>
There is no cost to avoiding casual drinking. You can still attend events, you can still hang with friends and you can still go to a bar (shocking).No monetary cost. There is a fun and flavour cost. It seems that the fun factor never enters your calculations.
>Notice how you have no argument that can't be applied to say, heroin.
Except heroin is illegal and uncontrolled (can have any crap in it), so I wouldn't advice using it.
If we're talking about recreational drugs in general, they're also OK.
>You can't seriously think that alcohol is healthier than water
You can't seriously think that this is the be all end all comparison to settle the issue of whether one should drink alcohol.
>And yes the comparison is valid for a drink of alcohol is a potential drink of water.
First this is a false dichotomy, as large part of any alcoholic drink is water -- literally 90-95% of beer and wine for example.
Second, if I do drink my 2-3 litters of water recommended by the health authorities (and in pure water form), would that be enough to stop busting my balls and let me enjoy my beer/wine/etc? Or should I drink nothing but water, lest I miss this huge opportunity cost to drink more water?
Are juices allowed?
Now, here are two poems for you:
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—
it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden
of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth,
you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be
drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green
grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room,
you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone,
ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock,
everything that is flying, everything that is groaning,
everything that is rolling, everything that is singing,
everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and
wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time
to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time,
be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on
virtue as you wish.”
Charles Baudelaire, 1821 - 1867
Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and --sans End!
Omar Khayyam - 1120 A.C.E.
(And the second guy was even a medieval muslim...)