Kids in the US not only abuse alcohol more than any other place in the channel they are used as traffickers for illegal substances due to their less severe criminal treatment. Of course this weight is carried by the lower economic class. In anonymous interviews there was consensus though, it was easier for them to get drugs and guns than alcohol and cigarettes. That's because they had to pay an adult to get it for them, because they are selling everything else.

All this is a structural part of stability of capitalism as you very well state. Unfortunately the formula of that stability is imposed on all other "dependent" states, and in some cases in extremes (Brazil, Phillipines, ..).