
Ask HN: License to Drink? - baron816
Most states will take away a person’s driver’s license for drunk driving and several other drinking offenses (public drunkenness, underage drinking, etc). But in those cases, the person really has a drinking problem, not a driving problem. So wouldn’t it be prudent to penalize a person by suspending their right to drink and buy alcohol instead?<p>Taking away someone’s license could threaten their ability to get to work or school and provide for their families. That in turn could lead to depression and further drinking.<p>If States instead issued a license to drink, it would be possible to revoke that and allow them to maintain their mobility.<p>You could even go a step further and have separate permissions for gambling, lottery ticket purchases, marijuana, etc. A step further from that would be to use the data from card scans to predict patterns of addiction and direct people to treatment.<p>Nonresidents would be tricky, since you don’t want to prevent them from buying alcohol just because they don’t have a card. Any ideas on how to deal with that? What other potential problems with this idea are there?
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onion2k
One person can _very easily_ buy alcohol for someone else, and they can drink
it in their home. This would be literally impossible to police.

