces. If somebody does the same thing privately, and get found out, the police just shrug. Doing it in private is allowed.

We could declare that advertising alcohol is a public vice and prohibit that. Private advertising, if it exists at all, has a small reach; we just don't care about it. We might go a little further and change the first amendment so that glamorizing alcohol in mass media can be forbidden. Then lower the drinking age to 16 so that it is only a child-protection measure.

We don't have the police prying into peoples private lives, because nothing private is being forbidden. Young people who don't want to drink aren't being priggishly obedient to bossy law. Young people who don't want to drink do get pushed to do so by peer pressure, but that is a lot less pressure than having advertising, culture, and your brainwashed peers ganging up on you.

It would be a trade-off. More personal freedom, less commercial freedom. But over-all, a good trade.