it’s infinitely easier to become an alcoholic by buying alcohol at a grocery store. brewing is pretty much the least direct most delayed gratification way to get drunk. i guess it can be pretty cheap if you optimize for that but it sounds like jim made enough money and high flying friends it’s unlikely to be major factor.
Note: I apologize and rescind my previous comment about not arguing in good faith.
My point isn't that home brewing makes alcohol easier to obtain; clearly it doesn't, as you pointed out.
Rather, it provides a respectable rationale for having a beer (e.g. testing a batch, checking the bottle fermentation, seeing how it pairs with a meal).
Drinking is now part of a productive, interesting hobby. For most people that's harmless, but for a vulnerable individual, the hobby supplies frequent opportunities, a steady supply, and an intellectually respectable reason to consume. That's all.
Though, after you've home brewed the beer, you've now got potentially gallons of beer in a giant pot that you have to bottle yourself. Or you could be lazy and just drink it yourself. True, you could just go down to the store and grab a 30-rack of mass produced beer if you wanted to be an alcoholic, but having a vat of beer in your kitchen that isn't going to drink itself and is gonna go bad if you don't, is a different kind of peer pressure.
You can get handles of vodka for 11 dollars. You can buy listerine for even cheaper and drink that. People brewing their own beer may be alcoholics but they are doing it for the hobby or to customize the flavor. Real down in the throes of addiction alcoholics are not becoming chemists for their fix with how cheap the mass produced stuff is.
If you want to find people doing that you look for the illegal drugs that haven't had wide spread industries drive down the price, like meth.
Kegerators are easy and quite affordable to build.
I absolutely have friends who stopped home brewing because they realized that having a tap of readily available beer in their house wasn't a good idea.
