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Comment by sevilo | Hacker News Reader

So just because alcohol is bad we should encourage other substances that also have an effect on people’s ability to think clearly and have additive properties? Instead of discouraging the culture of drinking? Regardless of what westerners think of as “ridiculous” drug laws, Japan, Korea and other Asian countries with “ridiculous” drug laws do have way lower rate of drug addiction and abuse. That is no coincident.

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Those statistics are highly suspect, from the article:

"Every year, the government gathers these statistics by approaching 6000 households and asking them to fill in a questionnaire. They don’t have to write their names on it, but they do have to hand them over to a government official. In a country where – as I’ll discuss later – even doctors call the police to inform them if their patients are suspected of using drugs, it is very likely that this method leads to figures that hugely underestimate the proportion of Japanese people using drugs."

As well as:

"He concluded: “A very Japanese way of not dealing with the problem is – don’t take the data that would show that it exists.”"

We have no idea what the statistics might be as they don't want to measure them since then they would have to admit that they have a problem. If people are in pain they'll find a way to escape it, and it seems there's a lot of people in pain in Japan and Korea due to the focus on extreme amounts of work and strict social rules. How they are doing compared to the west is a matter of debate, I think roughly equal just with different areas being difficult, however we can't truly measure and compare as the numbers are being deliberately ignored.

Ganja has, and is being used in a lot of meditation and yoga practices to help with focus, perception and attention. It’s use has in many ways helped develop many of these practices throughout countless generation.

Representing it as a substance which clouds the mind is only due to ignorance of its intentional use for the opposite.

That's an excellent point, any substance that alters your brain chemistry such as Marijuana, Alcohol, or Coffee can have a positive or negative impact. We are rich complex beings and everything we put in our body adds to that. I think many of the harmful substances can have a positive effect if used in a healthy way. We need to let go of either demonizing them for their negative effects or deifying them for their positive effects. Once we realize they're complex supplements that can be an enjoyable addition when used in certain circumstances while still respecting their potential for abuse we'll have made a big step forward.

Alcohol has virtually no positive health benefits. Ethanol is potently toxic and will cause DNA damage throughout your body and kill a number of other cells in the way.

But alcohol consumption is ridiculously evolutionarily beneficial. The ability to digest ethanol has evolved independently twice, and each time it swept to dominate ~95 percent of the population in less than 500 years.

It's interesting that you don't state HOW it is beneficial.

It is an energy income method, albeit not the best. In reasonable amounts it strengthens social bonds in group. And there might be few more. There ya go. Wanna grab a beer?

Nah, I'd prefer to avoid cancer thanks though.

From few beers per week? I don't think so. What about the happiness coming from evening spent in intense social bonding?

Downvote? Cute, does that equate to social pressure to consume ethanol? Any alcohol consumption increases the incidence of multiple types of cancers, the primary metabilite (ethanal/acetaldehyde) causes damage to DNA. I can bond with people over my passion for the sciences, I prefer to avoid increasing my risk of cancers. No NMDA antagonist needed.

"The evidence indicates that the more alcohol a person drinks—particularly the more alcohol a person drinks regularly over time—the higher his or her risk of developing an alcohol-associated cancer. Even light drinkers (those who have no more than one drink per day) and binge drinkers have a modestly increased risk of some cancers (3–7). Based on data from 2009, an estimated 3.5% of cancer deaths in the United States (about 19,500 deaths) were alcohol related (8)." https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

Just for some added shits and giggles: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/dar.12596

It's not necessary to know /how/ to know that it /does/, but it's probably related to the sanitation of drinkable liquids.

So you think mechanisms aren't important? Forget about engineering then.

> evolutionarily beneficial

Hardly convinced by your arguments since among Asian populations there is large genetic propensity not to be able to break down ethanol properly.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1580147/

We can admit that drug use is in essence a religion and perscribing acceptable modes of use is little more than a sectarian conflict that needlessly destroys human lives, like all other sectarian conflict

Shame there isn’t a metric for the amount of fun a society has from those same drugs.

Sure, China in the 1800s everybody had good amounts of fun from opium, widely accepted by society, pretty much everybody did it. Wonder how that worked out for them.

Britain got involved and fucked everything up?

It could have been any other country when your whole population is under the ongoing control of opoids.

So, large swaths of the United States in the year 2019.

In the Netherlands drugs are huge. Xtc, weed, cocaine. Its all good. The party never ends.

But the Netherlands has a social welfare system that by and large keeps people from crashing. There are no ghettos, no rust belt.

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