y is alcohol legal when it is the leading cause of accidental death???????

Question

to iraq51 they didn't even take into acount the numbers of the people that died from acohol related deaths tc ha!

Answer 1

A question is said to rhetorical when you know the answer, and ask to stress a point.
Humans are human.

Answer 2

For one thing, because it is so easy to make, prohibition will never work. It's been tried in the US and all it did was generate a booming market for bootleggers and the sale of products that were often extremely unsafe because they were unregulated. Check the history of this unwise experiment and you will see why it is bad idea to make alcohol illegal.

It is completely possible to be a responsible consumer of alcohol and making it illegal because of the few who cannot control themselves is pretty silly as well as paternalistic. As a matter of fact, consumption of some alcoholic beverages has even been shown to have health advantages, for example the substances in red wines. Moderate use of alcohol is not a problem and does not need prohibition.

It makes more sense to spend energy and money on alcohol education, treatment for those who do abuse it, and actual enforcement of laws governing those who harm others by irresponsible alcohol use. Crackdowns on sales to minors and to those who are alreafy inebriated also make sense.

Driving while intoxicated needs to be treated as a serious crime and everyone convicted should receive mandatory alcohol education and evaluation for addiction. I'd like to see this done as a inpatient incarceration/admission for no less than three days with the first offense.

The most important thing, though, is personal responsibility.

Answer 3

Because is one of the most taxed products in the market, and Uncle Sam is not just gonna let that money go away by bringing Prohibition back, even if that means sacrificing a few lives here and there, of course the government will never say it with these exact words, but that's how it is. Besides, with so many winos out there, Prohibition enforced alcohol abstinence for about two minutes in the 20's. Why would it work today?

Answer 4

You're not even close. The leading cause of accidental death in the US anyway in death by motor vehicle accident...43,200 last year. Death by falls was #2 at 14,900. Heck....death by alcohol ingestion didn't even make the top 10 list.

Certainly booze contributed to many of the deaths involved with car wrecks, falls and the like but not in a category of its own.

Answer 5

Because alcohol isn't the cause of those "accidental deaths" - irresponsible people are. Reasonable people regulate their own behavior, use common sense and don't place others in danger because of their risky behavior. Legislation to protect people from themselves rarely helps the target audience, it only penalizes the responsible and law abiding few. A better question might be: "Why is stupidity legal?"

Answer 6

The same goes for smoking, and cigarette related illnesses and deaths. Drugs, illegally make up such a small minority of crimes that I would think that stopping drinking and smoking would cure everything.

Not so, money is very powerful, those cigarette and booze companies have a lot of money and a lot of power, they would bring any president down just by conflicting with them.

You heard about the ads not so long ago, that encouraged people to smoke,......where are those ads now, is it just this present campaign doing "business" with them? I still see the ads, nothing has changed so much......

Answer 7

Alcohol itself is actually healthy, if used in moderation. So while people whom lack self control, misjudge how much they have had to drink, and get behind the wheel while intoxicated and drunk, there are the other group of people who do know how to use alcohol moderately.

Therefore, in order to be fair to those that do know how to act intelligently, the law has chosen to not ban alcohol from the shelf, but rather to impose strict punishments on those that don't use it wisely.

Remember, it isn't alcohol that leads to car crash accidents, it immature drunk people that fail to respect the law and the lives of others including themeselves.

I hope this helps, be careful out there.

Answer 8

I have been asking that question for years.I was married to an abusive alcoholic for 7 years.He would drive home drunk and beat the hell out of me.I finally got to the point I would go to the bars and convenience stores he visited and said"If I find out he was here and comes home and attacks me.,I will prosecute".Of course I probably couldn't,but it put fear into them.I always worried about who he might kill in an accident.I couldn't take it anymore and left.They keep raising cigarette prices,but alcohol prices stay almost the same.

Answer 9

The #1 cause of heart attacks is high colesterol. Do we outlaw beef
The #1 location of accidents in the home is the tub. Do we outlaw baths?
Get the drift. People have free will. Alcohol causes NO accidental deaths,.A person drinking too much of it does.

Answer 10

This question has been asked for the past hundred years or more in the US. We had prohibition in the US from 1920-1933. It worked about as well as the "war on drugs". It was repealed in 1933 because the federal government found it impossible to enforce. Here's a link to Wikipedia's entry about prohibition:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition

Answer 11

Excellent question.
During "prohibition" when alcohol was illegal in the U.S. there was a sharp rise in organized crime. The country felt that it would be more benefitial overall to have alcohol "legal", but be able to "regulate" it's sales and use.

I agree with your point of view, alcohol is a dangerous drug, and many people use it with disregard to the consequences.