We should help them hit rock bottom, by taking their car and putting them in jail.
The sooner that intervention happens, the less chance they kill others.
No. That just makes their life worse when they obviously had a bad life if they felt like this harmful anti-social conduct was acceptable in the first place. The exception being foolish kids that still have some growing up and learning to do.
You can't punish addicts and make a significant difference. That only works for people who have a lot to lose that aren't controlled by their addiction. Obviously this is not true 100% of the time, we are all just trying to generalize... a bit too much.
Rock bottom is a lot of simpleton nonsense anyway, what is rock bottom to a non-addict is different than that for an addict which usually involves near death experience or loss of a support system when young enough that they can't survive on their own.
Helping someone hit rock bottom is just another way of stating that you'd cast the first stone in a group that stoned someone to death. It's not helpful at all, and you are pretending that intervention means a cure, which is not usually the case unless you buy into fantasy intervention TV shows instead of reality.
Far more often, intervention means the addict becomes a transient and/or overdoses and takes anyone along with them that is in the same boat.
Intervention is for children, if an adult is so weak willed by their addiction that those around them think that intervention will work, then all it really does is further estrange the addict from the few social ties they had left.
What does really work? Finding out what went wrong. Where is the addict now and where they would rather be. Kicking someone who is already down does not accomplish that, quite the opposite. That does not mean coddle a drunk driver, clearly we can't allow that, but the solution is not to make their life worse and then they just drink more. Remember, an addict's mind does not fire on all cylinders.
Locking them up for a month will keep them off the street for a month, so I see the merit in that, but long term, if you make someone's life worse when they were drinking excessively because their life was already bad, it does not improve the situation. We see it all the time, repeat offenders despite the repercussions because the treatment has gone wrong.
How do we fix this? I don't have all the answers but I do know what hasn't worked.