The problem with articles like this is that they lack context on the relative risks of various activities. Is drinking a daily glass of wine more or less bad for your heart than skipping your daily aerobic exercise? Surely we can put some numbers on that.
Straight up comparisons like that are pry too simplistic when dealing with a complicated system like our bodies.
People seem to really want this kind of +1/-1 point system for health related behavior tho. Like: “I just spent 30mins at the gym so I racked up enough ‘health points’ to eat an apple pie at McDonalds”.
I think the reality is that you need to generally do a good job of following all advice all the time if you want to remain healthy. Keep very active and remember that indulgences are OK, but should be infrequent.
Why aren’t we looking into the merits of a daily or weekly cigarette? At a certain point it really looks like it’s just poison and wet should knock it off.
While smoking is harmful overall and I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to smoke, the nicotine it delivers does have some merits. So there is some nuance to the issue.
The dose makes the poison. For some poisons there is a minimum threshold dose below which there is no detectible harm. For others that threshold is zero.
The concept of dose-dependency is one of those things that earlier generations had an intuitive understanding of, but something we have an increasingly fragile grip on in the modern era.
I don't think anyone is having trouble understanding dose-dependency. There's just a separate question regarding whether some substances should have no acceptable dose, and when we should make that distinction.
Things like nicotine are thought to be pretty much not worth consuming in any situation. Things like lead have no "allowable dose". Maybe alcohol should be treated similarly to cigs. This is a totally defensible position, that's worth discussing.
Probably not going to get a chance to RTFA, but yeah, I know there's some stuff. I think it was looking like nicotine could be helpful in regulating some mood problems and similar stuff. Kinda like ADHD meds or anti-depressants. There may be some stress relieving effects, although I wouldn't be surprised if there's more stress in the long term (from constantly managing withdrawl)
Anyway, we're at the point with nicotine where virtually no one is willing to entertain the idea of recommending people consume "just a little". Maybe we should be that way with alcohol, too.
I think a good measuring stick would be the distance you'd need to drive in a car to generate the same level of risk to your life. Driving is seemingly mundane but I think one of the riskiest things we do on a daily basis in the US.
Driving risk statistics are sort of artificially inflated by deaths and injuries of motorcyclists and DUI/ DWI drivers involved in single-vehicle crashes. If you avoid putting yourself in those categories then driving is much safer than the raw statistics suggest.
There's also a huge variance in risk based on what vehicle you drive. Some larger vehicles have a statistical driver death rate close to zero.
> Don't worry, in 5-10 years it will be good for you again.
I don't know about that, it it looking more like Alcohol is heading down the path of cigarettes where the more unbiased funding and studies that are done, the worse it appears. There have been several convincing reviews[1] recently that showed an increased risk of cancer at any dosage.
Yeah, it’s really a myth that science is changing so much.
You can look at dietary recommendations from the 70s, and they’re fine. Eat your plants and don’t eat garbage. The food pyramid was more a product of lobbying than science. The doctors advice wasn't that bad, although there would be less knowledge of the dangers of refined carbs.
People want it to be true that the doctors don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s not (or these are bad examples of).
Honestly, I find it baffling when people think that doctors know what they're talking about when it comes to nutrition. Maybe things have changed in recent years, and that would be great, but in my experience and from the anecdotes of others, my conception of what doctors understand is the opposite of what you describe.
Granted, I do agree that the science actually hasn't changed that much, and that doctors who do research know ath they're talking about, but your average MD is pretty clueless about nutrition and fitness because that's really not a subject that gets priority in med school. There are even doctors today who still give advice along the lines of the Food Pyramid and My Plate. I've heard more than one account in my social circles of doctors telling people the myth that dietary fat flows freely through your blood vessels and clogs them exactly the same way that bacon grease can clog drain pipes.
> People want it to be true that the doctors don’t know what they’re doing
Also, the root of this statement is something I am surprised by. People want their doctors to not know what they're doing? In what universe is that true? Maybe that fits your experience, but this is a phenomenon I've never encountered in the slightest.
> People want their doctors to not know what they're doing?
No, you're right, people who go to a doctor certainly don't want their individual physician to be incompetent. I believe parent was talking about a less specific, somewhat "anti-establishment" point of view. Folks who feel that they've been failed by medical doctors, for example -- a chronic condition that they can't get help with. Or people who have other reasons to believe that the medical profession is ossified, or beholden to interests that don't serve patients -- critiques of that sort.
Yeah, OP is spot on. It's not really EVERYONE either, but I'd say the majority of people I know really like some version of the "doctors don't know what they're talking about" argument. Things are weird now with COVID and the politics around this stuff.
You'll probably see more of these attitudes on the right, but the idea that doctors don't know what they're talking about, and change their recommendations all the time is incredibly popular. So it's not like 100% of people, or probably not even 95%, but I think it's more than eg. 30-40%.
I've found this is one area where (far) left and (far) right overlap, actually. Maybe not in the exact specifics, but in a general mistrust of professional medicine.
Doctors often don’t have to know that much about nutrition, beyond telling you to eat your plants, and some stuff targeted at people who need specific diets.
You say they’re clueless on fitness and nutrition, but I don’t know what information they should be expected to know. Your talking about topics riddled with bullshit, when you look at public discourse.
Honestly, there’s not much to know other than to eat food that’s pretty famously healthy (plants), and avoid sugars. Now they definitely want you to limit meat, excessive fats, and refined carbs, too; but the basics are really simple.
There’s lots of studies out there, but there seems to be very little that’s clear other than those basic guidelines. You can really run around in circles with how complex this subject is, yet ignore the basics.
While the grains thing was particularly stupid advice, recommendations haven’t changed as much as you’d think. The guidelines from reputable sources as far back as the 60s and 70s were fine. They didn’t understand how deadly refined carbs were, but recommended eating fruits, vegetables while limiting desserts and too much fatty meat; now you might be eating a bit too much carbs without understanding the risks, but you should be perfectly fine with that diet.
People have been making noise about this issue for a very long time. Doctors know this stuff is poison and causes cancer. It’s always seemed silly that just the right amount of poison is good somehow. Of course, you don’t know without study, but experienced people can see areas where the data doesn’t seem to make sense.
I remember hearing about this stuff a few years ago and it was nothing new, even then. We know that early studies looked good because many “sick quitters” stop drinking due to their failing health. This makes non-drinkers look less healthy. Now this stuff is still actively studied and many of the pro-alcohol people insist it’s still healthy, but the writing has been on the wall for at least 5-10 years; no amount of alcohol is “healthy”.
> It’s always seemed silly that just the right amount of poison is good somehow
Why is it silly? A lot of things are dose dependent. A small amount of tylenol makes you head feel better. A lot of tylenol kills you. Lifting weights is very good for your health, but if you overdo it, you can get seriously hurt. A stressful day here and there is harmless, but if you're under constant, chronic, stress, your health will deteriorate. Four hours of sleep will leave you feeling terrible, 7-8 hours will leave you feeling rested, and 14 hours will likely leave you feeling terrible. I could go on, but I'd argue that dose-dependency is the rule rather than the exception.
It’s not dose dependent though, it’s a dangerous poison that causes cancer. Your other examples are completely different. Tylenol is closest, but you’re really talking about overdose. Drinking a couple of glasses of wine a day isn’t an overdose.
Yes, there may be some nasty chronic effects of tylenol too, but I think you’re trying really hard to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Is there a specific definition of poison you're working with?
You say that there's obviously no amount of poison that's good for you, but by that model of poison why do you assume that alcohol is a poison? Doesn't that become the question at hand?
I meant it more as a figure of speech. Nobody is trying to shoehorn health into random poisons. BTW there are allowable amounts to many poisons. There aren't allowable amounts of things like lead and butane.
The question is why we're trying so hard to make something healthy. The answer is obvious, because we like it. You don't see doctors trying to come up with justifications for why we should drink arsenic or cyanide, just as long as it's tiny amounts.
Alcohol causes cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, and many nasty things. It may be one thing to tell people that their glass of wine a day is OKAY, but we shouldn't be telling them it's "healthy" without good reason. The better analogy is smoking, because the harms are more similar than people think.
I sort of figured, but then it wouldn't be much of an argument to claim that it can't be beneficial.
But fair enough, I misunderstood your argument. Your argument is actually that any claims of a fun "poison" being beneficial are highly suspect.
To that end - that would make sense for novel poisons or poisons that are rarely consumed. But this is one that's been consumed by many successful cultures for thousands of years. Animals get drunk on fermented fruit. That makes it seem more plausible to me that there could be something beneficial to it. Perhaps it was only beneficial in the days of unclean drinking water (unless that one is also not actually true! It's hard to believe anything anymore.).
The first time I started to wake up to government one-size-fits-all health policies was back in my 8th grade health class when we were being taught about the food pyramid, and this one kid asked the teacher why hamburgers are considered junk food when they pretty much fit into the model food pyramid. I remember the teacher being stumped and uttered out a barely comprehensible response after an awkward moment.
At first I thought that kid was a smartass, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he wasn't wrong. I've you've got an American hamburger with all the fixin's, although its proportions aren't exactly like the food pyramid, it's close enough that it's hard to classify it as being unhealthy unless it's laced with extra cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot. Yeah, there's fat in the patty, but the whole fat being bad thing is pretty much one of the biggest forms of bullshit ever invented by health policy.
This isn't to say that I actually think hamburgers are health food, but that the food pyramid is kind of a farce, especially in the sense that it implies that grains are some sort of nutritional necessity that should be consumed in greater quantities than everything else.
They shouldn't be most of what you eat, since they have a lot of digestible carbohydrates compared to the amount of fiber, fat, and vitamins, but they are certainly not bad for you.
Your calories (unless you're a genetic outlier) should be relatively evenly split between carbs and fat. If whole grains are where most of the carbs are coming from, that's fine. Science says so.
Yep. You don't have to go that far. A decade back it was thought that red meat causes cancer, specifically intestinal cancer. Lots of health guidelines reflected that. It has all fallen apart in the last 2-3 years.
as if the scientific community has demonstrated it - it has not, and your articles do not support that claim. Your articles from 2-3 years ago are about one report, and even your articles call into question that report. So no, it has most definitely not "all fallen apart."
Go figure, right? He also has papers claiming the opposite of well established sugar research, which, you guessed it, was paid for by a industry trade group that tries to undermine health guidelines to make people believe doctors less and eat bad stuff....
When there are decades of papers and different groups with a similar claim, and one group publishes one counter claim, it makes news. It does not mean the counterclaim will stand further scrutiny. In this case, as looking over google scholar at research following the 2019 claim, it has not withstood more scrutiny.
Here is the paper you posted [1]. Here [2] is but one followup paper claiming your paper is basically crap. I can find none supporting the conclusions in [1].
All papers since then I can find still claim meat increases the risk of intestinal and other cancers.
Please don't believe or spread outlier results from news stories.
“Good for you” doesn’t make sense. As an analogy for a startup “sales people considered good for the organisation”. Or “meetings shown to be bad for the organisation”. Makes as much sense as “avocado is good for you”. Although a holistic diet, exercise, toxin avoidance, danger avoidance but balancing life goals and mental health regime is probably good for you.
as someone who grew up i a community that has for many reasons, religious, social, economic that no one really does alcohol.
when there is nobody who is drunk, we have 0 drunk driving cases, 0 cases of people ending up in wrong places, 0 cases of alcoholism, 0 cases of "well we will just mix a drink with something more recreational", no need for AA among a host of other things including not having to budget alcohol in your daily budget because people are generally still poor.
Because alcohol has been purposely drunk by people for literally thousands of years, and the vast, vast majority of people are able to drink without having a problem?
people have purposely been doing a lot of slavery for thousands of years as well. took us some time but we got over the whole "its been fine for millions of years so it must be good or at least fine" to get to the root of the issue. once we found that, slavery was abolished pretty much everywhere.
my point is, why bring "societal pressure of 500 years" into an argument for an inherently bad thing. just thinking out loud
I don't know what the slavery has to do here... but as for psychoactive drugs, it's not only a bad thing, it also has its upsides that are well-known, hence why humans have been consuming drugs since forever. The downsides/upsides ratio varies greatly depending on the dose and the frequency.
I think there's better education around alcohol now than there was 30 years ago (at least where I live). Still, a lot could be done, particularly for the youth, like banning pre-mixed cans and other sugary ready-to-binge beverages. Habits start early.
Could it be that it’s the result of prohibition? Because the Temperance Movement advocated a few of the things you mentioned. Ken Burns has a great doc on Prohibition!
from my small understanding of "prohibition" it was like thry tried to enforce it by way of brute muscle and people found ingenious ways to fool the system. what would the result have been if they had worked on educating people and building a society wide consensus about its ill effects.
Well, they did educate people, alcoholism was a huge problem in the US at the time and men who became alcoholics often abused their families and could not provide for them, leaving them destitute. AFAIK, these issues did change for the better as alcoholism rates were lower after Prohibition than before, and less hard spirits were consumed. But building a society-wide consensus in the US confirming teetotalism? Outside of the highly religious communities, it's just impossible.
The answer to your question is in your statement. Most communities don't have "many reasons" to favour prohibition, in fact most communities don't even have one. Yes there's the idea that no alcohol = no alcohol-caused problems, but people don't assume they will have a problem when they start to drink.
In my area, the only dry communities are small towns with strong Mennonite backgrounds. And in every one of those towns, there's a bar right outside city limits, or in the next town over, where people in the dry community go to drink.
Alcohol use around the world over the centuries is a vast topic, but coming from a US religious community that prohibited all alcohol, I was duly impressed while serving in the peace corps in rural South Korea with the social utility of drinking to moderate the rigid hierarchies of local culture there and to provide a place for blunt truth telling otherwise impossible.
The costs of alcoholism were readily visible as well, but I do believe drinking culture in South Korea is a hidden partner to its vaulting economic and cultural success from the ruins of the Korean War.
My friend and family groups have been making a consistent effort to stop romanticizing alcohol and have gatherings without it. There's no denying alcohol is a social lubricant that can be very enjoyable.
I think it's important to normalize having alcohol-free excursions, especially when younger people are around. Demonstrate that self control is valued. And I say that as someone with a drinking problem who sweats about going more than half a day without one.
It's delicious and it lets you collectively guard down in a way that creates a bond of trust. It's a difficult thing to substitute.
When one of my friends went to China on business and came back with "stories" I realized that KTV visits (prostitutes) performed a similar function, but honestly a glass of wine seems a bit more wholesome.
My father, an alcoholic (25 years sober), gave the best description ... he was always worried about if there was going to be alcohol at the event and how much.
If you are turning down attending events because they are dry ... you have a problem.
Agreed. I'm not against alcohol but I find I can get 80%-90% of the benefits by following the "ritual" of it with a mocktail and simply setting aside time where I give myself permission to relax and socialize. Alcohol is fine in moderation but its not as necessary as folks think to having those enjoyable experiences.
I was thinking about this recently watching a conversation between Lex Fridman and Bryan Johnson and it struck me that there is a huge difference in optimizing lifestyle choices for human physical and mental performance, and optimizing lifestyle choices for human flourishing, or even say joy and wonder. I feel like there is this growing misunderstanding that the "optimal" human is one that can be the most productive at work.
I think saying its a misunderstanding is not giving people enough credit: we are constantly incentivized if not required to eschew joy and wonder in order to be productive and optimal. I don't think most people even have the chance to reflect on what they really want, they just need to make money to pay their rent.
But it seems to me that the people that are most focused on being productive and optimal in this weirdly obsessive way are pretty high income -- they are not just scraping by to pay rent. I work with a company that does manufacturing here in the US -- it is pretty clear to me that the group of folks in our company that are skilled labor, hourly employees that are pretty well compensated, have more fun and make more time to experience joy and wonder than folks (like myself) that are more highly compensated and in the white collar world. This does not hold true for the lower end unskilled labor folks who have almost unavoidable material financial concerns due to income level. Now, I acknowledge this is very small sample size, but it makes me think.
Indeed, it is always good to know the science but we should balance that against the benefits. I like this quote from David Spiegelhalter[0]
"Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.
"There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.
"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."
I don't see it as a good quote and was puzzled as to its inclusion. It is simply a play on the words 'safe level' and equating it to other things. My best guess is that it's meant to appeal to the "I hear you but wish to continue drinking anyway" thought process, which is fair. This kind of equation is not.
Not necessarily. Driving for example is dangerous, a fatal crash can occur even if all parties involved are driving safely and are in complete control, and for that matter anything has a risk carried with it, but you balance out the risks and the rewards, just as you would with alcohol
I've wondered for a long time if the studies showing health benefits from alcohol are being confounded by the health benefits of socialization, which often involves alcohol in many societies. People who drink less might (statistically) socialize less.
This reminds me of something a friend once told me. This was about 10 years ago, he was a commander for the navy at the time.
In the navy, while at sea, you are expected to drink during social events. Alcohol is considered the 'social engine' of the ship.
Now I must disclaim that obviously the crew wasn't forced to drink. Those on guard, or who had any medical, religious or other objections were dismissed. And naturally they have very strict limits, as getting intoxicated on board of a operational warship would be very dangerous.
But, with moderate use, alcohol was (at least back then) viewed as an efficient method to prevent stress and mutiny among the crew. It probably is still today.
Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent.
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
Suppose the law states that David Haroldson (or the Glorious Leader, or foreign diplomats) cannot be convicted of any crime. That's inconsistent, (perhaps) arbitrary, and unfair. Yet, it would be foolish to extend this conviction-immunity to everybody.
Arguing about consistency in a system without the rule of law seems a bit foolish as well. Diplomats are a more interesting edge case. And AFAIK they can always be prosecuted and convicted in their home country.
That can be abused as well. Just frame the leader for a crime and he sits in prison until it is proved that he is innocent, then do so again for a different crime.
For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
I’m generally pro-legalization, but there are many things that we hypothesize are safe but do not know the long-term effects of and, within living memory, have discovered that many things initially thought safe were not.
People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc.
What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future.
Wouldn't this in effect give a parent with multiple children multiple votes.
Mail in voting means you'd just fill out the ballots for your kids.
I think voting should remain at 18. Although I have some ideas on making more concerns local. Why does most of my tax dollars go to the federal government rather than the state.
At the State level at least I have a remote chance of being heard. And if I don't like what my state is doing, I can drive 50 miles to another.
That is faulty logic. We hypothesize that mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are safe but do not know the long term effects. Why should we exercise conservatism for some drugs but not for vaccines?
To be clear, I'm just using that as an example of logical inconsistency and I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated. I also think that all recreational drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized) because regardless of the potential long-term effects the failed war on (some) drugs is causing far more harm than the drugs themselves.
For what it's worth, mRNA immunotherapies for cancer have been being injected into people for almost 20 years now. Efficacy aside, we know the medium-long term outcomes of injecting ourselves with mRNA.
The relative risk reduction for potentially catching covid-19 vs actually having cancer are radically different. Long to medium term risk of adverse effects from mRNA therapies are probably not weighed heavily against imminent eventuality of short term death with cancer. Edit- that's not to say I don't disagree with you on us knowing the long-medium term risks of mRNA therapies.
I'm not getting into the relative merits of vaccination, I'm merely saying that mRNA isn't going to hurt you. Even decades from now. We know there are no medium-term risks of mRNA therapies because the otherwise healthy people who have injected themselves with mRNA are still alive and kicking.
Here is the first Phase I test of an mRNA vaccine from 2013.
We make trade offs of short-term benefit and long-term risk all the time. When considering the purely recreational intake of a substance, the long-term risks are more relevant (due to the relatively small short-term gain) than for a vaccine which has unknown risks but has now-proven significant short-term benefits.
While that is technically correct, mRNA is something your body makes in relatively large quantities every day. As such if it was harmful life itself wouldn't be possible.
Really the argument should be about strengthening informed consent. "Safety" is not objective; something that one individual would consider safe might not be safe for another. For example I have friends that like to go sky-diving. For them it's "safe". For me, it's not. Drugs should require a waiver similar to signing up for a credit card. e.g.,
"This drug completed a 12 month Phase 2 clinical trial with 65,917 participants in which the drug demonstrated efficacy of Y against symptomatic disease. 1.5% of participants experienced adverse effects which included runny nose. 0.01% of participants experienced a fatal allergic reaction. These drugs are still undergoing trials and our understanding of safety and efficacy can change in the future.
[ ] Check to indicate you understand and consent"
I think this should be the standard for vaccines, drugs like marijuana and alcohol and cigarettes. Do it at the point-of-sale. For things that are particularly dangerous, maybe require an interview with a physician to make sure the person is of sound mind and capable of consenting. I believe that if you treat people like adults they will naturally make the best decisions for themselves. When you treat people like children, they'll act like children.
I do agree with this argument, but most of the time legalising doesn't just make problems disappear. It needs to be paired with better access to mental health facilities, rehabilitiation, etc.
Making drugs legal doesn't mean people will start abusing them. I do not drink or take drugs, and both are easy as hell to access here in the UK.
The benefits for me of legalising drugs would be making it easier for people to seek help with less stigma attached to it, remove drug dealers out of the equation, make it safer to procur drugs if people are going to take them anyway, I believe it would also make scientific research much easier which in turn might help us to know the long term effects of these drugs.
Does legalization make things better or worse than now? If it makes things better but still not perfect, perhaps we don’t need to hold up legalization until we can provide better mental health facilities, rehab, better public transport so people can get to these facilities easier, etc.
> What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
Considering that we are talking about alcohol, this argument could just as well be used in favor of liberalization.
In that case the question becomes: has use (and in particular abuse) of substances increased after legalization? Which I will just throw out there since I’m too lazy to research it myself.
Legalization brings production and sale of recreational drugs under regulation. That will not stop all harms, but those harms are then more likely to be known. Addiction treatment is more accessible when drug use is not criminalized.
Point was foolish consistency. I see an IT diktat that a function should not be longer than 100 lines. I would even go ahead and say seems reasonable for lot of cases. But to make it absolute would be foolish consistency.
Consistency in how the law is applied is important, but not that the composite of all laws be absolutely fair relative to each other. That is "foolish consistency" because it's impossible except by very closed-minded fundamentalism. The idea that you find the "worst" thing that is legal and then repeal all laws against things which are "better" is not a viable legislative strategy.
There is nothing foolish about treating things that are the same consistently. It would be foolish to grant animals citizenships to keep it consistent with humans, but just as e.g. human rights are applied consistently to people no matter where they come from or how they look like so should our policies to things be in general. Alcohol is a drug with a tremendous potential for harm, and if a society decides it wants to ban those, again there is nothing foolish in doing that consistently. But when looked at like that, it's clear there is not much rational in the way we regulate things. It's just a bunch of traditions and whims.
Statesmen saying “alcohol is legal, might as well legalize everything else that is less harmful on some dimension”. Where the alternative may be just leaving alcohol as an exception, or outlawing it (but yeah… don’t mess with Americans and their Alcohol - see prohibition and the whiskey rebellion).
Unless we have a perfect metric quantifying the “amount of harm” for every substance or practice, we will never have this kind of consistency. And then, there is the issue of harm to self versus harm to others, and how we can weight both aspects.
Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either.
So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
No two situations are the same, and demanding consistency at an arbitrary level of reasoning means disregarding everything you would see when looking closer. For example, banning something that has been legal for a long time is difficult because of the economic aftershocks and cultural resistance. If something new was invented that was just as harmful as alcohol, it might be best to ban it and leave alcohol legal.
FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
Also attempting to ban things that are both desirable and very easy to make is a great way to create an enormous criminal black market like we did with prohibition in the US.
Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it.
There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries).
Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.
> Everything was legal until a law was passed criminalizing it.
Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law.
Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law.
This kind of reasoning is perfect. You remember when alcohol was made illegal in the US? Remember the harm that caused from gangs, uneven police crackdowns on illegal bars, and such rampant criminality that alcohol was quickly re-legalized? The drug war is 100x worse.
If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on.
Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.
The argument you are making here is not that drugs should be legalized for consistency's sake. The argument you are making is that drugs should be legalized because the dangers of prohibition outweigh the benefits. That is a completely different line of reasoning
If our threshold for badness is X and we apply that to alcohol, but don't apply that to drugs, then we're being inconsistent with how we apply our threshold for badness. You just had to take your argument a step further to see the consistency argument.
> Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
> but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason.
It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.
Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact.
If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase.
In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why.
Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.'
Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?'
Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.'
Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?'
Parent: 'Well, yes...'
Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?'
Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.'
This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions.
Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
> Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
> Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences.
'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine.
'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence.
'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'
These are what I consider to be the strongest reasons why my child shouldn't do cocaine in my country right now. If they go to a country where it's well-regulated, then the cost/benefits calculation changes quite a bit.
Not GP, but a lot of people have trouble distinguishing "illegal" from "wrong", and the cause and effect. It's "wrong" to take cocaine because it's illegal; it's bad to legalize cocaine because it's "wrong". Cocaine is bad because of all the harms it causes to society; but a lot of the harms it causes to society (some of them listed above) come about solely because it's illegal.
It’s not necessarily meant to be used as an argument as such. It could also be intended as a rhetorical device in order to force the opponent to concede on another point:
Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument]
Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society!
Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?
Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.
I'm fine with alcohol being the high water mark. We can fairly objectively rank the health and societal harms of various drugs. Hard to quantify, but straightforward to build an ordinal list. Caffeine, weed, basically all psychedelics, amphetamine, mdma, and tobacco all make the cut (the latter just barely). Coke, meth, heroin, unsurprisingly worse than alcohol, ought to have some distribution controls at the very least. Prescription opioids actually look surprisingly bad.
At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.
That's interesting, I do wish it had a few more items on the "lower" end of the harm spectrum, just to help me gauge this better. Things like Caffeine, or the other "Energy Drink" supplements.
Do you really think it's worse than the current wave of synthetic opioids? I think I could even make a good case for cigarettes being worse than alcohol.
This doesn't include all of the other harmful effects from alcohol, like violence and injures. How much marital physical abuse happens due to alcohol? I'd rather have someone harm themselves from smoking then someone beat their wife while drunk.
Not to defend violent alcoholics, but people who get violent when drunk already have a problem, and would also violent when sober (they probably are). Most people who drink are not violent.
Regarding injuries: Sure, but the statistics in general doesn't include stuff that doesn't kill you but still is bad, like non-lethal lung problems from smoking.
To be clear, this data is showing correlation, not any kind of causation.
Regardless, if we accept the argument that people need to be coerced for their own good into avoiding harmful behaviors, the data linked seems to argue that we should be restricting access to sugar and high glycemic index foods (flour) much more than alcohol since "High blood sugar" at 6.5MM and "Obesity" at 4.7MM both beat alcohol by a large margin.
Yes, I agree that we should do more about unhealthy foods. Not restrict access to them (after all, smoking is also not illegal), but set in places incentives that nudge people towards healthier foods (these can be financial, educational, psychological, etc.).
Source? 35 feels realllly young, but I guess it depends on what’s considered an “average” alcoholic. If someone is spending their entire day drinking string liquors everyday, I can maybe see that.
I was being approximate, but here is the more nuanced explanation:
"This study found an average of 93,296 alcohol-attributable deaths (255 deaths per day) and 2.7 million YPLL (29 years of life lost per death, on average) in the United States each year."
While I don't disagree with smoking being extremely harmful, most people addicted to nicotine can still function regularly. Regardless of which kills more, they both kill via proxy and that's where I see the biggest issue for both of them. Interestingly enough I've found that many people smoke when they're drinking.
I wouldn't be surprised. There are studies that are beginning to link liver health to neurodegeneration, and that's just one set of potential disease states.
I don't know, the ways in which they stack up is like apples and oranges. Cigarettes are certainly bad for you, and it's known they cause cancer but cigarettes don't have the same severity when it comes to withdrawl in my understanding. Alcohol withdrawl can cause hallucinations, seizures, even death. Also, I would say the danger is greater with alcohol because it impairs your judgement in a far greater way than cigarettes... have you ever been scared of someone who is driving while smoking?
Extrapolated out over time, I would guess that alcoholism is a cofactor in more deaths annually than cigarettes (edit: that is to say, deaths not caused directly by drinking, including drink driving, but conditions such as diabetes and heart disease which are greatly exacerbated by drinking for example... I wonder if someone who dies of cirrhosis gets chalked up as a death by alcohol?)
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse does that, whether it's treatment facilities or social groups like AA and Al-Anon. As they should. Every family I know has been affected in one way or another by drug or alcohol addiction and has firsthand knowledge that substance abuse must be treated like an illness and to forgive (but not forget) the damage it causes. So I'm not exactly sure your statement reflects reality.
Treat here not in the "provide medical care for" sense but in the "interpretation" sense, as in, "I know it's a polka, but I'm going to treat it like a waltz."
Once again, I think that's a fun thing to see because it's always nice to dunk on the broader culture, but that's genuinely not been my experience. People are generally very understanding and considerate of substance abuse situations and the carnage that surrounds it.
And it should be noted that while substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
"Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse" is a small percentage of the population as a whole, and a very, very small percentage of the people who make policy and resourcing decisions related to how substance abuse is handled.
You may be in a particular microcosm that handles this well, but that is definitely not the universal experience (not by a long shot). I'd also dispute the "literally everyone" part of your comment, as I can think of countless examples of attempts at substance abuse treatment and support being actively harmful to the person struggling with addiction.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with an acute cancer treatment or recover from a kidney transplant.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with alcohol addiction.
Measure the immediate reactions and future performance review and employment outcomes of the two groups. Do you expect them to be the same as each other? I don’t and I think it comes down to “I or a family member could get cancer or kidney failure” vs “alcohol addiction is a choice” thinking.
Apples and bowling balls. As I said in another comment:
While substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
I think many managers would prefer the latter because getting sober should have mainly positive effects on my employee's health and performance whereas an organ transplant or cancer seems much more likely to come with longterm disability and accommodation needs...
Let's keep it practical. Alcohol is here to stay and will not be prohibited. For historical reasons, culture, whatever...it stays.
Yet other harmful substances are currently banned and you opt to unban them for...consistency. It's like saying when two countries are at war, why can't we all be at war? Seems "unfair".
No not be a total joke as a gov't. I love the stories on "refer scare" and the prohibition (which has become some big historical period like the renaissance, merely by retarded gov't policy).
And not like we're done with it. New Zealand is considering to ban tobacco sales to the next generation. What could probably go wrong with that? Is age discrimination now all of a sudden okay? (this is not about prohibiting sales to kids -- which im cool with obviously -- but also to adults of the next generations, when they are of age).
Most victimless crimes have literally no victim. There is no victim without some sort of harm. The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal is because if you go overboard enough with them there is a high likelihood of harm. In the vast majority of cases people don't go overboard and there is no actual victim though. These things are crimes because our system of justice is not good at punishing people for "going overboard" with the consistency and fairness we desire.
While I disagree with some victimless crimes, like drug possession, victimless crimes that put others at risk does victimize them.
It’s the reason that shooting a shotgun down a busy street is (and should be) a crime even if you don’t hit anyone.
Also, many violations of regulatory requirements are “victimless” but are entirely necessary cooperation for things to work properly, or to prevent consequential harm. Particularly for things where shared resources are used, like spectrum, roads, airports, the air we breathe, etc.
Who is hurt when I blow a little bit of lead dust into the air? Probably no one, and certainly nobody identifiable. Who is hurt when everyone blows lead dust in the air? Potentially many, and still likely unidentifiable.
You aren't getting it. Who does the bare risk itself victimize? Where is the damage? The risk is just that, a risk. There's a chance it may go bad and a chance that it may not. The risk produces no damage, no victim. But in sufficient quantity the bad outcome will happen enough to be worth making the activity is not allowed. Normally we prohibit the bad outcome but for some highly subjective cases we have to just draw a somewhat arbitrary line.
Risk victimizes those who are exposed to it. When it is trivial to identify a single person who is exposed to the risk, we don't call it "victimless", we call it "endangerment".
Why, when an act exposes multiple unnamed people to a risk, do some call it a "victimless" crime? Just because it's difficult to identify those exposed to a risk doesn't mean that people haven't been placed at risk.
If you share the road with a drunk driver but they crash into someone else are you a victim? Does their insurer compensate you?
Being exposed to risk does not make you a victim. You need to actually be harmed.
If your brother takes opiods but stops you are not a victim. If your bother takes opiods, gets addicted and ruins your family then you are.
Shooting a gun in the air, speeding, all sorts of unsafe things can have no victim, or they can have a victim depending on how things go.
We don't criminalize these things because they have victims when you do them right. They are usually victimless. We criminalize them because there's too much luck involved and we don't like the odds.
> The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal
Are very different reasons.
Drugs are illegal because of big alc biz lobby, religious interference and orchestrated mass hysteria. The effect: the police can target any group, search them hard and lock some up because "drug". If the police would search hard in Beverly Hills they'd also find a lot, but they choose not to. It gives the police the power to hurt any group they choose because we all do drugs.
Speeding is an offense because it causes harm to others in some cases. Also there is an environmental impact. You choose to roll your car in public roads, you need a license, a proper car and to follow the rules. Cars can be seriously dangerous for other people on the roads. And it is in most cases "an offense"! Not a crime. You get a fine, not a jail sentence.
The only reason tobacco isn't banned straight up is it would cause untold disruption in the older addicted population. By banning sales to younger people, they are trying to prevent the next generation from becoming addicted, reducing the impact a future complete ban would cause. It's a temporary solution that will eventually lead to total ban.
This line of reasoning doesn't capture any nuance. These kinds of things operate on an allowlist. Unless there is a law enacted specifically as an exception then no, in general age discrimination is not okay.
Voting, alcohol, weed, driving, truancy, parental control, marriage, consent for sex, contract law, criminal law, social security, retirement accounts, and military service all discriminate based on age despite it being the guiding principle that you should avoid using age for restrictions when possible. The law has plenty of examples of min and max ages.
If there was any other way to ban cigarettes without making life miserable for people who are currently addicted? Because we should absolutely ban cigarettes. The victim is the cigarette smoker and the crime is the manufacture and sale of a an addictive substance that it not safe to use in any amount.
I agree with you that a law making it illegal for people to smoke is silly, the law should apply to manufacturers and distributors.
All drugs should be decriminalized. Shooting people in drug raids is far worse for those people than are the drugs. Likewise, locking people in cages with other misfits, criminals, malcontents, and addicts isn’t smart (especially considering that drugs are in the prisons too). If the goal is truly harm reduction, people need to simply work to convince drug users to not use drugs (whether those are opioids, alcohol, tobacco, meth, whatever).
Arrest them for assault...? Basically every study or reasonable implementation of decriminalization has shown both fewer negative effects of drug use, and in many cases decreased drug use itself.
So there is in fact a simple answer, and I think you'll find that drug laws were likely conceived much more cynically than for the protection of the common person.
We have already (as a society) decided we will no longer forcibly help people, so what do you do with someone that hurts others to feed their addiction?
Put them all in jail for every little offense? Fine them? (they have no money) Force them into rehab? (another form of jail) Let the roam the streets attacking people? (recycle through jail or rehab)
Assault is not a "little offense". Anyone convicted of criminal assault should spend a significant amount of time in prison (regardless of whether they're a drug addict or not) in order to protect the rest of society.
Assaulting people for drug money is an artifact of the drug war, not the drug. Alcohol addicts don't typically assault people for alcohol money. Alcohol gangs do not shoot each other up on the streets over alcohol territory. Or they haven't since 1933.
I can agree with that, but what is it? It can't be forced rehab, that is just jail but different. And addicts by definition _won't_ seek help or a solution.
I don't agree with your definition, often people affected by addiction will desperately seek help. Unfortunately, many fall into relapse cycles and it's a long and hard process to recovery.
I think a good solution would be making quality non-forced resources available for free. For example, rehab, therapy, or jobs specifically created for those seeking to overcome their addiction. Ideally these programs could pay for themselves in net returns for society as a whole.
Sorry for the late reply. I think much of the help available is cost prohibitive, I think addiction treatment programs should be free. A much better use of money than locking people up in cages which is both inhumane and more expensive.
What you are thinking of as the side effects of drug addiction are mainly the side effects of prohibition. Alcohol addiction is a serious problem, with serious negative consequences. So we made it illegal. And then we had two problems instead of one. Drug laws do not decrease addiction rates. They do make drugs unnecessarily expensive, and force addicts to interact with violent criminal gangs to get them. The negative unintended consequences of drug prohibition are worse than the problem they purport, but fail to solve.
Why am I forced to choose any or just one? Why do you think alcohol does less harm then any of the others?
Currently far, far more children die due to alcohol than the others, and while that's definitely due to availability it's not obvious that wouldn't still be the case if all were legal.
> Why do you think alcohol does less harm then any of the others?
A simple test, give each to a baby/small child and see what happens... I lived in a time where babies were given tiny amounts of alcohol for pain relief and it did no harm that I ever heard. I doubt you can say the same for meth.
I believe that the consensus is that it did cause a small amount of harm and there likely are horror stories you never heard, that's why the practice stopped, but giving children meth is called adderal.
Children also had regular access to small amounts of coke and heroin probably in your grandparents or great grandparents life, remember Coca Cola and laudanum was used for teething. You've never heard of harm from that. Your test says all of them pass.
You are mistaken. Vast numbers of American teens are prescribed amphetamines every day. The main difference between elicit recreational methamphetamine use and medical/psychological amphetamine use is circumstances and dosing. Kids on Ritalin are generally in safe situations where they have consulted a psychologist with the involvement of their parents, and are given a pure, unadulterated, small, carefully dosed amount of amphetamines. Meth addicts are typically people with more serious mental issues and in precarious situations, given massive and uncertain doses of unpure, perhaps adulterated amphetamines.
The disparate outcomes of those groups are much more about the dosage and the personal/social situation.
Pharmacologically, they are pretty much the same drug.
But if the person they attacked dies, arresting the attacker after the fact doesn't bring them back to life. Do you also think DUI should be legal until you get in a crash?
> Do you also think DUI should be legal until you get in a crash?
No clearly we should charge anyone found in possession of alcohol with a felony to lower the possibility.
Drinking is not a crime, being drunk alone is not a crime, driving is not a crime. Being drunk, while driving is. On the other hand, assault is a crime regardless.
I would argue that any drug that are depressants would have a different effect when high vs when the user is in withdrawl. Marijuana is considerably different than narcotics from my first hand experience/witness of it's effect on people.
Dope heads don't jones for their next hit. But I have seen a sweet young naive young teen turn into a mugger from meth.
I'm not refuting and generally agree with your sentiment here in harm reduction but I tried to see the collateral damage of drug raids vs drugs.
In the US the CDC reported 100,000 overdoses from drugs in the 12 months preceding April 2021[1]. I can't find how many people die from drug raids specifically but this Al-Jazeera article shows 1,068 people being killed by the police a year after George Floyd died[2].
And for a little more context Statista[3] shows 21,750 people being murdered in 2020.
Police kill at ~1% the rate of drug deaths.
Citizens kill at ~20% the rate of drug deaths.
An addict can become not an addict. A person killed by police cannot become anything other than a corpse. The severity of the harm has a temporal component due to time preference.
EDIT: Also, dying of overdose is both a symptom of illegality and of the addiction. If a thing is outlawed the production isn’t exactly regular and therefore strength/purity of the substance varies.
Agreed. I'm in no way advocating people dying from any source. Drugs laws are ridiculous in so many ways. I was just trying to wrap my head around what the true numbers are as it helps put things into context.
Oh absolutely. Something like marijuana should not have ever been a crime. It's absurd and horrifying to think of people spending their lives behind bars for that and many other drug offenses.
I am not sure where I fall on the all drugs should be legal argument but I do know that because I spent ~$400 to get a medical marijuana card I can legally buy pot at the local dispensary in my state and smoke it with zero repercussions. In the mean time the jails are absolutely full of people who are there because they did not spend the $400. It is morally insane for that to continue. People are getting rich off selling marijuana in a dispensary while others are serving life sentences for selling it out of their home.
I take a lot of Non-FDA approved gray market and black market medicine. If all drugs are legal then such medical drugs should be legal as well. At least the ones I take are health promoting, non-addictive and non-habit forming.
I think a big part of the resistance to legalization is the medical establishment maintaining their monopoly supplier status on medicine.
Back in the 90's I worked on a concrete crew for a summer. Building big box store type buildings. They pour the floor, then pour the walls on top of the floor, then tip the walls up and weld them together with metal flanges embedded in the concrete.
Nearly everyone on the crew did meth (except like 2 guys, I was one). Often work would start like 3:00 AM to prevent rapid drying. No lunch to speak of. Expected to literally run on the job site from one task to another. I suppose there may have been potential labor complaints but they never happened or weren't investigated.
It wasn't unusual for people to burn out and just not show up. That was part of the calculus I think by management. One guy fell asleep in his truck and could not be woken up (after presumably being up for a few days).
I quit after a few months but later saw my (low level) supervisor at a restaurant. He was alone and didn't look good. He told me how his life had gotten increasingly out of control and he had tried to kill himself (before finding Jesus per his words).
Company didn't care. They were making money. They turned a blind eye to what was going on. The human wreckage generated was awful however.
You think if meth is legal over the counter this won't be more prevalent? I'm pretty sure it will. Meth kills, and not just the body.
I would consider it the worst or most powerful drug in terms of access, addiction and intoxication. It's literally poison, and what it can do to an individual I feel is unlike most other illicit substances.
What about meth, fentanyl or oxycotin? (to name just a few)
I would consider these more literal poison by comparison to alcohol by any objective manner. If they are all legal, then access/addiction/intoxication are not even close to compare to alcohol, they are all far worse.
They're not poison though based on they way they work with neuroreceptors whereas alcohol limits neurotransmission all together. None of them are good, and in excess they're both terrible.
Alcohol is only a problem because some people do it so much. Alot of people I know drink all the time-- like several times a week. They could look a little younger but generally have passable bills of health.
Also we have to question who's behind this statement. For all we know it's the PRC starting a new teetotalling campaign in their land.
Agreed. Banning it has been tried at least once, in the USA, and apparently it didn't work very well. There were too many people that wanted alcohol and were willing to defy government to have it. Government is at least partially (more in some countries than others) by consent of the governed.
But also on the contrary to your "none of the other drugs" point, I can't think of any possible reason why cigarettes weren't outright banned 40 years ago, except that they have exactly the same mechanism keeping them legal.
Counterpoint: alcohol is one of the best drugs on the planet for anyone on the spectrum of introversion to crippling social anxiety.
In all my (many) years, I have found no better path to becoming socially acceptable (even likable) to neurotypicals/extroverts than 3-4 shots of vodka. This is an unfortunate, but very real fact for many of us. I've heard good things about Phenibut, but (1) it's very difficult to obtain, and (2) it is also apparently habit-forming.
I’ve recently taken to trying Kava, which seems to be relatively popular among people trying to quit alcohol/benzos/etc.
Supposedly it also helps with disinhibition and socialization, but admittedly I haven’t tried it in a social setting so I’m not sure myself. It certainly does relax me and chill me out though without the dumbing down of alcohol.
Of course, by the things I’ve seen in those “pop-medical” sites that fill Google search results, you’d think it’s much more dangerous than alcohol.
Kava is great and for sure is wonderful in a social setting. I've taken to Kava recently and enjoy it casually (1 to 2 times a week) as its a shorter duration than alcohol, I get no hangover, and while I relax I don't lose my inhibitions. I also have drank it at a kava bar and find it to be an enjoyable social experience where the atmosphere is very bar like. I'm not totally against alcohol but Kava for sure is underrated and scratches many of the same itches as it were. Highly recommended.
Can definitely second kava. I went to a kava bar several times a few months ago and found it to be a great alcohol alternative. It also filled the niche of being a place where the atmosphere was more similar to a cafe so I could read a book or work on something in isolation, but without the downside of caffeine where you can't do that in the evening without ruining sleep quality. The social effects were definitely there.
Like you said, the crowd was largely people trying to quit or who had quit alcohol or benzos along with a fair amount of neurodivergent people. Being able to set aside some of my social anxiety and talk with them is part of what led to me getting assessed and diagnosed for autism recently.
The grandparent comment also mentioned phenibut which I find even more enjoyable, but like they said it can be habit forming and has a tolerance build up that limits safe use to once or twice a week.
I love kava. I used to use a lot of substances when I was younger, but quit for health reasons. Still, I get bothered by stress pretty often. Kava at the end of a long day is exactly what I need. Bonus points that there's no habituation.
GHB is probably an even better replacement than Phenibut as it's safer, has less of a hangover/rebound and can be used more often to no detriment but it has a worse reputation, needs to be dosed correctly (taking twice the dose accidentally means you pass out for 4 hours), and if you for some reason end up using it 24/7 the addiction is as bad to kick as with benzos or alcohol.
I used to be devastatingly introverted. Alcohol helped, but it’s nothing compared to GHB or MDMA. Ecstasy will give you the gift of gab like you can’t believe.
minor edit: I should say I am ignoring the context of where it’s acceptable to do such things. You probably shouldn’t do G at Christmas with the in-laws. (Though our quarantine Christmas this year with friends…) I’m just making a bit of a pedantic bit that there are club drugs out there that are pretty wild in how they can open you up socially.
sure, but its not really socially acceptable to drop X at the company happy hour. also mistakenly falling into a G Hole at the local BBQ is generally frowned upon. Having a couple beers is unlikely to lead to career or social suicide.
IF the "few beers" turns into ONE too many, it will lead to the same career and social suicide. Driving under the influence, fighting, lewd acts, etc... I live in a state where Weed is legal. I don't see people high decide to fight everyone at the party. I have seen this with alcohol more than I care to admit.
G yes, but MDMA can hardly reliablyreplace alcohol for general social settings given that you cannot do it all that often without issues, and that it has an even worse comedown for most people.
There are also many people who self medicate with opioids to treat chronic depression. I certainly wouldn't recommend that depressed people try opioids, but empirically it seems to be effective in reducing symptoms for some patients at least temporarily.
> Counterpoint: alcohol is one of the best drugs on the planet for anyone on the spectrum of introversion to crippling social anxiety.
I completely disagree and I think you should consider the possibility that alcohol is creating your anxiety in the first place. My years-long struggle with social anxiety disappeared after I decided to quit drinking for good.
Speaking from experience, as an older guy with crippling social anxiety and 30+ yrs of alcohol use/abuse, I can say that it superficially helps with social anxiety. However, it does not get to the root cause(s) of said anxiety. Professional help is needed to find and work on fixing those. The side effects, physical and psychological, of regular alcohol consumption are far worse than living with social anxiety. I also think it's unhealthy to try to fix one's psychological issues with drugs/medications without also looking at and trying to fix the reasons for their use in the first place.
Also, I now have to undergo quite a few yearly medical tests to keep an eye on my body after years of self medicating for my extreme social anxiety.
FWIW, I don't say these things as a teetotaler. I believe in harm reduction.
I agree with the point on consistency, but must substances be viewed through the lens of "abuse" and "mental health"? It's not clear if you are implying that use of alcohol is generally a form of drug abuse related to mental health. In fact I'm not sure we can adequately define what is "abuse" in this case.
Take for instance Lemmy from Motorhead, who used alcohol and drugs heavily throughout his life and probably died an early death as a result; can that really be considered abuse when he, pardon my French, didn't give a shit?
For some people, things like alcohol are a serious issue and overuse can stem from both physical and psychological addiction. Then you've got people who use it sparingly. And yet there are people who drink heavily, know exactly what they're doing, and can't easily be classified as addicts without projecting one's own life choices unto them.
Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should probably consider legalizing everything else that's less harmful to at least be consistent.
I've never understood the arguments like yours, which I used to hear a half-century ago in high school, and now see presented online. They distill down to "We allow this one bad thing, so we should allow all of the other bad things, too." As if having more bad things is better than having fewer bad things.
I don't drink, so I don't care if alcohol gets banned or restricted or whatever. But these type of arguments always strike me as little more than "Billy jumped off the bridge, so I can, too!"
I would much rather legalize pot over alcohol being illegal. If alcohol had the same usage as pot we would have far fewer deaths. My only complaint is that pot smells awful (though alcohol isn’t much better).
There is such thing as a slippery slope and a dam that overruneth.
We’ve inherited use of alcohol over millennia —it’d be an uphill battle to rid ourselves of it short of fundamentalist dogmatism.
Some places in Central Asia have socialized opiate usage —but they too have unwritten rules about usage, or at least traditionally had them observed (it was a ‘luxury’ of old age).
If you allow an anything goes policy, you’ll end up with a decaying society. While I don’t propose prosecuting consumption because it’s the wrong focus, we should prosecute production and distribution of hard drugs.
Else you may end up with the likes of XIX century in China, or huffers in metro Manila.
Just to show how facile this reasoning is, let's flip the bit:
"Alcohol is one of the worst 'drugs' on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should make sure we keep other drugs illegal by default unless shown individually, through decades of research, to be safe. Otherwise we will burden our healthcare system and create a national catastrophe. As evidence of this danger, I submit the history of alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and liver disease, and their effects on our healthcare system."
I offer that you can only do one of two things now:
1. Argue against my advocacy for inconsistency using personal incredulity
2. Provide a deeper argument that relies on something more than an appeal to consistency
Edit: added a clause to sweeten my argument for inconsistency
I hate the term "legalize" because all things are legal (in the U.S.A.) until they are made illegal. "Legalize" verbiage constantly tells people that they have to be selectively given rights, not selectively taken away.
The worst thing about alcohol today is how America is letting alcoholics dictate pandemic responses, as if we believe that bars are more important than schools.
This comes from the point of view that harm is a scalar quantity. There are many different dimensions of harm and they vary wildly for each activity/drug. Reality is more nuanced than any single measure we select.
Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution. So I don't think "we allow one bad thing and we can't get rid of it, so let's allow all bad things" makes a particularly compelling argument.
(FWIW, I'm generally not against legalization nor do I think all drugs are net-negative. I just find the argument as laid out to be unconvincing.)
> Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution.
It was recognized as impractical fairly quickly, despite having fairly similar concrete outcomes to the drug war, for which a similar recognition has been much slower and less complete. But, again, that's just another layer of inconsistency in the same direction, not a mitigation of it.
Again, I'm not against legalization. But I'd like to see more concrete mitigation of the downsides. Just stating that we should aim for consistency does nothing about the blowback. "Legalize it to be consistent" seems as facile a solution as "Prohibit it because it can be dangerous" in that they ignore the complexities of implementation.
> Alcohol is one of the worst "drugs" on a personal/societal harm scale
Addiction is, not alcohol in itself. I haven't been anywhere close to drunk in a decade. I still enjoy a glass of whisky or a cold beer here and there.
People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait. I've seen the damage of weed in my friends, it's just as bad as alcohol tbh. I never understood the "it's bad so let's legalise other bad things"
>People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait.
You're blatantly assuming here and making it a categorical statement. They usually don't, neither statistically or at least in my experience, anecdotally. I and many friends of mine regularly drink, but most of us barely touch other drugs. Weed occasionally for some of my friends (I personally dislike it intensely) but things like coke and so forth, pretty much nothing, in a wide group of people who are regular consumers of alcohol.
Less "no fun allowed" generic conspiracy stuff, more "hey, these are the consequences to some of that fun, please keep them in mind as you establish the risk level you're comfortable with".
> Cost-effective interventions to reduce alcohol consumption include strengthening restrictions on alcohol availability, enforcing bans on alcohol advertising, and facilitating access to screening and treatment.
"Restrictions on alcohol availability" could be anti-fun if implemented in the extreme (hopefully we've learned prohibition doesn't work), the other two are pretty standard.
Which ones? They say to regulate who can sell alcohol, raise prices/taxes, raise the drinking age, limit advertising, add prominent warnings...I guess those first few are arguably "anti-fun", but they don't seem especially so.
Sure, interstate speedlimits are somewhat about gas mileage. But I'm going to need some citation from you that a 25mph speedlimit in a residential area is about environmental impacts and not safety.
Sure the autobahn isn't a meat grinder, but there's a difference between safe and unsafe, and unsafe doesn't mean everyone dies.
Regardless, doesn't matter if the regulation is for safety or environmental protection, being "anti-fun" isn't an argument against them.
I'm sorry, but that's an opinion piece written by a very biased source. This organization was founded to oppose the 55mph speedlimit back in the 80s and since then have moved on to things like opposing drunk driving laws. Sure they claim all kinds of stats in that blog you linked, but they provide no sources for those stats.
The problem is that a general statement like "no alcohol is good for the heart" is that it is probably factually wrong.And I base this on the fact that grapes for example is known to be a very good fruit for all-things blood and especially red cells.(Most notably iron here).This is not pseudo-science.
And while yes, you could say "that's not alcohol itself" and that's correct, but obviously not all alcohol is equivalent, and also you cannot exactly separate alcohol and examine it in a vacuum.Alcohol is not consumed purely in the vast majority of cases.
Generally speaking if the institution name starts with "World" or "Global", it's more likely to say something to be accepted by virtually everyone, and most often that will sound dystopian and bullsh1t.The prohibition did not work(and i say this as someone who drinks maybe <=5 times a year, very much liking to stay lucid but also acknowledging the benefits of such an experience when i do).The drug on war did not work.Institutions want to regulate any substance that deviates thought from the mainstream hivemind narrative.Your statement can easily be deconstructed by more than 2000 years of written history where people battled whether consumed drugs and especially alcohol is or not beneficial for health.With the exceptions of exaggeration in certain cultures(see alcoholism in russia) this is not an issue.The other exaggeration happened in US with Prohibition and we've seen that's also not desirable, and it promotes drinking irresponsibly.
You know, most (Americans) drink little or no alcohol. The cult of alcohol is certain they cannot live without it, which is part of the problem perhaps. But most do live without it. And are not eating bugs.
Source that most Americans drink little or no alcohol? Apparently in 2019, 54.9% of respondents[1] had alcohol in the last month. And I would imagine polls like this are generally under-reported, not over.
I drank alcohol in the past month. I drink about once a month. I'd assume that that counts as "little or no alcohol". Thus, if just 1/11 of those 54.9% are like me, his statement to be true.
Yeah, currently there are three people using the same data to "disprove" the parent, which is baffling to me. As I said in another reply, 45% of people had no alcohol in the past month, so "most Americans drink a little or not at all" seems plausible, or at least not disproved by this data. I understand disagreeing with that sentiment (there are plenty of rational arguments that most people drink more than "a little"), but why harm the image of one's motivation by purposefully omitting critical details from the post one is responding to?
While a little unclear on details, this seems to put the parent's assertion well within the realm of possibility. 45% of people had nothing to drink in the past month. It's therefore believable, barring additional data, that the majority of people drink at most a "little", as the parent put it. Are you interpreting this differently?
54.9 percent reported that they drank in the past month
Consider this: I am in the group that can say "they drank in the last month." It is also simultaneously true that I "drink little or no alcohol" (by any reasonable standard).
How can that be? Well, if you took my last 12 months worth of alcohol consumption and calculated my "average drinks per month" the number would round to 0. So yes, I do drink, and by happenstance it happens that I've had a drink in the last month. But I think that easily qualifies as "little or no alcohol".
And I mean, cigarettes are cool. There's a reason they still exist as a trope in movies and it's not all due to marketing. It lends something to the character.
That's not to say there isn't or can't be a healthier replacement, of course.
Alcohol is also fun because it lowers inhibitions and makes people do stupid things they ordinarily wouldn't. Cigarettes being cool is definitely a marketing thing though.
I'm not getting that kind of attitude from this document. It seems to just be a holistic counterpoint to the "common knowledge" that "a little bit of alcohol can be good for the heart". What is this intense negativity you're sarcastically paraphrasing?
I used this argument to myself for years so I could ignore my alcoholism. Well if the French and Italians drink as much wine as they do, a bottle or 4 a day is probably good for me.
Could you please explain to me the logical link between the scientific evidence that alchol is harmful in any quantity and the concepts of "having fun" and being a "slave to society"? Let's also overlook your dogwhistle regarding "eating the bugs"
It also recommends some social policies to encourage people to follow said advice, though they seem like pretty tame recommendations to me. (To be fair I hate the "you can't buy a beer at 11:45am on a Sunday" rule where I live, but it's not especially harsh.)
If you see a study that purports to show health benefits of drinking check to see if it distinguishes lifelong teetotalers vs recovering alcoholics. Lifelong teetotalers are much healthier than an alcoholic who's quit drinking, on average. The studies, at least in the US, should also control for wealth.
Bingo. A lot of studies that purport health benefits from drinking are comparing "sick quitters" who drank themselves into health problems to normal people who have the occasional drink and don't bother to control for socioeconomic status
They've been consistent on the positive cardiovascular effects from mild consumption of red wine forever.
> 48 animal and 37 human studies were included in data extraction following screening. Significant improvements in measures of blood pressure and vascular function following RWP were seen in 84% and 100% of animal studies, respectively. Human studies indicated significant improvements in systolic blood pressure overall (− 2.6 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 4.8, − 0.4]), with a greater improvement in pure-resveratrol studies alone (− 3.7 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 7.3, − 0.0]). No significant effects of RWP were seen in diastolic blood pressure or flow-mediated dilation (FMD) of the brachial artery.
It's pretty hard to build a study... You have to get a group of participants who are willing to drink alcohol everyday or never drink it again depending on which group they are assigned to.
Funny that they're saying this now because fermented drinks used to protect people from health issues when the water supply was not clean enough to drink.
With beer, this was because the brewer needed to boil the water used in order to kill off any microbes which would compete with the yeast, or it would go "off". It's a very important step for brewing beer. Then the beer would be stored in barrels/casks to help reduce the chance of introducing further microbes, plus the use of preservatives like hops to help keep it longer.
With wine, people generally mashed the grapes immediately after picking to ensure that the yeast took hold before any harmful bacteria did. Then followed the same process of barrelling it to prevent other microbes from getting in. People also learned that added sugar served to further preserve wines that would be stored for longer periods of time.
If people would have boiled their drinking water, it would have been safe to drink.
> With beer, this was because the brewer needed to boil the water
No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew kits suggest using a fairly small amount of hot water to disolve the malt extract, and to get it up to fermentation temperature.
Beer is safer to drink because the yeast out-competes pathogens, and because it causes a pH change that inhibits and/or kills them.
I once toured a microbrewery which produces beers the same way they did in colonial times. This involved pumping the water up ~20 feet into a copper kettle situated above an elevated brick furnace. The water was boiled, then gravity fed down canals via ladles to other kettles for mashing and lautering.
Now, this brewery was replicating 19th century American brewing, but these ideas probably came from Europe.
How else are they going to get water to a specific temperature before the invention of thermometers?
Please consult literally any intro guide to home brewing. They all call for boiling all of the water. I have brewed dozens of batches of beer at home and always boil all of it. I don't know as much about commercial brewing but I've never heard or read of partial boiling as a common technique in commercial brewing. (There is such a thing as "raw ale", but the fact that it has a special name to indicate the lack of boiling tells you it is the exception to the rule).
Boiling is also not only about sterilization. It is also fundamental to the character of the beer. It causes isomerization of the alpha acids in hops which is responsible for the bitter flavors in beer. It also denatures proteins in the wort resulting in clearer beer. See: https://www.love2brew.com/Articles.asp?ID=573
Is it possible that boiling the water and then adding the yeast is a modern practice? People in older times didn't know about yeasts (they didn't know anything about microorganisms). So they couldn't go and buy brewer's yeast from the shop to make beer, they'd have to culture it by natural fermentation. So they couldn't boil the beer before it fermented. Although they could perhaps keep a culture from an early batch and then boil the water of subsequent batches, until they needed to replenish their culture?
That's how traditional yogurt making works. If you ask most people who know how to make yogurt they'll tell you: 1) you boil the milk, 2) you let it cool, and 3) you add yogurt. The yogurt is the fermentation culture (lactic acid bacteria rather than yeasts) and while making yogurt propagates it, at some point someone needs to make yogurt without already having yogurt. The only way to do that is to start with milk that wasn't boiled because boiling kills the culture (the bacteria in yogurt are thermophiles but they won't survive being boiled!). Perhaps something like that happened with brewing also?
Or maybe it's more like modern cheesemaking? Nowadays most cheese is made with pasteurised milk. To make cheese, the milk has to be cultured with lactic acid bacteria, but pasteurisation kills those off. So modern cheesemakers add lyophilised culture to their milk after they pasteurise it. Traditionally though the only way to obtain culture was to leave the milk alone, use it raw. Back in the day people didn't even know about the existence of bacteria so they had no reason to pasteurise their cheesemaking milk in the first place.
So how old is the practice of boiling the water for beer? Is it possible it's something that's only done today thanks to the knowledge of microorganisms?
> No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew kits suggest using a fairly small amount of hot water to disolve the malt extract, and to get it up to fermentation temperature.
Boiling is a pretty important step in brewing, both in the home and in the commercial brewery. Yes you could technically make beer without boiling it, but that is not the norm. Boiling is used not only for sanitation, but also to allow the hop oils to isomerize and become soluble in the wort, as well as reduce the wort volume to make the wort more concentrated, since the sparging step produces a lot of diluted wort (when using grains rather than extract). Wort in a can (malt extract) means you may not be concerned with concentrating the wort since you could control that, but you still generally want to isomerize the hop oils.
Your point about needing to wait for the wort to cool is correct, but that's precisely what brewers do.. they cool the wort until it gets to yeast 'pitching' temperature
Yes. There's a reason every early human civilization was located near a body of water. Water is necessary for humans. Clean water. Alcohol also doesn't have a significant disinfecting property until at least 30% ABV. And it wasn't until the middle ages that distilled alcohols became common
Interesting how there's a major shift in the knowledge about risks of things like sugar, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. And it usually turns out there was an industry group involved in sort of a coverup. The lesson here is to take any health claims or dismissal or risks with a grain of salt when there's a big industry behind it.
One of my favorite examples of this is how coconut oil is advertised all over youtube by thousands of influencers as a superfood that must be a part of a healthy diet.
(Especially since it's hardly an oil in my opinion -- it's partially solid at room temperature)
There's absolutely no reliable evidence that coconut oil has any beneficial effects on the human body, and I really don't see why anybody would believe that an oil high in saturated fats is good for you.
There's a ton of alternative kinds of sugar that are marketed as healthier than sugar but are in fact just sugar extracted from a different plant or other source. Sugar is sugar.
It would be more accurate to say that there is no strong evidence that saturated fats are bad for you.
Lots of the previous science was bad science that did not account for confounding factors, such as not taking into account that lots of fast food has lots of saturated fats(and made up for a large portion of saturated fat consumption) and adjusting for that. ie the difference between "do sat fats make people unhealthy" and "does eating fast food(which happens to have sat fats) make people unhealthy"
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, there is also no strong evidence showing cholesterol/eggs are bad, and neither is there any evidence showing salt is bad(if you are healthy). Lots of nutrition studies have such laughably silly methodology. Not sure why they were ever taken seriously.
Dietary Cholesterol / Blood Cholesterol - cholesterol restriction has been removed from dietary guidelines in the US, so people have taken that seriously.
Increased saturated fat is pretty well associated with LDL levels, which is associated with cardiovascular disease risk. Not sure that I've ever seen any contrary studies recently - I would be interested if you could link any you are aware of... I guess the questions I have seen are around carb intake and fat intake, but that's kind of a separate issue
Salt is definitely more questionable, but seems like if you are avoiding hyperprocessed foods, you are going to intake less salt, so maybe a non-issue...
There seems to be a moderate reduction in cardiovascular events, BUT - there is NO CHANGE in mortality or even cardiac mortality. Also note, these studies may be victim to the saturated-fats-are-fast-food issue.
If saturated fats were actually bad, like smoking is, I think we would see more significant results than "10-15% decrease in events that doesn't even change peoples' overall outcomes".
I'm not saying you should avoid coconut oil, I just think it's a very questionable claim that cooking with coconut oil instead of other plant based oils like canola oil is going to improve your health in any way.
I suspect that high fats are fine and high carbs are fine, but having both high fats + high carbs leads to health problems. Fat heavy leads to keto metabolic state, heavy carbs lead to the other metabolic state. Having both at the same time is the issue, my opinion.
> I really don't see why anybody would believe that an oil high in saturated fats is good for you.
A lot of people do if you look around. Serious people I mean. They usually sing the praises of butter (and ghee), but the same reasoning is applied now to coconut oil.
I always scoffed at people who believed "a glass of wine every night is good for you." It seems pretty obvious that ingesting literal poison every day is not good for you.
Indeed, an NIH funded longitudinal study on alcohol kicked off in 2014 and it was shut down for being tainted by industry money: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/health/alcohol-nih-drinki... - you can't necessarily even trust publicly funded science when it impacts large industries.
Of course you'd say that. You clearly work for the salt lobby! In all seriousness though, who stands to benefit from this? In the case of sugar, doctors wanted to suggest limiting it, but lobbyists pushed for the advocation of limiting fat intake instead (which was thought to be just as unhealthy at the time). Sugar was a clear substitute because removing fat makes things taste like, well, cardboard. Off the top of my head, I'm not aware of any substitutes for tobacco products or alcohol. Recreational services, maybe? Even Bowling alleys typically have bars.
> major shift in the knowledge about risks of things like sugar, cigarettes, alcohol...
In each of these case, the medical and scientific community didn't have a vested interests in these entities. I mean, the medical community didn't come up with smoking or alcohol consumption...
Now imagine some entity or procedure that the medical/scientific community came up with and the big business found way to make huge money off of, such that there is a natural alignment of incentives for the scientific community and big business to keep this thing propped up. Such a thing, even if doing great harm, is sure to go on for a vastly longer period of time, if not perpetually....
Agreed, although a single shot of moonshine is a equivalent to a little over a pint of beer. You can drink that and be well within alcohol consumption guidelines in US. Even most alcohol-naïve people would only be minimally intoxicated from a single shot of moonshine.
I'm sure drinking has some effect on you, but I'm not sure one non-peer reviewed which by their own papers shows <18 drinks / week shows baseline within the uncertainty band is evidence of any noticeable mental decline. In fact several of the graphs, it shows an increase in matter volume for low non-zero amounts vs zero.
From Wikipedia:
Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
My great grandfather sat in a chair and drank from his handle of whiskey every day until his death also at 96. I had heard stories of workers on his farm not realize he was drinking during the work day until the tractor plowed through a neighboring fence causing them to look up in concern to see him passed out on the seat.
I unfortunately saw many in my family use his fortunate long life span, regardless of drink consumption, as an enabler to drink like that. Including myself, up until about 90 days ago.
Yep, and there's always that one person who trots out that their grandmother smoked 2 packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day and lived to be 100. Anecdata is not data.
The statement is only interesting when you consider a sizeable population who regularly drank the % alcohol and lived to 96. It’s a classic case of selection bias
I wish this info was more well known. My family still labors under the old info of thinking a little of that poison is healthy. And I have watched that be incorrect.
That's interesting. I decided to look up to see if there were any theories on why that might be the case. It looks like results on this are inconclusive across the board and conflict of interest rears its ugly head yet again, but I found this:
Alcohol is a carcinogen, it's bad for the liver, and while I didn't know, I'm not surprised it's bad for the heart.
Keep drinking to a minimum, and if possible keep it social. Life's short, enjoy a beer or glass of whiskey, but try to minimize it's harms, or just take mushrooms.
Also keep an eye out if you're a binge drinker, it's the second type of alcoholic, you don't drink everyday, but when you do drink you drink until you pass out.
I think you start working and the only "fun" situations you are in are meetings at a pub after work with drink involved. After few years you naturally start to associate fun off-work time with drinking.
Not at all, I’m referring mainly to those who feel like they have to drink to enjoy themselves. Of course there are adults who don’t have to drink to enjoy themselves (there are many who have never had a drink)
I saw some drunken adults. Looks like they are having more fun than babies, kids and teenagers. And they get some form of "support" by other adults, unlike babies, kids and teenagers would get if they behaved the same. Until it starts ruining your life, being a drunken adult seems fun and acceptable.
My take on it is that as adults you mature and begin to abide by all the rules of society. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions and "allows" you to act like you were as a child.
Yes, but wine makes food taste infinitely better. I don't want to eat my rare filet with a glass of water, I want to eat it with and chilled bottle of natural Syrah from the North Rhone (preferably Dard et Ribo)
I have tremendous enjoyment in my life without drinking. Running, hiking, biking, cooking, movies, road trips, museums, concerts, new restaurants, etc…
There are also enjoyable things that involve drinking too, but _needing_ a drink to enjoy oneself seems a bit hyperbolic for the average adult, no?
I hike and camp a lot with my kid’s Scout troop, and agree: there’s so much fun you can have without alcohol. That said, there’s also a time factor. When we’re up in the mountains, we have a couple of days dedicated to the activity, and we can all relax into it. When a bunch of coworkers go out after work, they’ve got a couple of hours to go from work-mode to play-mode before going home for the night, and alcohol can greatly facilitate how quickly a person can switch from one to the other.
I enjoy the same things you’re talking about sober (except maybe concerts — is that even legal?), but understand why a group of friends would start their evening together with a round of drinks.
Sure but if you are stuck at home because its 8pm on a tuesday because you work all day you can’t exactly go hiking. If you have money and time its easy to entertain yourself.
> Then at some point people, as adults, feel like they have to drink to enjoy themselves? I wonder what happened.
It feels like this question is disingenuous. You don't need fire starter to start a fire either, but wouldn't it be silly to conclude fire starter doesn't make starting a fire easier? Moderate alcohol consumption in an intimate environment is a lot of fun.
Put differently, if alcohol didn't present such serious health risks, I wouldn't be making an effort to cut it out of my social circles. As it stands, though, my friends, family and I have started referring to it as "poison", just to be totally transparent about what we're doing when we meet for drinks.
Your claim that moderate alcohol consumption makes things more fun is part of the point of my post. Is this actually true, or just a rationalization of people who already drink?
It is true. It allows some people open up in ways they wouldnt before. Your point could apply to psychedelics, are they necessary for personal growth and changing perspectives? No. Can they help & accelerate the process? Yes.
- anecdote from someone who doesnt like drinking much
I used to hate drinking and only drank very small quantities of alcohol at parties/gatherings. That's changed somewhat in the past few years. I've only been drunk 3-4 times in my life (I'm 29, male, living in a Western country), and even then it was mild (no blackouts, hangovers, feeling sick, etc.). However, I believe that when I do drink for social lubrication purposes, it does help. I'm quite introverted/withdrawn usually, and a few drinks definitely help with altering that balance a bit.
Of course, I've not done control trials on myself, with placebos and so on. It's just anecdata.
I mean come one, are we really going to argue that huge numbers of people are just fooling themselves into thinking that alcohol is fun? Yes. It is actually true that alcohol consumption makes many social situations more fun for many people.
Before I continue, I think it's also important to note different people metabolize alcohol differently and feel its effects differently. Many Russians can take care of 0,5L of vodka in one sitting and still function. (Russian men aged roughly 20-45 also die from alcohol at absurdly high rates.) So as with all things, our discussion is purely a subjective one -- I find it useful, though, as it helps me analyze my own drinking habits.
> Your claim that moderate alcohol consumption makes things more fun is part of the point of my post. Is this actually true, or just a rationalization of people who already drink?
Right. It's a good question, and I don't know the answer, and I've tried hard to introspect and distinguish between rationalizing and it being true.
As someone pointed out above, the fire starter analogy is better than one might think -- if you are enlightened enough, you don't need alcohol to start a fire. In my experience, though, few things open up a conversation with a stranger as quickly as a little alcohol. I'm not saying I've never had an intimate conversation with a stranger in which we both showed vulnerability without alcohol. But the psychoactive aspect of intoxication makes those conversations with alcohol more memorable, stranger or closest friend. I've tried hard to determine whether I'm just fooling myself, or if alcohol is actually making something "funner". My conclusion is that if I am fooling myself, the trick is good enough that I'll probably never figure it out.
More apt analogy than one would think. lighter fluid and any product specifically labeled a fire starter do not really help if one has a basic understanding of fire except in extreme cases like for some reason the wood is soaking wet. And they have significant downsides in cost. lighter fluid is just gross. With even a modest understanding of how fire works all one needs is wood. Newspaper is good for charcoal.
“Fire starter” products are mostly only useful to people who don’t know what they’re doing or aren’t actually using it to start the fire but want to squirt in lighter fluid just to see big flames.
we're missing the point here, but newspaper isn't good for charcoal. You need sustained heat to activate charcoal--paper burns too quickly. The one time I tried to do this, I ended up slathering it in olive oil which would retard the flames a bit and drag the burn out.
It's fine if you don't like to drink, nobody is saying you have to, but saying that it doesn't lubricate social situations is just naive. Is it a crutch? In some cases, sure. In other cases--an enhancer.
With a chimney you use olive oil on newspaper?! Anyway enough about fire starting. To be honest if you’re having fun with campfires like once in a blue moon and don’t really know what you’re doing, a fire starter can be an okay crutch, but if you want to go camping often to have fun it’s much easier and cheaper to just use the wood and maybe a bit of paper. But that’s enough hijacking this thread to fire starting.
People come reliant on alcohol and can’t do it without it. It becomes a prerequisite not an enhancer. That sounds more parasitic than anything else.
What's the difference between the life of a child and that of an adult? You seem to be very close to figuring it out. (Tip: adults have little to no leisure time).
"People with as yet undeveloped pre-frontal cortexes to limit their inhibitions, and analyze, second-guess and evaluate their actions before they take them, don't need a drug that specifically suppresses the executive functions of their PFC, so why do you?"
Among other things, alcohol became legal to drink. Adults take more road trips than babies and teenagers too, I wonder why they can’t have fun at home anymore.
I don’t really get this jump from “I enjoy drinking alcohol with friends” to someone accusing me of “being unable to enjoy myself without alcohol.” You could throw the same accusations at anyone for literally everything they enjoy doing. You can’t enjoy yourself without going out to see a movie! You can’t enjoy yourself without camping! You can’t enjoy yourself without listening to music!
I believe it's really just cultural. If you spend time with people who don't drink, they often have just as fun a time as drinkers. Humans have been around for a while and if we couldn't have fun once in a while we'd be long extinct. I think people overestimate the necessity of social lubricants. This probably goes hand in hand with the greater culture as well-- at least in America I think it's seen as more necessary because socially its seen as weird to behave really friendly with strangers unless you're imbibed.
Disclaimer, not a scientist, just a (3 year) sober alcoholic
One drink once in your life is not going to harm you. I think this is talking more about the "moderate" drinking of 1-2 servings per week.
That said, I've been down the whole alcohol path before and it ain't good for me. I don't know of any time since I've gotten sober that I thought back and said "Man, I wish I had been drunk for that"
It's an unnecessary risk. Maybe you'll do fine trying alcohol, maybe you'll become an addict and ruin your life. I don't think you're going to enhance your life by trying alcohol.
My parents and grandparents drinks wine daily… every single meal (no water at their table)… have done their entire life… grandpa died at 94 due to an accident… grandma 98 and going strong… both my parents are 75 healthy and a active (always around travelling). But for them alcohol is not a drug… is a beverage that goes very well with food! They never drink for the sake of it! As long as a person sees alcohol as a recreational drug he has a problem but it must not always be the case!
It's fine to never drink alcohol. One drink won't change anything measurable. Even this press release doesn't claim that one drink per day is harmful -- it merely claims that one drink per day has never been definitively shown to cause benefit.
A fitbit helped me discover how terrible alcohol is for your heart. I could clearly see which days I would have a drink because my average resting heart rate would go from 63-65 to 77-80!
Unlikely. A) I never worried about it, B) The effects last into my sleep.
The effect is also most pronounced in my sleep since my heart rate is usually quite consistent, it varies like 2 bpm most nights. But if I look at the last night I drank, my average heart rate is +10 from baseline and varied by 20 bpm during my sleep.
I had a doctor tell me it was probably preferable to have a beer after work to unwind than try to quit. I dunno, I think it's very dose and situation dependent. There are social aspects to drinking in our culture and being social has health benefits.
Always interesting when one group reports a subjective phenomenon, and someone else refutes their experience by pointing to an X mg/dL change in some serum test.
Obviously the experience is what matters, not what the machine says. Alcohol increases cortisol levels? Ok, all I know is I feel nice and relaxed right now.
Of course if I overdo it, or do it too often, then the next day will demand the debt repaid, or my baseline will shift upward. Ok, so don't overdo it.
You can get the same benefit of relaxed by making or buying a hops tincture in MCT Oil. The hops are what make a pilsner feel really relaxing. The pulse side is you don't have the harm from the alcohol.
Yes, and the takeaway from this brief should not be "reduce your alcohol consumption to zero." It is instead, "know when you consume alcohol that there is no quantity that will produce no harm." That's a big departure from the previously accepted, and now thoroughly debunked, conventional wisdom that a small quantity is harmless or even beneficial.
That common claim has a lot of asterisks/caveats, however: stress has many bad health effects and alcohol can reduce stress, but it does so while inducing many of the same phenomena that make stress dangerous (e.g. cardiac issues).
I've heard this more lately and can't square it with what I had understood about those super long-lived cultures; like in Italy or Japan, where supposedly they drink moderate amounts of alcohol approximately daily.
There are so many factors that effect health its really hard to isolate one. I think moderation is key to preventing one of these things from having an undue large effect. grandmother (Irish/English) drank and smoked a lot, she lived to her mid-nineties. She had a relatively stress free existence though. But she's one person and without an identical twin control, its hard to tell how much better she might have been had she abstained.
But that's why I thought these studies of long-lived _cultrures_ were significant. These things, including moderate alcohol consumption, which are common to multiple very different large groups that live longer than average.
Generally, doing things in moderation is way better than going to extremes.
Drinking moderately as a culture may be correlated with eating moderately, exercising moderately, etc.
In any case it has always seemed clear to me that studies showing beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption are heavily influenced by some combination of paying interest-groups and the researchers really wanting to justify a daily beer/wine glass.
The clearest evidence for me that a glass a day can not possibly be healthy is the effect just a single glass has on athletic performance the next day.
For the record I do drink and have for a long time, but have no illusions about the negative effects.
I definitely see why you'd be suspicious. But on the other hand, the Okinawa Japanese are definitely one of those groups that DOES live really long and DOES drink moderately. I've traveled extremely widely, used to live in Japan, and (sure, anecdotally) it feels reasonable.
There's no doubt that alcohol in excess is very bad for a person.
There's enough doubt about whether light-moderate alcohol consumption (i.e. a small glass of red wine with dinner and two or three once in a while with friends) is harmful or protective that it seems pretty clear that, whether the net effect is positive or negative, it's not terribly strong.
We get really hung up on whether something is "good for you" or "bad for you", without focusing as much as we should on exactly how bad it is: we just want to sort things into either the "good" bucket or the "bad" bucket and feel the corresponding dose of pride or guilt.
I've heard of having a glass of wine in meals in Italy, but does Japan really have a culture of daily drinking? Either way, that brings up use patterns. Here we tend to binge drink, with the purpose of getting drunk. That's not the same in such cultures. They have a much more moderate view of alcohol. A glass of wine and shots are two very different things
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 501 ms ] threadPeople seem to really want this kind of +1/-1 point system for health related behavior tho. Like: “I just spent 30mins at the gym so I racked up enough ‘health points’ to eat an apple pie at McDonalds”.
I think the reality is that you need to generally do a good job of following all advice all the time if you want to remain healthy. Keep very active and remember that indulgences are OK, but should be infrequent.
https://peterattiamd.com/ama23/
The dose makes the poison. For some poisons there is a minimum threshold dose below which there is no detectible harm. For others that threshold is zero.
Exactly.
The concept of dose-dependency is one of those things that earlier generations had an intuitive understanding of, but something we have an increasingly fragile grip on in the modern era.
Things like nicotine are thought to be pretty much not worth consuming in any situation. Things like lead have no "allowable dose". Maybe alcohol should be treated similarly to cigs. This is a totally defensible position, that's worth discussing.
Anyway, we're at the point with nicotine where virtually no one is willing to entertain the idea of recommending people consume "just a little". Maybe we should be that way with alcohol, too.
There's also a huge variance in risk based on what vehicle you drive. Some larger vehicles have a statistical driver death rate close to zero.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/driver-death-rates-by-make-and-...
I still remember being lectured in school on the food pyramid and the importance of getting your 8-10 servings of grains a day.
https://youtu.be/D2fYguIX17Q
I don't know about that, it it looking more like Alcohol is heading down the path of cigarettes where the more unbiased funding and studies that are done, the worse it appears. There have been several convincing reviews[1] recently that showed an increased risk of cancer at any dosage.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32584303/ (First one I could find easily again)
You can look at dietary recommendations from the 70s, and they’re fine. Eat your plants and don’t eat garbage. The food pyramid was more a product of lobbying than science. The doctors advice wasn't that bad, although there would be less knowledge of the dangers of refined carbs.
People want it to be true that the doctors don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s not (or these are bad examples of).
Granted, I do agree that the science actually hasn't changed that much, and that doctors who do research know ath they're talking about, but your average MD is pretty clueless about nutrition and fitness because that's really not a subject that gets priority in med school. There are even doctors today who still give advice along the lines of the Food Pyramid and My Plate. I've heard more than one account in my social circles of doctors telling people the myth that dietary fat flows freely through your blood vessels and clogs them exactly the same way that bacon grease can clog drain pipes.
> People want it to be true that the doctors don’t know what they’re doing
Also, the root of this statement is something I am surprised by. People want their doctors to not know what they're doing? In what universe is that true? Maybe that fits your experience, but this is a phenomenon I've never encountered in the slightest.
No, you're right, people who go to a doctor certainly don't want their individual physician to be incompetent. I believe parent was talking about a less specific, somewhat "anti-establishment" point of view. Folks who feel that they've been failed by medical doctors, for example -- a chronic condition that they can't get help with. Or people who have other reasons to believe that the medical profession is ossified, or beholden to interests that don't serve patients -- critiques of that sort.
You'll probably see more of these attitudes on the right, but the idea that doctors don't know what they're talking about, and change their recommendations all the time is incredibly popular. So it's not like 100% of people, or probably not even 95%, but I think it's more than eg. 30-40%.
You say they’re clueless on fitness and nutrition, but I don’t know what information they should be expected to know. Your talking about topics riddled with bullshit, when you look at public discourse.
Honestly, there’s not much to know other than to eat food that’s pretty famously healthy (plants), and avoid sugars. Now they definitely want you to limit meat, excessive fats, and refined carbs, too; but the basics are really simple.
There’s lots of studies out there, but there seems to be very little that’s clear other than those basic guidelines. You can really run around in circles with how complex this subject is, yet ignore the basics.
People have been making noise about this issue for a very long time. Doctors know this stuff is poison and causes cancer. It’s always seemed silly that just the right amount of poison is good somehow. Of course, you don’t know without study, but experienced people can see areas where the data doesn’t seem to make sense.
I remember hearing about this stuff a few years ago and it was nothing new, even then. We know that early studies looked good because many “sick quitters” stop drinking due to their failing health. This makes non-drinkers look less healthy. Now this stuff is still actively studied and many of the pro-alcohol people insist it’s still healthy, but the writing has been on the wall for at least 5-10 years; no amount of alcohol is “healthy”.
Why is it silly? A lot of things are dose dependent. A small amount of tylenol makes you head feel better. A lot of tylenol kills you. Lifting weights is very good for your health, but if you overdo it, you can get seriously hurt. A stressful day here and there is harmless, but if you're under constant, chronic, stress, your health will deteriorate. Four hours of sleep will leave you feeling terrible, 7-8 hours will leave you feeling rested, and 14 hours will likely leave you feeling terrible. I could go on, but I'd argue that dose-dependency is the rule rather than the exception.
Yes, there may be some nasty chronic effects of tylenol too, but I think you’re trying really hard to fit a square peg in a round hole.
You say that there's obviously no amount of poison that's good for you, but by that model of poison why do you assume that alcohol is a poison? Doesn't that become the question at hand?
The question is why we're trying so hard to make something healthy. The answer is obvious, because we like it. You don't see doctors trying to come up with justifications for why we should drink arsenic or cyanide, just as long as it's tiny amounts.
Alcohol causes cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, anxiety, and many nasty things. It may be one thing to tell people that their glass of wine a day is OKAY, but we shouldn't be telling them it's "healthy" without good reason. The better analogy is smoking, because the harms are more similar than people think.
I sort of figured, but then it wouldn't be much of an argument to claim that it can't be beneficial.
But fair enough, I misunderstood your argument. Your argument is actually that any claims of a fun "poison" being beneficial are highly suspect.
To that end - that would make sense for novel poisons or poisons that are rarely consumed. But this is one that's been consumed by many successful cultures for thousands of years. Animals get drunk on fermented fruit. That makes it seem more plausible to me that there could be something beneficial to it. Perhaps it was only beneficial in the days of unclean drinking water (unless that one is also not actually true! It's hard to believe anything anymore.).
At first I thought that kid was a smartass, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he wasn't wrong. I've you've got an American hamburger with all the fixin's, although its proportions aren't exactly like the food pyramid, it's close enough that it's hard to classify it as being unhealthy unless it's laced with extra cheese and barbecue sauce and whatnot. Yeah, there's fat in the patty, but the whole fat being bad thing is pretty much one of the biggest forms of bullshit ever invented by health policy.
This isn't to say that I actually think hamburgers are health food, but that the food pyramid is kind of a farce, especially in the sense that it implies that grains are some sort of nutritional necessity that should be consumed in greater quantities than everything else.
I bet it played a big part in the growth of the $71B US diet industry.
Five top wine consumers [0] vs. (coronary disease per 100k [1]): US (79.2), France (31), Italy (51), UK (47), China (114), Russia (225), Spain (38.9)
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/858743/global-wine-consu...
[1] https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/coronary-...
Your calories (unless you're a genetic outlier) should be relatively evenly split between carbs and fat. If whole grains are where most of the carbs are coming from, that's fine. Science says so.
https://progressreport.cancer.gov/prevention/red_meat
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-can...
Good overview of the controversy.
>It has all fallen apart in the last 2-3 years.
as if the scientific community has demonstrated it - it has not, and your articles do not support that claim. Your articles from 2-3 years ago are about one report, and even your articles call into question that report. So no, it has most definitely not "all fallen apart."
Interestingly, days after your NYT article, they published this one https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/well/eat/scientist-who-di...
Go figure, right? He also has papers claiming the opposite of well established sugar research, which, you guessed it, was paid for by a industry trade group that tries to undermine health guidelines to make people believe doctors less and eat bad stuff....
When there are decades of papers and different groups with a similar claim, and one group publishes one counter claim, it makes news. It does not mean the counterclaim will stand further scrutiny. In this case, as looking over google scholar at research following the 2019 claim, it has not withstood more scrutiny.
Here is the paper you posted [1]. Here [2] is but one followup paper claiming your paper is basically crap. I can find none supporting the conclusions in [1].
All papers since then I can find still claim meat increases the risk of intestinal and other cancers.
Please don't believe or spread outlier results from news stories.
[1] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M19-1621
[2] https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/43/2/265/36125/Red...
why is that not more prevalent?
my point is, why bring "societal pressure of 500 years" into an argument for an inherently bad thing. just thinking out loud
I think there's better education around alcohol now than there was 30 years ago (at least where I live). Still, a lot could be done, particularly for the youth, like banning pre-mixed cans and other sugary ready-to-binge beverages. Habits start early.
In my area, the only dry communities are small towns with strong Mennonite backgrounds. And in every one of those towns, there's a bar right outside city limits, or in the next town over, where people in the dry community go to drink.
The costs of alcoholism were readily visible as well, but I do believe drinking culture in South Korea is a hidden partner to its vaulting economic and cultural success from the ruins of the Korean War.
It's delicious and it lets you collectively guard down in a way that creates a bond of trust. It's a difficult thing to substitute.
When one of my friends went to China on business and came back with "stories" I realized that KTV visits (prostitutes) performed a similar function, but honestly a glass of wine seems a bit more wholesome.
If you are turning down attending events because they are dry ... you have a problem.
"Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention," he said.
"There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.
"Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention."
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45283401
In the navy, while at sea, you are expected to drink during social events. Alcohol is considered the 'social engine' of the ship.
Now I must disclaim that obviously the crew wasn't forced to drink. Those on guard, or who had any medical, religious or other objections were dismissed. And naturally they have very strict limits, as getting intoxicated on board of a operational warship would be very dangerous.
But, with moderate use, alcohol was (at least back then) viewed as an efficient method to prevent stress and mutiny among the crew. It probably is still today.
While we're at it, let's de-stigmatize the abuse of substances and treat it like a real mental health issue.
Please do not decide policy using this kind of reasoning. Maybe we should legalise more stuff, but “worse things are legal” is not a good reason.
> A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the above assume the leader is actually glorious, though of course most leaders who are called glorious are awful (IMHO)
People were taking X-ray images of shoe fit in department stores, we used thalidomide to treat morning sickness, etc.
What society says is legal has an effect on how it is perceived and how frequently it’s accessed by minors, teens, young adults, and adults. Exercising a modicum of conservatism in approving all things that we think are safer than alcohol seems appropriate to me.
Legalize everything for anyone 21 or older, and while we're at it, raise the enlistment age to 21.
If you're old enough to die for this country, you should be old enough to light a j in it.
I'm not kidding. Talk to any 8 year old and they're much more level headed compared to those 10x their age. But the current system is set up to crush them relying only on the good will of seniors to protect their future.
This isn't a new idea btw https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/16/reconstruct...
Mail in voting means you'd just fill out the ballots for your kids.
I think voting should remain at 18. Although I have some ideas on making more concerns local. Why does most of my tax dollars go to the federal government rather than the state.
At the State level at least I have a remote chance of being heard. And if I don't like what my state is doing, I can drive 50 miles to another.
Or have addicts die in the street.
Prohibition doesn't work.
To be clear, I'm just using that as an example of logical inconsistency and I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated. I also think that all recreational drugs should be legalized (or at least decriminalized) because regardless of the potential long-term effects the failed war on (some) drugs is causing far more harm than the drugs themselves.
Here is the first Phase I test of an mRNA vaccine from 2013.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02241135
Here's a phase I trial for mRNA therapies from 2005.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00204516
"This drug completed a 12 month Phase 2 clinical trial with 65,917 participants in which the drug demonstrated efficacy of Y against symptomatic disease. 1.5% of participants experienced adverse effects which included runny nose. 0.01% of participants experienced a fatal allergic reaction. These drugs are still undergoing trials and our understanding of safety and efficacy can change in the future.
[ ] Check to indicate you understand and consent"
I think this should be the standard for vaccines, drugs like marijuana and alcohol and cigarettes. Do it at the point-of-sale. For things that are particularly dangerous, maybe require an interview with a physician to make sure the person is of sound mind and capable of consenting. I believe that if you treat people like adults they will naturally make the best decisions for themselves. When you treat people like children, they'll act like children.
Making drugs legal doesn't mean people will start abusing them. I do not drink or take drugs, and both are easy as hell to access here in the UK.
The benefits for me of legalising drugs would be making it easier for people to seek help with less stigma attached to it, remove drug dealers out of the equation, make it safer to procur drugs if people are going to take them anyway, I believe it would also make scientific research much easier which in turn might help us to know the long term effects of these drugs.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Considering that we are talking about alcohol, this argument could just as well be used in favor of liberalization.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30010236
In that case the question becomes: has use (and in particular abuse) of substances increased after legalization? Which I will just throw out there since I’m too lazy to research it myself.
Consistency is in the eye of the beholder. For some people, sex is just as bad as alcohol, and they include some kind of spiritual damage as “harm to self” in their analysis. These things are necessarily subjective. Psychological damage cannot be quantified either.
So it follows that consistency is subjective, and even if a legal framework could be consistent from the point of view of a certain group of people by chance, it would not be consistent in the eyes of everyone.
FWIW, I probably mostly agree with you on policy. Just wanted to chime in on why people might object to the reasoning.
There's a difference between an offense and a crime (in most countries).
Making buying/selling/using some substances a crime is limiting freedom, and hence should only be a measure of last resort. So no "the alc lobby push for laws against weed" kind of story that ended up with the "reefer scare" tactic.
Many things are illegal not because a law has been passed against it, but because something seemed bad, was brought before a judge, and the judge made a judgment that set a precedent. That's what is called common law.
Having a law created is a separate way that things can become illegal. That's what is called statutory law.
Not all countries have common law.
Like growing MJ in yr garden?, gimme a break.
Hoe can substance use ever become a crime under common law? Some penalty okay, but a crime???
If we'd been consistent, we'd have dodged 50 years of a brutal drug war that has done so much damage to society, the rule of law, our democratic institutions, the role of police, basically everything, that it's hard to imagine the vacationing on the moon type of future we missed out on.
Treating drug addiction like alcohol addiction and drug dealers like liquor stores, would have been the road less taken and would have made all the difference.
From that article:
> Across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, the number of patients treated in Bellevue Hospital’s alcohol wards dropped from fifteen thousand a year before Prohibition to under six thousand in 1924. Nationally, cirrhosis deaths fell by more than a third between 1916 and 1929. In Detroit, arrests for drunkenness declined 90 percent during Prohibition’s first year. Domestic violence complaints fell by half.
That's not the reasoning to legalize things. That's the reasoning used to filter out what we should consider further.
It's a very good reason to at least change one of the two. Either make the worse thing legal, or criminalise the "better" thing. Arbitrary rules are never a good thing.
Any parent, ever - will be able to tell you this is a fact.
If you think arbitrary rules can stick, wait until your kid hits the 'why'/'how come' phase.
In this case, the government is the parent making an arbitrary rule and the people represent the 5-year-old kid asking why.
Parent: 'You can drink, but you can't do cocaine.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because cocaine is bad for you.'
Kid: 'But why? Isn't drinking bad for you?'
Parent: 'Cocaine is worse.'
Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'It's addictive and it ruins lives.'
Kid: 'But doesn't alcohol do that too?'
Parent: 'Well, yes...'
Kid: 'So why is cocaine so much worse?'
Parent: 'It just is! Just stop asking questions and listen to your parent.'
This kind of shit stops a kid from respecting their parent, because they trust their parent to know what's good for them, and to have reasons behind rules and restrictions.
Similarly, when the government starts making arbitrary decisions for us, but can't provide the logic behind it - and - worse - the evidence from the medical, scientific and psychology communities state the complete opposite - we lose respect for and faith in the government.
> Kid: 'Why?'
Parent: 'Because alcohol is legal and cocaine isn't; that has several consequences.
'Governmental regulations provide some confidence that alcohol is safe and as-advertised; there is no regulation of the manufacturing quality of cocaine.
'Buying alcohol brings you into close proximity to the liquor supply chain, all of whom can settle disputes by using the court system. Buying cocaine brings you in close proximity to the cocaine supply chain, all of whom can only settle disputes using violence.
'And of course there are no legal repercussions for the possession of alcohol; there are legal repercussions for the possession of cocaine.'
Leaders are not parents, states are not families, national budgets do not compare to your bank account, and adults are equal partners in our society.
I realize you're trying to get at psychological tendencies, but the premise is flawed and leads to applying faulty intuitions in disasterous ways.
Person A: We should legalize weed in order to be consistent [see above argument]
Person B: Nonsense! Weed has harmful effects on society!
Person A: Alcohol objectively harms society more than weed [insert citations here]. So you would agree that we should regulate alcohol more, yes?
So many countries have had great success with legalization, so what is your reasoning for so much caution? It's only continuing the legacy of pain.
Seems pretty excellent to me. Things should be arranged on numerically indexed scale from benign to deadly. We should identify a point on that scale where illegality begins, and everything to the left is legal.
At the very least, the US drug schedule system is completely out of whack with actual risks. There's tons of sched 1 drugs which are objectively safer than alcohol.
(Edit: see archive link below)
And
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067361...
Alcohol is one place behind street meth in Figure 1. Damn.
Global yearly deaths by smoking: 7.1 million
Global yearly deaths by alcohol usage: 2.84 million
Regarding injuries: Sure, but the statistics in general doesn't include stuff that doesn't kill you but still is bad, like non-lethal lung problems from smoking.
Regardless, if we accept the argument that people need to be coerced for their own good into avoiding harmful behaviors, the data linked seems to argue that we should be restricting access to sugar and high glycemic index foods (flour) much more than alcohol since "High blood sugar" at 6.5MM and "Obesity" at 4.7MM both beat alcohol by a large margin.
"This study found an average of 93,296 alcohol-attributable deaths (255 deaths per day) and 2.7 million YPLL (29 years of life lost per death, on average) in the United States each year."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930a1.htm
Whereas smoking reduces life expectancy by "only" ~12 years.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201112012236/http://dobrochan....
I wouldn't be surprised. There are studies that are beginning to link liver health to neurodegeneration, and that's just one set of potential disease states.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/09/210914152531.h...
Extrapolated out over time, I would guess that alcoholism is a cofactor in more deaths annually than cigarettes (edit: that is to say, deaths not caused directly by drinking, including drink driving, but conditions such as diabetes and heart disease which are greatly exacerbated by drinking for example... I wonder if someone who dies of cirrhosis gets chalked up as a death by alcohol?)
also, at least for now, cigarettes are legal, which just bolsters the point above.
Literally everyone involved in the treatment and support of substance abuse does that, whether it's treatment facilities or social groups like AA and Al-Anon. As they should. Every family I know has been affected in one way or another by drug or alcohol addiction and has firsthand knowledge that substance abuse must be treated like an illness and to forgive (but not forget) the damage it causes. So I'm not exactly sure your statement reflects reality.
Treat here not in the "provide medical care for" sense but in the "interpretation" sense, as in, "I know it's a polka, but I'm going to treat it like a waltz."
And it should be noted that while substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
You may be in a particular microcosm that handles this well, but that is definitely not the universal experience (not by a long shot). I'd also dispute the "literally everyone" part of your comment, as I can think of countless examples of attempts at substance abuse treatment and support being actively harmful to the person struggling with addiction.
Have 1000 people tell their boss they need a month of paid leave to deal with alcohol addiction.
Measure the immediate reactions and future performance review and employment outcomes of the two groups. Do you expect them to be the same as each other? I don’t and I think it comes down to “I or a family member could get cancer or kidney failure” vs “alcohol addiction is a choice” thinking.
While substance abuse is an illness and should be treated as such, it's not leukemia or muscular dystrophy. It requires an active participant to make a concerted effort to obtain and abuse an addictive, destructive substance. So it's no surprise that substance abuse might not be given the same level of sympathy.
• making it easier for non-experts to reason about the law
• consistency is, in my experience, usually a property of fairness
Yet other harmful substances are currently banned and you opt to unban them for...consistency. It's like saying when two countries are at war, why can't we all be at war? Seems "unfair".
No not be a total joke as a gov't. I love the stories on "refer scare" and the prohibition (which has become some big historical period like the renaissance, merely by retarded gov't policy).
And not like we're done with it. New Zealand is considering to ban tobacco sales to the next generation. What could probably go wrong with that? Is age discrimination now all of a sudden okay? (this is not about prohibiting sales to kids -- which im cool with obviously -- but also to adults of the next generations, when they are of age).
Most victimless crimes have literally no victim. There is no victim without some sort of harm. The reason we have speed limits and drugs are illegal is because if you go overboard enough with them there is a high likelihood of harm. In the vast majority of cases people don't go overboard and there is no actual victim though. These things are crimes because our system of justice is not good at punishing people for "going overboard" with the consistency and fairness we desire.
It’s the reason that shooting a shotgun down a busy street is (and should be) a crime even if you don’t hit anyone.
Also, many violations of regulatory requirements are “victimless” but are entirely necessary cooperation for things to work properly, or to prevent consequential harm. Particularly for things where shared resources are used, like spectrum, roads, airports, the air we breathe, etc.
Who is hurt when I blow a little bit of lead dust into the air? Probably no one, and certainly nobody identifiable. Who is hurt when everyone blows lead dust in the air? Potentially many, and still likely unidentifiable.
Why, when an act exposes multiple unnamed people to a risk, do some call it a "victimless" crime? Just because it's difficult to identify those exposed to a risk doesn't mean that people haven't been placed at risk.
If you share the road with a drunk driver but they crash into someone else are you a victim? Does their insurer compensate you?
Being exposed to risk does not make you a victim. You need to actually be harmed.
If your brother takes opiods but stops you are not a victim. If your bother takes opiods, gets addicted and ruins your family then you are.
Shooting a gun in the air, speeding, all sorts of unsafe things can have no victim, or they can have a victim depending on how things go.
We don't criminalize these things because they have victims when you do them right. They are usually victimless. We criminalize them because there's too much luck involved and we don't like the odds.
Crimes of endangerment are an exact counterpoint to this. They often do have identifiable victims, in a way that most people would agree.
Are very different reasons.
Drugs are illegal because of big alc biz lobby, religious interference and orchestrated mass hysteria. The effect: the police can target any group, search them hard and lock some up because "drug". If the police would search hard in Beverly Hills they'd also find a lot, but they choose not to. It gives the police the power to hurt any group they choose because we all do drugs.
Speeding is an offense because it causes harm to others in some cases. Also there is an environmental impact. You choose to roll your car in public roads, you need a license, a proper car and to follow the rules. Cars can be seriously dangerous for other people on the roads. And it is in most cases "an offense"! Not a crime. You get a fine, not a jail sentence.
Hasn't society already decided a while ago that, for some reason, age discrimination is okay as long as it's only against younger people?
Please re-read my comment and see https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-59589775
This line of reasoning doesn't capture any nuance. These kinds of things operate on an allowlist. Unless there is a law enacted specifically as an exception then no, in general age discrimination is not okay.
Voting, alcohol, weed, driving, truancy, parental control, marriage, consent for sex, contract law, criminal law, social security, retirement accounts, and military service all discriminate based on age despite it being the guiding principle that you should avoid using age for restrictions when possible. The law has plenty of examples of min and max ages.
If there was any other way to ban cigarettes without making life miserable for people who are currently addicted? Because we should absolutely ban cigarettes. The victim is the cigarette smoker and the crime is the manufacture and sale of a an addictive substance that it not safe to use in any amount.
I agree with you that a law making it illegal for people to smoke is silly, the law should apply to manufacturers and distributors.
please see this. it is not protecting children, it is excluding a generation (no matter how old)
What happens when a drug addict looking his next fix attacks someone? This is why we have drug laws to start with, was to protect people.
There are no simple answers here.
So there is in fact a simple answer, and I think you'll find that drug laws were likely conceived much more cynically than for the protection of the common person.
Put them all in jail for every little offense? Fine them? (they have no money) Force them into rehab? (another form of jail) Let the roam the streets attacking people? (recycle through jail or rehab)
No, it's not simple.
What happens when a person robs someone so he can buy a new car? You don’t outlaw cars.
There should be a non-criminal route for helping drug addicts that doesn't result in prison.
I think a good solution would be making quality non-forced resources available for free. For example, rehab, therapy, or jobs specifically created for those seeking to overcome their addiction. Ideally these programs could pay for themselves in net returns for society as a whole.
I will pick alcohol every time over the others.
I would suggest that children shouldn't be driving at all.
Currently far, far more children die due to alcohol than the others, and while that's definitely due to availability it's not obvious that wouldn't still be the case if all were legal.
A simple test, give each to a baby/small child and see what happens... I lived in a time where babies were given tiny amounts of alcohol for pain relief and it did no harm that I ever heard. I doubt you can say the same for meth.
Children also had regular access to small amounts of coke and heroin probably in your grandparents or great grandparents life, remember Coca Cola and laudanum was used for teething. You've never heard of harm from that. Your test says all of them pass.
No babies are given alcohol either anymore so you'll accept that heroin and cocaine should be legal based on your bullshit test?
The disparate outcomes of those groups are much more about the dosage and the personal/social situation.
Pharmacologically, they are pretty much the same drug.
You arrest and charge them for attacking someone?
No clearly we should charge anyone found in possession of alcohol with a felony to lower the possibility.
Drinking is not a crime, being drunk alone is not a crime, driving is not a crime. Being drunk, while driving is. On the other hand, assault is a crime regardless.
Dope heads don't jones for their next hit. But I have seen a sweet young naive young teen turn into a mugger from meth.
In the US the CDC reported 100,000 overdoses from drugs in the 12 months preceding April 2021[1]. I can't find how many people die from drug raids specifically but this Al-Jazeera article shows 1,068 people being killed by the police a year after George Floyd died[2].
And for a little more context Statista[3] shows 21,750 people being murdered in 2020.
Police kill at ~1% the rate of drug deaths. Citizens kill at ~20% the rate of drug deaths.
1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2021/... 2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-hav... 3. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-a...
EDIT: Also, dying of overdose is both a symptom of illegality and of the addiction. If a thing is outlawed the production isn’t exactly regular and therefore strength/purity of the substance varies.
I think a big part of the resistance to legalization is the medical establishment maintaining their monopoly supplier status on medicine.
Back in the 90's I worked on a concrete crew for a summer. Building big box store type buildings. They pour the floor, then pour the walls on top of the floor, then tip the walls up and weld them together with metal flanges embedded in the concrete.
Nearly everyone on the crew did meth (except like 2 guys, I was one). Often work would start like 3:00 AM to prevent rapid drying. No lunch to speak of. Expected to literally run on the job site from one task to another. I suppose there may have been potential labor complaints but they never happened or weren't investigated.
It wasn't unusual for people to burn out and just not show up. That was part of the calculus I think by management. One guy fell asleep in his truck and could not be woken up (after presumably being up for a few days).
I quit after a few months but later saw my (low level) supervisor at a restaurant. He was alone and didn't look good. He told me how his life had gotten increasingly out of control and he had tried to kill himself (before finding Jesus per his words).
Company didn't care. They were making money. They turned a blind eye to what was going on. The human wreckage generated was awful however.
You think if meth is legal over the counter this won't be more prevalent? I'm pretty sure it will. Meth kills, and not just the body.
I would consider these more literal poison by comparison to alcohol by any objective manner. If they are all legal, then access/addiction/intoxication are not even close to compare to alcohol, they are all far worse.
Therefore, if we can classify water as poison (which it can be) it sort of makes any of these simplistic comparisons moot.
Alcohol is only a problem because some people do it so much. Alot of people I know drink all the time-- like several times a week. They could look a little younger but generally have passable bills of health.
Also we have to question who's behind this statement. For all we know it's the PRC starting a new teetotalling campaign in their land.
But also on the contrary to your "none of the other drugs" point, I can't think of any possible reason why cigarettes weren't outright banned 40 years ago, except that they have exactly the same mechanism keeping them legal.
In all my (many) years, I have found no better path to becoming socially acceptable (even likable) to neurotypicals/extroverts than 3-4 shots of vodka. This is an unfortunate, but very real fact for many of us. I've heard good things about Phenibut, but (1) it's very difficult to obtain, and (2) it is also apparently habit-forming.
Supposedly it also helps with disinhibition and socialization, but admittedly I haven’t tried it in a social setting so I’m not sure myself. It certainly does relax me and chill me out though without the dumbing down of alcohol.
Of course, by the things I’ve seen in those “pop-medical” sites that fill Google search results, you’d think it’s much more dangerous than alcohol.
Like you said, the crowd was largely people trying to quit or who had quit alcohol or benzos along with a fair amount of neurodivergent people. Being able to set aside some of my social anxiety and talk with them is part of what led to me getting assessed and diagnosed for autism recently.
The grandparent comment also mentioned phenibut which I find even more enjoyable, but like they said it can be habit forming and has a tolerance build up that limits safe use to once or twice a week.
I used to be devastatingly introverted. Alcohol helped, but it’s nothing compared to GHB or MDMA. Ecstasy will give you the gift of gab like you can’t believe.
minor edit: I should say I am ignoring the context of where it’s acceptable to do such things. You probably shouldn’t do G at Christmas with the in-laws. (Though our quarantine Christmas this year with friends…) I’m just making a bit of a pedantic bit that there are club drugs out there that are pretty wild in how they can open you up socially.
I completely disagree and I think you should consider the possibility that alcohol is creating your anxiety in the first place. My years-long struggle with social anxiety disappeared after I decided to quit drinking for good.
Also, I now have to undergo quite a few yearly medical tests to keep an eye on my body after years of self medicating for my extreme social anxiety.
FWIW, I don't say these things as a teetotaler. I believe in harm reduction.
I hear that vodka shots also have this property.
Take for instance Lemmy from Motorhead, who used alcohol and drugs heavily throughout his life and probably died an early death as a result; can that really be considered abuse when he, pardon my French, didn't give a shit?
For some people, things like alcohol are a serious issue and overuse can stem from both physical and psychological addiction. Then you've got people who use it sparingly. And yet there are people who drink heavily, know exactly what they're doing, and can't easily be classified as addicts without projecting one's own life choices unto them.
I've never understood the arguments like yours, which I used to hear a half-century ago in high school, and now see presented online. They distill down to "We allow this one bad thing, so we should allow all of the other bad things, too." As if having more bad things is better than having fewer bad things.
I don't drink, so I don't care if alcohol gets banned or restricted or whatever. But these type of arguments always strike me as little more than "Billy jumped off the bridge, so I can, too!"
I really don't see the logic here.
We’ve inherited use of alcohol over millennia —it’d be an uphill battle to rid ourselves of it short of fundamentalist dogmatism.
Some places in Central Asia have socialized opiate usage —but they too have unwritten rules about usage, or at least traditionally had them observed (it was a ‘luxury’ of old age).
If you allow an anything goes policy, you’ll end up with a decaying society. While I don’t propose prosecuting consumption because it’s the wrong focus, we should prosecute production and distribution of hard drugs.
Else you may end up with the likes of XIX century in China, or huffers in metro Manila.
"Alcohol is one of the worst 'drugs' on a personal/societal harm scale - if we're going to tolerate this at large, we should make sure we keep other drugs illegal by default unless shown individually, through decades of research, to be safe. Otherwise we will burden our healthcare system and create a national catastrophe. As evidence of this danger, I submit the history of alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and liver disease, and their effects on our healthcare system."
I offer that you can only do one of two things now:
1. Argue against my advocacy for inconsistency using personal incredulity
2. Provide a deeper argument that relies on something more than an appeal to consistency
Edit: added a clause to sweeten my argument for inconsistency
This argument is brought up fairly regularly but I don't think it's very good. We cannot go back on alcohol, Americans tried pretty hard.
Our choice is limited to alcohol or alcohol plus whatever we legalize. Harm from alcohol is the hard lower bound on harm from substance use.
Eating sugar for example in excessive amounts leads to way worse diseases - https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/features/how-sugar-affects-yo....
Also worth noting that consistency could be achieved by outlawing alcohol. In the U.S. at least, that proved an impractical solution. So I don't think "we allow one bad thing and we can't get rid of it, so let's allow all bad things" makes a particularly compelling argument.
(FWIW, I'm generally not against legalization nor do I think all drugs are net-negative. I just find the argument as laid out to be unconvincing.)
It was recognized as impractical fairly quickly, despite having fairly similar concrete outcomes to the drug war, for which a similar recognition has been much slower and less complete. But, again, that's just another layer of inconsistency in the same direction, not a mitigation of it.
Addiction is, not alcohol in itself. I haven't been anywhere close to drunk in a decade. I still enjoy a glass of whisky or a cold beer here and there.
People who have problem with alcohol would have problems with "less harmful" (weed I assume?) drugs too, it's a personality trait. I've seen the damage of weed in my friends, it's just as bad as alcohol tbh. I never understood the "it's bad so let's legalise other bad things"
You're blatantly assuming here and making it a categorical statement. They usually don't, neither statistically or at least in my experience, anecdotally. I and many friends of mine regularly drink, but most of us barely touch other drugs. Weed occasionally for some of my friends (I personally dislike it intensely) but things like coke and so forth, pretty much nothing, in a wide group of people who are regular consumers of alcohol.
> Cost-effective interventions to reduce alcohol consumption include strengthening restrictions on alcohol availability, enforcing bans on alcohol advertising, and facilitating access to screening and treatment.
"Restrictions on alcohol availability" could be anti-fun if implemented in the extreme (hopefully we've learned prohibition doesn't work), the other two are pretty standard.
As a world, we absolutely have not. And any insane policy will be backed up by very reasonable scientific evidence.
Being anti-fun isn't an argument against regulation
The Autobahn is still not a 24/7 disaster zone of dead bodies and scrapped cars last time I checked.
Sure the autobahn isn't a meat grinder, but there's a difference between safe and unsafe, and unsafe doesn't mean everyone dies.
Regardless, doesn't matter if the regulation is for safety or environmental protection, being "anti-fun" isn't an argument against them.
well, you can take it up with the National Motorists' Association, they have the stats.
And while yes, you could say "that's not alcohol itself" and that's correct, but obviously not all alcohol is equivalent, and also you cannot exactly separate alcohol and examine it in a vacuum.Alcohol is not consumed purely in the vast majority of cases.
Generally speaking if the institution name starts with "World" or "Global", it's more likely to say something to be accepted by virtually everyone, and most often that will sound dystopian and bullsh1t.The prohibition did not work(and i say this as someone who drinks maybe <=5 times a year, very much liking to stay lucid but also acknowledging the benefits of such an experience when i do).The drug on war did not work.Institutions want to regulate any substance that deviates thought from the mainstream hivemind narrative.Your statement can easily be deconstructed by more than 2000 years of written history where people battled whether consumed drugs and especially alcohol is or not beneficial for health.With the exceptions of exaggeration in certain cultures(see alcoholism in russia) this is not an issue.The other exaggeration happened in US with Prohibition and we've seen that's also not desirable, and it promotes drinking irresponsibly.
[1] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
Most Americans do drink.
That doesn't contradict what the person you are replying to said. They said most Americans drink "little or no" alcohol, not "no alcohol".
Why is it that on the Internet almost everyone seems to silently remove/ignore qualifiers like that, and treat everything as a binary dichotomy???
* 85.6 percent of people ages 18 and older reported that they drank alcohol at some point in their lifetime
* 69.5 percent reported that they drank in the past year
* 54.9 percent reported that they drank in the past month
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...
Consider this: I am in the group that can say "they drank in the last month." It is also simultaneously true that I "drink little or no alcohol" (by any reasonable standard).
How can that be? Well, if you took my last 12 months worth of alcohol consumption and calculated my "average drinks per month" the number would round to 0. So yes, I do drink, and by happenstance it happens that I've had a drink in the last month. But I think that easily qualifies as "little or no alcohol".
It’s important to give people correct medical information. I’m now off the wagon completely.
And I mean, cigarettes are cool. There's a reason they still exist as a trope in movies and it's not all due to marketing. It lends something to the character.
That's not to say there isn't or can't be a healthier replacement, of course.
No it isn't. The studies change on this constantly. Literally, it is why they are making their policy- because its confusing to people.
They also need to conduct a longitudinal study (or more than 1) to prove this... and guess what? They won't do it.
> 48 animal and 37 human studies were included in data extraction following screening. Significant improvements in measures of blood pressure and vascular function following RWP were seen in 84% and 100% of animal studies, respectively. Human studies indicated significant improvements in systolic blood pressure overall (− 2.6 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 4.8, − 0.4]), with a greater improvement in pure-resveratrol studies alone (− 3.7 mmHg, 95% CI: [− 7.3, − 0.0]). No significant effects of RWP were seen in diastolic blood pressure or flow-mediated dilation (FMD) of the brachial artery.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-020-02247-8
With wine, people generally mashed the grapes immediately after picking to ensure that the yeast took hold before any harmful bacteria did. Then followed the same process of barrelling it to prevent other microbes from getting in. People also learned that added sugar served to further preserve wines that would be stored for longer periods of time.
If people would have boiled their drinking water, it would have been safe to drink.
For a limited time. The live cultures and then alcohol in fermented drinks keep the bad bacteria at bay.
Keep in mind in the past, not everyone had a convenient source of heat in their homes.
No, they didn't - you do not need (or should) boil the water. If you did boil it, you would then need to let it cool down before adding the yeast. Home-brew kits suggest using a fairly small amount of hot water to disolve the malt extract, and to get it up to fermentation temperature.
Beer is safer to drink because the yeast out-competes pathogens, and because it causes a pH change that inhibits and/or kills them.
Speaking as an ex microbiologist.
Now, this brewery was replicating 19th century American brewing, but these ideas probably came from Europe.
How else are they going to get water to a specific temperature before the invention of thermometers?
Boiling is also not only about sterilization. It is also fundamental to the character of the beer. It causes isomerization of the alpha acids in hops which is responsible for the bitter flavors in beer. It also denatures proteins in the wort resulting in clearer beer. See: https://www.love2brew.com/Articles.asp?ID=573
That's how traditional yogurt making works. If you ask most people who know how to make yogurt they'll tell you: 1) you boil the milk, 2) you let it cool, and 3) you add yogurt. The yogurt is the fermentation culture (lactic acid bacteria rather than yeasts) and while making yogurt propagates it, at some point someone needs to make yogurt without already having yogurt. The only way to do that is to start with milk that wasn't boiled because boiling kills the culture (the bacteria in yogurt are thermophiles but they won't survive being boiled!). Perhaps something like that happened with brewing also?
Or maybe it's more like modern cheesemaking? Nowadays most cheese is made with pasteurised milk. To make cheese, the milk has to be cultured with lactic acid bacteria, but pasteurisation kills those off. So modern cheesemakers add lyophilised culture to their milk after they pasteurise it. Traditionally though the only way to obtain culture was to leave the milk alone, use it raw. Back in the day people didn't even know about the existence of bacteria so they had no reason to pasteurise their cheesemaking milk in the first place.
So how old is the practice of boiling the water for beer? Is it possible it's something that's only done today thanks to the knowledge of microorganisms?
https://www.thehomebrewforum.co.uk/threads/beer-from-kit-boi...
Boiling is a pretty important step in brewing, both in the home and in the commercial brewery. Yes you could technically make beer without boiling it, but that is not the norm. Boiling is used not only for sanitation, but also to allow the hop oils to isomerize and become soluble in the wort, as well as reduce the wort volume to make the wort more concentrated, since the sparging step produces a lot of diluted wort (when using grains rather than extract). Wort in a can (malt extract) means you may not be concerned with concentrating the wort since you could control that, but you still generally want to isomerize the hop oils.
Your point about needing to wait for the wort to cool is correct, but that's precisely what brewers do.. they cool the wort until it gets to yeast 'pitching' temperature
Do not allow victimless crime to exist. And big biz lobby efforts should be illegal.
(Especially since it's hardly an oil in my opinion -- it's partially solid at room temperature)
There's absolutely no reliable evidence that coconut oil has any beneficial effects on the human body, and I really don't see why anybody would believe that an oil high in saturated fats is good for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_coconut
Lots of the previous science was bad science that did not account for confounding factors, such as not taking into account that lots of fast food has lots of saturated fats(and made up for a large portion of saturated fat consumption) and adjusting for that. ie the difference between "do sat fats make people unhealthy" and "does eating fast food(which happens to have sat fats) make people unhealthy"
If you want to go down the rabbit hole, there is also no strong evidence showing cholesterol/eggs are bad, and neither is there any evidence showing salt is bad(if you are healthy). Lots of nutrition studies have such laughably silly methodology. Not sure why they were ever taken seriously.
Dietary Cholesterol / Blood Cholesterol - cholesterol restriction has been removed from dietary guidelines in the US, so people have taken that seriously.
Increased saturated fat is pretty well associated with LDL levels, which is associated with cardiovascular disease risk. Not sure that I've ever seen any contrary studies recently - I would be interested if you could link any you are aware of... I guess the questions I have seen are around carb intake and fat intake, but that's kind of a separate issue
Salt is definitely more questionable, but seems like if you are avoiding hyperprocessed foods, you are going to intake less salt, so maybe a non-issue...
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
There seems to be a moderate reduction in cardiovascular events, BUT - there is NO CHANGE in mortality or even cardiac mortality. Also note, these studies may be victim to the saturated-fats-are-fast-food issue.
If saturated fats were actually bad, like smoking is, I think we would see more significant results than "10-15% decrease in events that doesn't even change peoples' overall outcomes".
A lot of people do if you look around. Serious people I mean. They usually sing the praises of butter (and ghee), but the same reasoning is applied now to coconut oil.
Ban all protein!
A glass of wine calms your nerves.
Separately, consider that your assertion would likely be more persuasive to doubters if you'd included a link defending it.
In each of these case, the medical and scientific community didn't have a vested interests in these entities. I mean, the medical community didn't come up with smoking or alcohol consumption...
Now imagine some entity or procedure that the medical/scientific community came up with and the big business found way to make huge money off of, such that there is a natural alignment of incentives for the scientific community and big business to keep this thing propped up. Such a thing, even if doing great harm, is sure to go on for a vastly longer period of time, if not perpetually....
Here’s one for brain health.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.10.21256931v...
I'm sure drinking has some effect on you, but I'm not sure one non-peer reviewed which by their own papers shows <18 drinks / week shows baseline within the uncertainty band is evidence of any noticeable mental decline. In fact several of the graphs, it shows an increase in matter volume for low non-zero amounts vs zero.
I unfortunately saw many in my family use his fortunate long life span, regardless of drink consumption, as an enabler to drink like that. Including myself, up until about 90 days ago.
https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga...
"One study suggests this could be because nicotine interferes with ACE2 receptors, which may prevent the virus from entering cells."
Keep drinking to a minimum, and if possible keep it social. Life's short, enjoy a beer or glass of whiskey, but try to minimize it's harms, or just take mushrooms.
Also keep an eye out if you're a binge drinker, it's the second type of alcoholic, you don't drink everyday, but when you do drink you drink until you pass out.
It’s curious:
- babies have fun without drinking
- kids have fun without drinking
- some teens have fun without drinking
Then at some point some people, as adults, feel like they have to drink to enjoy themselves? I wonder what happened.
Edit: explicitly clarifying that I’m only talking about some people here
I think you start working and the only "fun" situations you are in are meetings at a pub after work with drink involved. After few years you naturally start to associate fun off-work time with drinking.
There are also enjoyable things that involve drinking too, but _needing_ a drink to enjoy oneself seems a bit hyperbolic for the average adult, no?
I enjoy the same things you’re talking about sober (except maybe concerts — is that even legal?), but understand why a group of friends would start their evening together with a round of drinks.
It feels like this question is disingenuous. You don't need fire starter to start a fire either, but wouldn't it be silly to conclude fire starter doesn't make starting a fire easier? Moderate alcohol consumption in an intimate environment is a lot of fun.
Put differently, if alcohol didn't present such serious health risks, I wouldn't be making an effort to cut it out of my social circles. As it stands, though, my friends, family and I have started referring to it as "poison", just to be totally transparent about what we're doing when we meet for drinks.
Your claim that moderate alcohol consumption makes things more fun is part of the point of my post. Is this actually true, or just a rationalization of people who already drink?
No judgement for those who do drink, by the way.
- anecdote from someone who doesnt like drinking much
Of course, I've not done control trials on myself, with placebos and so on. It's just anecdata.
> Your claim that moderate alcohol consumption makes things more fun is part of the point of my post. Is this actually true, or just a rationalization of people who already drink?
Right. It's a good question, and I don't know the answer, and I've tried hard to introspect and distinguish between rationalizing and it being true.
As someone pointed out above, the fire starter analogy is better than one might think -- if you are enlightened enough, you don't need alcohol to start a fire. In my experience, though, few things open up a conversation with a stranger as quickly as a little alcohol. I'm not saying I've never had an intimate conversation with a stranger in which we both showed vulnerability without alcohol. But the psychoactive aspect of intoxication makes those conversations with alcohol more memorable, stranger or closest friend. I've tried hard to determine whether I'm just fooling myself, or if alcohol is actually making something "funner". My conclusion is that if I am fooling myself, the trick is good enough that I'll probably never figure it out.
“Fire starter” products are mostly only useful to people who don’t know what they’re doing or aren’t actually using it to start the fire but want to squirt in lighter fluid just to see big flames.
It's fine if you don't like to drink, nobody is saying you have to, but saying that it doesn't lubricate social situations is just naive. Is it a crutch? In some cases, sure. In other cases--an enhancer.
People come reliant on alcohol and can’t do it without it. It becomes a prerequisite not an enhancer. That sounds more parasitic than anything else.
What's the difference between the life of a child and that of an adult? You seem to be very close to figuring it out. (Tip: adults have little to no leisure time).
I can have fun without alcohol, no problem. But I can't deny that I like the taste of alcoholic drinks / beverages, and I enjoy the effect.
Same with sugar - I can enjoy a life without candy, but once in a while, I enjoy eating candy.
It's all about moderation.
Among other things, alcohol became legal to drink. Adults take more road trips than babies and teenagers too, I wonder why they can’t have fun at home anymore.
- kids have fun without money
- some teens have fun without money
Then at some point /some/ people, as adults, feel like they need money to enjoy themselves?
I've never drunk alcohol before. Is it worth never having it? Does one drink really ruin your body that much.
If I had to guess, the air I breathe and other environmental factors would be more harmful over a long term period than having a single drink.
One drink once in your life is not going to harm you. I think this is talking more about the "moderate" drinking of 1-2 servings per week.
That said, I've been down the whole alcohol path before and it ain't good for me. I don't know of any time since I've gotten sober that I thought back and said "Man, I wish I had been drunk for that"
It's an unnecessary risk. Maybe you'll do fine trying alcohol, maybe you'll become an addict and ruin your life. I don't think you're going to enhance your life by trying alcohol.
P.S. we are from Southern Europe
The effect is also most pronounced in my sleep since my heart rate is usually quite consistent, it varies like 2 bpm most nights. But if I look at the last night I drank, my average heart rate is +10 from baseline and varied by 20 bpm during my sleep.
The data is crystal clear.
If a little alcohol reduces one's stress and increases socialization, then they may be better off with the alcohol on net.
Obviously the experience is what matters, not what the machine says. Alcohol increases cortisol levels? Ok, all I know is I feel nice and relaxed right now.
Of course if I overdo it, or do it too often, then the next day will demand the debt repaid, or my baseline will shift upward. Ok, so don't overdo it.
But alcohol has risks and if you actually want to balance those risks with the rewards, you should have an accurate account of what those risks are
In any case it has always seemed clear to me that studies showing beneficial effects of moderate alcohol consumption are heavily influenced by some combination of paying interest-groups and the researchers really wanting to justify a daily beer/wine glass.
The clearest evidence for me that a glass a day can not possibly be healthy is the effect just a single glass has on athletic performance the next day.
For the record I do drink and have for a long time, but have no illusions about the negative effects.
There's enough doubt about whether light-moderate alcohol consumption (i.e. a small glass of red wine with dinner and two or three once in a while with friends) is harmful or protective that it seems pretty clear that, whether the net effect is positive or negative, it's not terribly strong.
We get really hung up on whether something is "good for you" or "bad for you", without focusing as much as we should on exactly how bad it is: we just want to sort things into either the "good" bucket or the "bad" bucket and feel the corresponding dose of pride or guilt.