My father was a compulsive gambler. So my view on the right approach to alcohol, tobacco, firearms (in the US especially), pot and other illegal drugs, as is appropriate to each ones current status is:
delegalize (a term I thought I just made up, until I Googled it),
decriminalize,
decommercialize.
It is not just Native Americans who have a problem integrating distilled spirits into their communities. as Hogarth's famous 1751 prints show. Societies in the British Isles and Europe in relatively recent times and to this day deal with the difficulties posed by distilled spirits. The crime novels of Denise Mina graphically illustrate the grim legacy of 250 years of the double whammy of the Industrial Revolution and distilled spirits on poverty stricken Scottish and Irish communities. The Balkans and Western Africa have also suffered from atrocities fuelled with distilled spirits.
The US has unique problems from the political power of and successful covert (in the sense that the movement followers see themselves as rebellious independent thinkers not being manipulated by powerful elites) construction of social movements, libertarianism and the Tea party with significant financial and public relations support by the gun industry. Cheap guns and cheap alcohol with and aversion to effective social safety nets lead to communities with far higher violent deaths than are found other wealthy countries.. Essentially, the alcohol, tobacco and firearms, and legal and illegal drug industries benefit hugely from enforcing laissez faire capitalism for this traffic in poor US communities without enough hope in a vicious spiral.
I do not endorse prohibition, which was criminalization, but rather a radical assertion of the right to collectively remove these problematic activities from the commercial sphere. People over the age of majority can grow and brew and gamble to their hearts content, but the might of the state is concentrated on breaking up or, interdicting and fining (rather than taxing which leads to dependence on continued growth) large commercial concentrations of profit from these activities. Like the tiny gunsmith operations of Northern India, they could build their own long guns and ammunition on a small scale only.
Interdiction has in most cases led to dangerously concentrated intoxicants, which are less risky for profiteers because less bulky and/or prone to detection, but far harder for communities to integrate and moderate the damage from. Beer vs. spirits, coca vs. cocaine, opium vs. heroin, even weak wild cannabis vs. Sinsemilla and hash oil.
Such a dismantling of multiple multi-billion dollar laissez faire legal and underground markets would require a somewhat violent international revolution of sorts. The UN itself is currently highly committed to the war on drugs, the interdiction which sustains the huge black market it purports to oppose.
