Oh yeah, a lot of people die because they drink too much water. Don't forget how moch money is wasted because people break shit and beat each other up when theu are high on water.
Isn't that more a social issue? Getting drunk and becoming violent isn't a cause-effect. Someone that becomes abusive after drinking would be abusive without alcohol as well, that's just a trigger for the behavior.
This is closer to an actual answer, though. It's easier to remove drinking than to change drinking culture. It just didn't work the last time they tried to ban alcohol (in the USA), so if behavior around drinking is the issue that is trying to be solved there are probably other ways to go about it.
Alcohol is popular because also improves your socialization, could be linked perfectly, but I'm not an expert to say it. And smoking cigarettes is also bad and isn't banned, while weed is safer than those two addictions, and it's still mostly illegal. There are reasons, and hippies are probably the cause, government wanted to criminalize them and their love movement. If alcohol keeps you down, and quiet, the government will not care to ban even if it's bad for your health, they need the companies to keep winning money.
Ok, but there are plenty of other items that that do that as well. It's not a call out of "all drugs, including tobacco and alcohol". It's not a callout of microplastics. So there's something specific to alcohol.
Being widespread. One bad set of laws in bad place in bad time (propination laws in eastern Europe in XVIII-XIX century) caused untold suffering and is keenly felt to this day, showing how easily hundreds of millions of people can be fucked up by poisonous commodity.
I'm not for entirely banning alcohol, but only because it would be rather futile, but for restrictions in its selling and far going educational campaigns to finally get rid of it - and it is possible, even if not entirely, looking at the decline of consumption of other poison, tobacco.