An interesting tidbit about temperance.

Prohibition was a bad idea. But the Temperance movement was originally about decreasing the insane amount of alcohol Americans consumed in the country's youth, and it was shockingly successful at that.

The American Temperance Society was founded in 1826. Although we cannot easily distinguish correlation from causation, historical evidence points to it being a great success. The raw amount of alcohol consumed per capita decreased by as much as 75% over the next twenty years. Most of this was achieved without legislative intervention: the first law that limited alcohol distribution was the Maine law was passed in 1850, after this change occurred

No one remembers or cares about this, because the the temperance and prohibition movements are associated with events a hundred years later. These events led to a national ban on alcohol and still had less of an effect both in proportional and absolute terms.

What is there to learn from that? There exist cases where changing social attitudes can matter far more than changing laws. Arguably, gay marriage and marijuana legalization have fallen into this camp: social mores shifting pushed forward state by state legality.

What is shocking to me about this event is that social change caused unpleasant individual change without needing legal change. We think these things impossible, because our culture treats its denizens as pavlovian beasts who cannot help but respond to stimulus.

Our attention has been stolen from us by a legion of gamified stimuli in every corner of our life. Our focus has broken down in the face of that unrelenting buzz. Everything has become entertainment, and entertainment has become a reliable drip feed of dopamine. I'm writing this while trying yet another strategy to reclaim my focus in the mornings, which has so far worked well. What if groups united to spur individual change on issues like these?

Potential

I was looking through cigarette data and e cigarette data and discovered that this wasn't just true in the past.

According to the National Youth Tobacco Survey, E-cigarette usage among high school students has fallen since its peak in 2019, and is now lower than it was in 2018

¹

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I'm shocked I didn't know this was true given the amount of press the rise in e cigarettes got. To be clear, the e cigarette market isn't shrinking: these companies know that once you get someone addicted you have a lifelong customer, and many of my generation who picked them up in high school or college have kept the habit. But despite the middle schoolers of 2019, ten percent of whom used e cigarettes, currently being high schoolers, the percentage of high schoolers is almost half it was then, (27.5% vs 14.1%).

To be clear, e cigarette usage can and should go even lower. Nicotine bad. I'm just saying its important to recognize the huge success that those corny anti vaping ads and greater public awareness of the dangers of e cigarettes can have.

I hope in the future we are able to have similar conversations about addictive apps.

1. There were methodological shifts for covid so you aren't supposed to compare 2020 and before data to 2021 and 2022 data, but given that the trend already had started 2019-2020 and the survey starts at the beginning of the year, I think it's fine. Data here: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/surveys/nyts/index.htm