• 3 Posts
  • 382 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • TLDR: Cars are the real problem here, not bars. I hyper focused on this, so it got a little long, but I swear it’s not AI, I just like to write with dashes.

    It’s also not really fair to ask bartenders to accurately assess inebriation for large numbers of customers. Legal limits vary, but 0.05-0.08% BAC doesn’t normally make a relatively experienced drinker (not a euphemism for alcoholics, but not 19 year olds or people who never have more than enough to toast) slur or seem even obviously tipsy- similarly, long term alcoholics can seem sober with a BAC of 0.15%. It might be more accurate to judge it based on approximate size and just use a table, but that’s no help for people who recently donated blood or didn’t have dinner. I know that sounds like nitpicking, but I do remember kids in college donating blood together and then going out so they wouldn’t need to spend as much money getting drunk, and skipping dinner to get drunk faster/cheaper was super common for most of my acquaintance circle until our mid twenties (I’m not even really a drinker, so it wasn’t huge for my closest friends, but it’s something people would mention doing pretty regularly).

    One possible solution would be to have a breathalyzer with an easily disinfected mouthpiece installed in bars, so that people would realize how much alcohol they actually have in their systems, but that could also be disastrous if improperly calibrated (and even if not, a person with a BAC of 0.04% who’s never had alcohol before is probably not good to drive, but it puts the bartender in an awkward spot to cut them off before they’re over the limit, especially if their boss is shitty). I could see bars tuning them to be more sensitive as a marketing and protective strategy, but if people didn’t think they could trust the results, it would be pointless.

    I think we’re looking at the problem the wrong way though- the bars are not as big a problem as the lacking infrastructure, and trying to bandage problems from our reliance on cars through bars is inadequate.

    All that is to say, I agree that this is a good idea in places with good non car infrastructure, and places without it should look at implementing it before subsidizing alcohol from restaurants and bars. Especially considering that the initial problem is social isolation, which is only compounded by car centric infrastructure