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.
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.
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.
You must not drink or like beer. Brewing something until it ferments into alcohol is the most basic thing ever. There is the very simple problem of taste that is the issue.