Against Alcohol
fergus-mccullough.com
fergus-mccullough.com
I've seen his harm score chart quite a few times here on HN [1]
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
Source : addiction happened to people i met and the HR happened in a friends party.
sounds like caffeine (from those criteria)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_caffeine_on_memory
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777290/
[2]: https://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/news/20060815/coffee-may...
It's pretty easy to drink 3 cups of coffee and not come anywhere near overdosing on caffeine. And then after that you can drink 3 more. And then after that you are probably sick of coffee, but go ahead and drink 3 more if you really want.
How's the recreational dosing of GHB go?
Example: https://www.inquisitr.com/1909754/caffeine-powder-death-teas...
I've never taken GHB and don't plan to, but it looks like a recreational dose is ~1/2 of a dangerous dose, both of which would be (at least somewhat) difficult to obtain.
With caffeine, the typical recreational dose is a beverage that is easily obtained and isn't dangerous. That you could buy caffeine powder doesn't make that a typical way to consume it.
Apparently 500 mg of caffeine is considered potentially dangerous. That would be 5 or 6 cups of coffee (I'm in the habit of drinking that much coffee and have a pretty low resting heart rate during the consumption, so I dunno).
Long term use of most substances ALWAYS lead to problems and even the short term there are bad trips, brain zaps that alcohol dont bring. Also even for stuff that do not lead to physical cravings such as mdma, i have seen soo many people falling into an addiction. Its not a game.
Alchol wont be banned ever, but i think is a retarded debate to say "we should decriminalize other stuff be cause alcohl is bad". This is the worse reason possible.
Im quite happy drugs are banned and not mainstream so that my children will stay away from them and maybe try later when they feel more mature.
That doesnt mean i support the american war on drugs or jailing people for 3g of cannabis.. but the decriminalization of weed is stupid to considering two of my friends who have an impaired short term memory after 1 - 2 years periods of abuse.
I dont see any sort of upside in legalizing drugs at the society level considering the effects ive see on people. THATs a simple position.
Alcohol brings seizures, which are considerably worse (and potentially fatal).
>That doesnt mean i support the american war on drugs or jailing people for 3g of cannabis.
How do you intend to enforce the illegality of substances (and in a manner that will cause your children to fear possessing them) without punitive measures?
This is literally the first time ive heard about that. That said i do think alcohol is dangerous.
> How do you intend to enforce the illegality of substances (and in a manner that will cause your children to fear possessing them) without punitive measures?
The status quo in my country is fine to me:
Drugs are easily available, fines are low (i know a ecstasy dealer who got caught in a club woth 60 pills and got 3 month of 'potential' jail time that will apply only if he gets caught again) , its badly seen by society and "forbidden".
That means not a lot of people do drugs. Motivated people can acess them, but you dont have a society of degenerate zombies. All good to me.
I had hoped it was common knowledge that alcohol withdrawal could lead to fatal seizures. People should be aware that going cold turkey (abruptly stopping heavy drinking) can put them at serious risk.
"All the people who want to do drugs are already using them, but society will crumble into degeneracy if they are legalized"?
What do you anticipate changing if they are legalized?
People will do them thinking "if its decriminalizef they must be fine" which is not a fine mindset at all and its a good thing to fear them.
Illegal drugs are much more accessible to teenagers than alcohol is.
Alcohol is quite accessible to teenagers outside the US..
I think you're both vastly misinterpreting the data. It's not classifying drugs based on how popular they are.
This is, in fact, the only sensible way to compare the relative harms of drugs. Otherwise, you can't put a number on how harmful X is without specifying the quantity and frequency of use, and they vary widely. With alcohol we know that lots of people consume small amounts weekly with little harm, and some people consume large amounts daily with major harm. The same is true for all drugs. The only data we have is for the current usage levels in society, so it makes sense to report harms for those levels.
At any rate, the paper boils down to "We asked a panel of experts how harmful are X, Y, Z in various ways on a 100 point scale and we averaged those numbers using some weights that seem vaguely plausible and here are the results!" And somehow the Lancet published it.
There's little evidence that light or moderate drinking has major negative health effects. Anything under 10 drinks per week only has a very slight negative effect on all-cause mortality, and anything under 7 drinks per week has no effect: https://marlin-prod.literatumonline.com/cms/attachment/9e0c4... (A standard drink is 14 grams, so the 7 and 10 per week marks are just before 100 and 150 on the x-axis).
Source: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I think most people start with 4 drinks per week. 12 years later is a different story.
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-s...
Sounds like a public health crisis
Also "most people start with 4 drinks per week" is made up. Regardless of where you put "start".
Sorry, you're gonna have to back up this rather hefty statement with some facts. I've never seen any data to suggest that a "vast percentage" of people are at risk of becoming alcoholics.
Thanks, you're quite right to challenge that, it's a belief based on past reading and should be backed up.
> Sorry, you're gonna have to back up this rather hefty statement with some facts. I've never seen any data to suggest that a "vast percentage" of people are at risk of becoming alcoholics.
"vulnerable to the gradual creep of addiction" and "at risk of becoming alcoholics" are not the same thing. A person might refrain from alcohol altogether because they believe, perhaps due to their family history, that if they drank on a regular basis they would become alcoholic. IOW, they feel they are vulnerable to the gradual creep of addiction. And they might be right. But as long they don't drink at all, they're not at risk of developing alcoholism.
This isn't about the propensity of an individual to develop alcoholism based on personal circumstances. This is a population-level claim with no data to back it up.
Frankly, I'm not even sure what you're arguing but it seems wholly disconnected from the OPs claim or my counterpoint.
I've drank lots, both socially and just at home for no reason. I enjoyed having many different beers around and consumed what was on-hand but never got to the point I made special trips to stock it. Similarly for wines or spirits (vodka, tequila, whiskey, wine).
Lately since there's little social occasions to drink, I've taken to consuming a bottle of red per week with/after meals. It seems to help with sleep (since I also have a couple cups of coffee throughout the day) than without.
Edit: Also recalling that it wasn't all that long ago, historically speaking, that Quebec still allowed smoking inside the office, and there was one woman who I worked with that had a rolling machine and a large ashtray that always needed emptying. It was like a weird trip in a time-machine.
Everything is "chemicals".
> somewhere over a pack a week was habit forming
Try three packs a day
> I've drank lots,
Probably not, compared with someone (such as me) that does drink lots.
> I've taken to consuming a bottle of red per week ... I also have a couple cups of coffee throughout the day
Careful there!
My point is that different people have wildly different ideas about what is acceptable, damaging and addictive, and their ability to deal with it, in one way or another. I easily managed to give up cigarettes because my girlfriend said she would leave me if I didn't. She gave up alcohol (which she was a heavy user of) when she became pregnant (not by me), which is something I know I will never be able to do.
Nutritional epidemiology is real questionable - it pretty much can tell you nonsense - like the fact that most items we cook with give us cancer [1]
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/binge-drinking.htm
EDIT:
To be clear, I'm not an abolishonist. I do think, however, we should look at the actual potential harm of a substance when making laws. Alcohol is both physically addictive and habitual vs. marijuana or mushrooms. Alcohol and MDMA have overdose risk, where as marijuana and mushrooms do not. Marijuana and MDMA can pose serious psychological risks, especially in adolescents, where alcohol has a much lesser risk. These should all be reviewed in a scientific and dispassionate manner when defining laws, is all I'm suggesting.
The second argument, primarily in the second half of the article, is that creating the conditions to easily permit binge drinking is just a severe a problem.
>> It’s possible to consume alcohol in a safe manner... But at some margin, you are contributing to the idea that it’s normal to drink it. And we need to break down that norm.
In other words, every drink you order in public has a >1 R0 to make one of your buddies also order a drink. Conversely, every drink you don't get has <1 R0.
I'm sure we've all been in those situations at a bar where we say "I'll get (another) one if you get (another) one".
That's why he vouches for abstinence. Not for health, but to discourage a binge drinking culture that's quite pervasive, in the UK especially.
However, their quality of life is certainly lower than it was before alcohol. They require daily medications with side-effects, need to see expensive specialists, require expensive lab work to be run regularly, and have to worry about what happens should they go without their medication (ie suffer brain damage from seizing, have a heart attack, and/or die).
In fact, mushrooms and LSD are the two least harmful recreational drugs per the Economist chart from 2010. Number 1 is alcohol and number 2 is heroin and crack. Meth is a pretty distant 4th. [1]
They're not addictive, in no small part because they're not really "fun" in the classic way cocaine is. They're interesting, but you're really not in a hurry to do them again. Further, the LD-50 is really, really, really high.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
LSD and other 5-HT2A agonists are self-limiting in that they induce a massive tolerance after a single dose, making subsequent doses either not work or give diminished effects that do not increase with increased doses. They also are not physically addictive like alcohol is, nor does LSD cause organ damage like alcohol does.
Beyond overdoses, opioids, other than ones like MPTP, don't cause physical harm to the body like alcohol does. The dangers of heroin come mostly from its criminalization, the criminalization of addiction and the lack of access to healthcare to treat addiction. For example, there are millions of people who take Suboxone, a long acting and powerful opioid that stays in the blood for 30+ days, without it causing organ damage or seizure disorders. Street heroin is dangerous because it is unregulated and often cut with fentanyl and stuff that should not be going into veins.
The issues surrounding heroin would be solved with a regulated supply of clean heroin, medical support to administer it correctly, addiction treatment and making all of those things accessible and affordable to the people who need it most. There are several examples of governments that provide all of these things, and they indeed cut down on heroin's mortality and the devastating effects of addiction.
Similar to the person I know with heart disease from alcohol, I know a former heroin addict who also has heart disease from their use. Their heart problem was not caused by heroin, but by the fact that they'd crush pills and inject them without properly filtering them, and the pill binders caused heart damage. A clean supply of heroin and access to addiction treatment would have prevented their heart problem.
I'm in favor of universal legalization, but it's definitely worth considering the impact to everybody, not just the people who use drugs responsibly
When I was in high school and college, kids would regularly get alcohol poisoning and need medical attention. Some of them would drink, drive and die. People like this will exist whether or not it's legal for them to consume whatever substance they're abusing.
> I'm in favor of universal legalization, but it's definitely worth considering the impact to everybody, not just the people who use drugs responsibly
Criminalization isn't going to stop these people, and even if their use leaves them unscathed, the justice system can impose lifelong negative consequences on them.
This is why I'm in favor of funding real drug education so people can make informed decisions, healthcare so people can get help if their use affects their heath, and legalization so that lives aren't ruined by legal consequences.
Many formulations contain small enough amounts of Naloxone to permit a addict to take opiates without any significant adverse effects within a few hours.
The reason why people use the name synonymously is because Buprenorphine is a Mu Kappa Delta antagonist with sufficiently higher affinity to those receptors making it very much harder for other opiods to bind preferentially. Slow release formulation and slow linear bioavailability decline profiles suffice to do the rest of the job of making say heroin ineffective if the patient takes anything else.
I'm saying this so no one is under any impression that Suboxone is a safe drug for anyone to take (accidentally or otherwise) and off the top of my head a commonly used 8mg dose is roughly 100mg Morphine equivalent.
https://www.gloshospitals.nhs.uk/gps/treatment-guidelines/op...
Again, even the people in my life who think of themselves as moderate drinkers without even the hint of a problem would have to acknowledge multiple incidents that fit the above criteria, if they were honest.
Because we live in a culture that tolerates alcohol we view a lot of this behavior as insignificant in a way that you wouldn't if somebody at a party were exhibiting signs of, say, cocaine intoxication. "Bob didn't come to work today because he used too much cocaine" sounds like a serious problem, but "Bob didn't come to work today because he's hungover" may elicit knowing laughs from the co-workers who were with him at the bar the night before.
Most people won't become fall-down drunks who lose their jobs and their spouses and everything else, but that's a pretty weak standard for harm.
As if that's all there is to life...
Except that "binge drinking" is the norm for a lot of people.
Think about how much drinking surrounds sports events--it's really easy to fall into the trap of "having a couple extra"--and a stadium cup is often close to 2 drinks in quantity.
Suddenly, you're in the "7 drinks" range without even trying very hard.
Like everything we use to numb/escape our own minds, alcohol and all the marketing we're fed, and the examples we're set while growing up, make it easy to rationally think we should cut down but there's no way that message is going to be easily accepted by your subconscious!
Other links: - https://www.oneyearnobeer.com/ - https://thisnakedmind.com/ - https://medium.com/ainyf-alcohol-is-not-your-friend
HTH.
Not sure if they have an Android or other version.
Yes, alcohol is worse for your health than no alcohol. That’s almost certainly true even for “moderate” drinkers. People do it for pleasure. A “case against alcohol” that doesn’t address this very real benefit is unlikely to have any impact, except with people who have decided that pleasure itself is suspect at best.
- Muscles must be stressed and sustain damage ("microtrauma") before muscle growth occurs.
- DNA must be damaged by UVB radiation in order for the body to create melanin.
- Allergen immunotherapy works by exposing the body to larger and larger amounts of a substance which causes an allergic reaction. This process is clearly nonlinear and involves hysteresis!
Ethanol exists naturally in the body, in small amounts (~3g/day), as a byproduct of fermentation in the digestive system. We're always producing a small amount of the enzymes which convert alcohol to acetaldehyde, and then acetaldehyde to acetic acid and acetyl-CoA, and so on. Is it such a stretch to imagine that the body has a feedback mechanism to deal with variations in these levels, and that that mechanism is effective at preventing neurotoxicity for small enough variation in these levels? At some point I think to argue there is no theoretic way the body regulates these low levels of ethanol, you'd just be arguing that living, itself, is neurotoxic.
A drink would be 8 oz (5%) = 11.2 g etoh / beer avg that is consumed in <30m so that's 22.4 g/H or 1800% higher rate of etoh consumption for single beer compared to what your body naturally produces. Due to that, it remains in your blood stream and crosses the blood brain barrier for some period of time before the enzymes can effectively convert it, hence the increase in BAC for that period of time. That indicates that you are not maintaining homeostasis at that rate of consumption. If you drink more, then that extends the time of exposure and raises the level further - so yea there is a non-linearity there.
I'd compare it more to toluene or some solvent you breath in accidentally while working. Sure your body removes it, there are acceptable OSHA personal exposure levels so obviously it won't kill you at that concentration, maybe it gets more efficient at removing it after you expose yourself repeatedly. Still it's a neurotoxin and breathing any in causes non-zero damage.
All this beer talk got me thirsty, cheers!
it's like pruning the dead branches from a shrub
forgetting can be helpful
To your point, what would the numbers look like without alcohol?
Perhaps there is a decrease in birth rate as people make more judicious choices?
Perhaps people move to other, less healthy intoxicants?
Perhaps suicide rate increases because people are less able to blow off steam and occasionally get stupid?
Who knows?
What we do know is that humans are genetically adapted to consuming ethanol, have been doing it for thousands of years [1], and seem to have a pretty fun time doing it.
> It really feels like we’re experiencing a rebirth of puritanism
Sometimes it seems like the issue is even broader to me. There seems to be a strange obsession recently with getting rid of anything that's generally enjoyable.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beer#:~:text=A%20....
The health benefits of red wine are well known. Alcohol also lowers the odds of stroke and improves your cholesterol:
"Man doesn't want people to do thing he doesn't enjoy; news at 10"
It's a shame he wrote this blog because at least some of Nutt's proposals seem reasonable.
> A Christian framework can be extremely helpful here.
Oh ok, why did I even start reading this?
I'd say the cost to benefit on it is pretty horrific, with cancer, liver, etc all adding up together in the end. I think if someone were abusing Benzos or Ketamine it'd be far much cleaner than abusing alcohol. Note, please don't take this as advice or any kind of implicit approval for abusing any of the above. It's just, uh, nice to not have to lose your liver and such (and I know there are other side effects from abusing the others above, but it seems to be from rampant, constant use, I believe/have heard, at very high doses for Ketamine. Don't know as much about the Benzos side of things.)
The first sentence might be true for all I know, but I can't see how the second one makes for supporting evidence.
I'm not an alcoholic but I am an anxious wreck. Single best way to make me stop freaking out at a party? Two old fashioneds.
I'd prefer to be gregarious and unworried sober, but that's not an option. (Yes, there are other approaches. This works better than all of them.)
I'm not a drinker, and used to be a recluse, but once in a while there's a birthday I cannot refuse. I get there, stay miserable, drink a bit, keeps miserable, gets home at 3am.
I woke up at 7am like a champ, jumping out of bed as if it was a 2 weeks holidays.
Alcohol gets very bad press today but for me, that tiny bit of alcohol helped me stay at a party which probably refueled some social needs (even if shallow).
No, this isn't even the question. It is clear that people will keep doing things that have downsides, with out any explainable benefit. This is called addiction. It isn't a new idea.
This part is what I was commenting about. Not your shy guy.
Do you see any downsides in your use of alcohol? No? Then you're not what my comment was about.
You could ask the same thing about speed and meth.
I think the minimum pricing law of Scotland is the way to go when regulating alcohol. When I was living there, the system seemed to work well and incentivised buying higher quality drinks as well. I guess the problem is populist politicians who could easily brand it as limiting poor people's drinking, instead of posh ones.
I live in a state where restrictions on alcohol sales are pretty limited; grocery stores and corner/convenience stores, for example, can sell whatever they want alcohol-wise. Many stores will keep the more expensive stuff in locked cabinets as a shoplifting-prevention measure. I don't think it'd be too crazy to require that all hard liquors be kept that way, and then sales there can even be restricted by time of day if that was desirable. Beer and wine could be left as-is, with no restrictions. (On the downside, this would hurt smaller shops that aren't specifically liquor stores; locked cabinets are an added expense and take up more space.)
Government run shops let you track sales by area in a fine-grained way.
They can be a more effective way to ensure rules around supply are enforced than random inspections / checks.
They let you change the rules (eg opening hours, id requirements, record keeping, banned drinker registry, customer limits) easily without an outcry from retailers who would no doubt claim that any restrictions are onerous and impractical.
They can be placed so as to avoid completely saturating low income areas with booze.
No price wars or loss-leader marketing strategies.
They mean one can buy essentials without going "near" alcohol. Supermarket sales can be an issue for problem drinkers.
Retail profits can go back to the community.
There are other ways you can achieve each of these points of course but monitoring, enforcement and change will all tend to be more difficult in a decentralised vs centralised system.
Even in the last year you can look at the pandemic response, so much of the unhappiness was around the fact bars were closed. The world is ending because you can't drink? People were outraged, Its bizarre. Theres also a travel gatekeeping thing around visiting bars that is odd too. The idea where you need to go to some dive bar in a foreign place to really get the culture. The article is kind of right, cheap alcohol culture kind of just preys on people who can't help themselves. There isn't anything of substance going on when cheap alcohol is involved.
I don't really drink much anymore, maybe one or two drinks,a good wine or interesting cocktail. Alcohol kind of physically hurts now. All about the dabs, psychedelics and mdma. Imagine a world where those can be a regular alternative to excessive drinking at a bar. There might still be drug abusers but atleast we would all be a little more relaxed.
No, they were outraged because they couldn't meet their friends. If they just wanted to drink, they could have got alcohol from supermarkets.
https://www.epi.org/blog/we-prioritized-open-bars-before-giv...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/03/macs-staten...
> “The people have rights!” one protester yelled, reported the Daily News. “Open the door, I’m thirsty!”
Possibly for kids getting bullied at schools in the anglo saxon world...
Then after my friends came back from college overseas all they wanted to do was to go to bars and pubs instead, ugh
Any thoughts on how to avoid the folly of restriction on alcohol? There seems to be multi-pronged issues, one being that the chemical messes up our body and is largely incompatible, and even if we altered the chemical someway and left the fun effects, we still have the issue of people being taken advantage of while experiencing the effects. But the trade in alcohol is so great that any state sponsored curbs on consumption results in a worse illicit reality.
i don't recommend trying it
they are all heavily controlled, and benzodiazepines are considered some of the most damaging and addictive substances of abuse.
Public health/education campaigns, however, can be wildly effective with enough funding. Smoking cessation in particular has been massively successful even with no change to legality and billions of dollars of tobacco industry money doing everything they can to reverse it. The public health campaign in the US managed to turn cigarettes from chic to trashy and have made prohibition unnecessary. I could imagine the same happening with alcohol (and other problematic substances) on a long enough timeline.
The campaigns against obesity don't make people thin, because half the time they don't even promote stuff that makes people thin. Half the time they promote diets that makes situation worse in the long term.
Campaigns against smoking did worked in the past. Drug use is down. Teenage v pregnancies are down. All stuff that involved campaigns.
Admittedly, most anti-obesity campaigns also seem to be neutered by lobbying. "Stop drinking soda" becomes politicized and turned into "move" by lobbyists. Taking a 30 minute walk is great advice for overall health, but will do absolutely 0 to address obesity.
I guess overall, there's no guarantee of success here, but I tend to view the shift in public sentiment about tobacco as a direct result of public health efforts. Which leads me to believe it's at least possible for other issues (obesity, alcohol). But certainly it is difficult and with unknown risk of failure.
Since then, I've tried a wide variety of beer, wine, rum, bourbon, etc and have only once come away from the experience with a "I didn't hate that/I'd buy that again.". The vast majority of the time I've failed to finish what I'm served (or do so out of politeness) and reflect that I'm simply "missing the point" because I'm not interested in inebriation/"buzzed". I'm sure there are those that enjoy the flavor (perhaps in the same way that I "enjoy" very spicy hot sauce), but wanted to ask.
Good things to compare to are:
- spicy food
- stinky foods (eg cheese)
- coffee
All of the above are acquired tastes. I could barely eat spicy before, now I love it. Stinky cheese makes we want to vomit, but others enjoy it. I only drink decaf, yet periodically enjoy a black coffee, something which seemed absurd when I was younger.
To me alcohol is just one more flavor option. I wouldn’t want it banned just because other people can’t control themselves.
This is why when the price of beer went up 18+ people stopped buying it because they only used to buy it as a cheap way to get drunk. Drinks companies switched to making extremely sweet alcoholic drinks to counteract that and marketed them towards this audience to make up the loss.
I used to work in advertising and worked on marketing one of these a products so this is what I heard from one of the worlds largest breweries while doing it.
He was chairman of the UKs Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs for seven years until his dismissal for advocating that that illicit drugs should be classified according to the actual evidence of the harm they cause. In Nutts ranking, alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than LSD, ecstasy or cannabis and should thus be subject to stricter regulations.
edit: adding some sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000709121...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...
Also Khat is the best on this chart yet I believe that it makes you feel extremely tired the next day.
That being said the topic is really interesting and I am looking forward to a better rational chart.
Benzodiazepines are at virtually the same position on the chart that alcohol is, so I don't think the chart should be viewed as an endorsement for switching. They are of roughly the same level of danger, but that doesn't mean that they are dangerous in exactly the same ways.
A similar analogy would be to compare the relative danger of automobiles to atomic bombs.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/25/what-is-...
And I say that as someone who never drinks alone; I do drink regularly with friends, and if i get wasted in a group, that's it.
Societies that have a problem with alcohol abuse need to change the society.
Alcohol is a drain on economic growth, damaging our productivity and forcing us to spend money on healthcare that could be used elsewhere. The CDC estimated the cost of hangovers to the American economy as $249bn in 2010. The Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates a cost of £1.4bn a year for British productivity.
And therein lies the core argument of the entire piece. Good old fashioned Anglo capitalist puritanism. Don't have fun that could be harmful or dangerous, don't have any pleasure, optimize your life for GDP and close your eyes and think of England.
I seriously wonder why people who argue along these lines and apparently write an entire book on the dangers of alcohol don't just skip that part and go to the actually interesting question and ask themselves why people still drink or do any other drug, because we all know that it's dangerous and harmful etc. But drugs are also a part of our culture, of our social life, they can be a source for creativity or just for pleasure.
There's another interesting little bit in the piece
>"Left unaddressed is why we think that alcohol is necessary to any of those (good and often great) rituals. It’s not. I don’t see why you can’t get most of those social benefits anyway."
I seriously wonder how long you have to hit people on the head with Tyler Cowen books until they actually start to believe this stuff. A ritual is a sacred, integrated activity. It's not some autistic utilitarian thing where you can rip a part out and 'get the social benefits'. You take one part out, the entire thing falls apart. But I don't think people who think like this even have any religious or aesthetic appreciation any more to understand this.
So? You live to work?
Incidentally, it's not hard to learn how to drink all night without having a hangover the next day. Look at tonics or water your wine. Easy peasy.
Many things people put into their bodies hurt them in the long run and sometimes the more the faster. Should we prevent them from doing it? In the US, we mostly say no.
It seems to me that most Americans are ok with that.
Maybe these restrictions do more good than harm. But they definitely do some harm.
I also think if we look at it from a human suffering perspective as humanists, the Christian moral angle is unneeded. We can offer alternatives to alcohol that are better for people by understanding why they drink. Mental health and general life satisfaction are certainly reasons we would need to tackle for the worst cases, in addition to the established rituals the article talks about. Making moral arguments primarily through Christian theories of sin is a major reason the last temperance movement (in the US) failed, because it did not understand the reasons people drank and offer any alternatives.
I suspect society has normalised taking alcohol to numb daily stresses or problems. So any sudden top down decision to ban it or trying to force a reduction in consumption by raising the prices would be met by a very forceful backlash. Any reduction would have to be conducted with a long term plan that redirects people from this reaction to stress
and also for me, alcohol has seemingly helped me through depression , along with excerse
The alcohol industry seems to me as bad as the tobacco industry.
I've been teetotal for coming up to two years now. I feel better than ever. Alcohol has no positive effects. It serves only to numb the senses. I prefer to experience the world in all its glory. Luckily it's very easy to be teetotal now. As Nutt mentions, you do need to have a glass of drink (that isn't water) at all times in social settings, but I can get a lime soda anywhere and now have a mocktail from many places. Loads of people don't drink either for health reasons, religious or just because they don't want to. It's easy.
Prevailing opinion of HN comments seems to be getting a lil stupid for fun is Bad.
> Prevailing opinion of HN comments seems to be getting a lil stupid for fun is Bad.
That part might be true. I think there's a tendency to be a little robotic/scientistic/productivist about...just about every topic.
> I don't know, I have seen a lot of pro LSD and psilocybin mushroom micro-dosing posts and comments
These ideas are very much in line with each other. The pro-psychedelic comments very often talk about the "objective" value (studies on mental health benefits and comparative safety) rather than only the subjective experience or ethics of criminalization.
Personally I want all drugs legalized on ethics/freedom principles, but especially with Psilocybin, MDMA, and Ketamine there seems to be a mounting wealth of evidence suggesting these things are miracle drugs in many respects.
I see a decent amount of posters talk about using nootropics, THC, mushrooms, and alcohol.
There seems to be a lot of interest in "hacking" the body in various ways using chemicals.
Places in Southern Europe like France or Italy have a much more reasonable approach to alcohol. Perhaps we should aim to emulate them and not continue teetering between being teetotalers and drunkards.
The extremes, the noisy, stereotypes and what media like to focus on get noticed. The rest of us in the 90% who just have a little bit with a meal occasionally never get noticed. So comparisons between countries and cultures has more to do with perception than statistics.
I could try to make different arguments as to why I want to retain my right to drink. But that's the wrong strategy.
The better answer is, you can't stop me. I do t owe anyone an explanation for what I put in my own body. I don't have to defend it. I do it or not because I want to or don't. And you're going to have to stop me by force if that is your goal.
To defend it gives the puritans credibility. You don't owe them an explanation.
As an alcoholic myself, the terms have always meant the same thing to me.
There are plenty of people who will drink every day of their life in a way that evidences dependence, but with little or no evidence of abuse. I've had some of these in my family. They drank at the same time in the evening and in the same quantity every day for decades, and they were likely in some state of mild chemical dependence, but the addiction, as it were, never caused any trouble whatsoever.
It's not useful to call these people alcoholics.
Likewise, it would be absurd to label people who drink coffee or tea daily with "caffeinism", even if physical dependence is present. And we don't label people who are chemically dependent on anti-depressants with "SSRI-ism".
In my mind, attaching an "ism" to a substance is only useful to identify pathology, which doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dependence.
> It's not useful to call these people alcoholics.
Whether it's useful is not the point, especially whether it's useful to you personally. Alcoholism has a definition, which revolves around dependence. If they're dependent they're alcoholics, and it's still different than non-dependent binge drinking. You're basically trying to make the same distinction I just did (contrary to your own "they're the same" from two posts earlier), except that that you're using the term "alcoholism" for the wrong side of the distinction.
> In my mind, attaching an "ism" to a substance is only useful to identify pathology
You're using "pathology" in a very idiosyncratic way, almost opposite to its real meaning. To a clinician, social effects are not pathology. The pathology is the causes and effects on the individual, so dependence qualifies but wrecking your car doesn't.
Not... really.
The problem here is that the term "alcoholism" is a colloquialism, not a technical term. Neither the DSM nor ICD uses it. So I suppose it can mean whatever you want, but it would be good for the common usage of the term to be useful in some way, and indeed it is in this case. In everyday language, the term alcoholism overwhelmingly connotes problem drinking. I'm quite steeped in the culture for personal reasons, and I've never in my entire life heard anyone use the word "alcoholism" to refer to completely harmless and controlled consumption.
> contrary to your own "they're the same" from two posts earlier
No, I asserted that alcoholism, in its everyday colloquial sense, connotes abuse. I definitely do not assert the same regarding the notion of "dependence", which does have a widely used technical definition.
If it's dependence that we're debating, I'll argue that mere dependence on alcohol should not qualify it for the "alcoholism" label in the common pejorative sense. If you disagree, then I really am curious why you would not likewise label daily coffee drinkers with "caffeinism"?
In the other direction, I assert that any regular, pathological pattern of consumption indicates a degree of dependence, but I recognize that there's some semantic debate there.
> You're using "pathology" in a very idiosyncratic way, almost opposite to its real meaning. To a clinician, social effects are not pathology.
We're not talking about oncology here. Alcoholism is not diagnosed, treated, studied, or managed quite like a medical condition such as cancer or diabetes. Outside the world of medical doctors, the term "pathology" is usually truer to its greek root "pathos". "Pathologic behaviour", "pathological gambling", etc.
For what it's worth, the DSM and ICD largely classify mental disorders based on behavioural evidence. This is certainly true for alcohol dependence and abuse (DSM-IV) and alcohol use disorder (DSM-V).
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26763944 you used the exact words "meant the same". Don't retcon.
> Alcoholism is not diagnosed, treated, studied, or managed quite like a medical condition
Don't throw around terms like "pathology" then. If you have moral opinions about other people's drinking, just say so.
> DSM and ICD largely classify mental disorders based on behavioural evidence
"Behavioral" does not mean only effect on others. The distinction you're trying to make keeps shifting around, but AFAICT it hasn't at any point matched any common one.
That's right. I assert that the term "alcoholism" is most widely and commonly used to denote "alcohol abuse". That's what I said before and that's what I'm saying now. I'll say it again if you'd like :)
And again, I have never in my life heard a pattern of harmless and controlled consumption of alcohol referred to as "alcoholism".
Regarding the notion of dependence, I assert that (1) there is such a thing as alcohol dependency that does not result in or qualify as alcohol abuse, and (2) that in practice all alcohol abuse involves some degree of chemical or psychological dependence. I understand there is semantic debate about this, especially among cognitive scientists, and I'm comfortable taking a side. In DSM-IV, dependence and abuse are diagnosed by completely separate criteria. In DSM-V the criteria are merged under the diagnosis of "Alcohol Use Disorder".
Regarding binge drinking, I'll argue that all regular binge drinking should be considered disordered or abusive. Both DSM-IV and DSM-V guidelines appear to allow some amount of binge drinking to escape a clinical diagnosis, but in my experience regular binge drinking is always abusive in the ways that matter. I bet you every addiction counsellor you'll ever meet will agree with me on that.
> Don't throw around terms like "pathology" then.
Like I said, the word pathology is widely used with a broader meaning outside of hospitals and doctor's offices. But if you're really intent on policing that particular word, I invite you to take up the debate up with a clinical psychologist. Tell them that they're using that word all wrong, and they should use it only the way MD's do. Let me know how that goes.
> If you have moral opinions about other people's drinking, just say so.
No, I have no problem with alcohol, and I'm regularly around quite a bit of drinking. I have no problem making a run to the liquor store for dinner or a party, and I'm always glad to be the designated driver.
My experience leads me to believe that addiction is a disease, not a moral failure. I have the disease of alcoholism, a disease that is diagnosed clinically on the basis of my behavior. Not on my genes or brain structure, but on my behavior. I will never be "cured" of this disease. The best I can hope for is remission, and that's why I can never touch alcohol again, not even a single drink. But that's just my approach. I know there are others, and I don't judge them.
So this would seem to support my assertion that an "ism" generally denotes excessive consumption leading to "problems" by whatever definition one chooses.
I've used a month's worth of scare quotes today.
A person can regularly binge drink, but not be dependant on alcohol.
Even if you could arrange a definition of dependence such that it doesn't apply to a regular problem drinker, then I think the term loses it's utility. The physiology and psychology of dependence is an interesting topic, but the disease of substance abuse IS the problematic behavior.
EDIT: I had to clean this up a bunch, apologies for the butchered first attempt.
Alcoholism a behavioral health condition which inclines one toward unhealthy alcohol use.
Alcohol abuse is a behavior which can exist with or without that underlying condition.
I enjoy drinking from time to time, and have definitely had nights of excessive drinking that I've found incredibly fun, but I won't try to convince myself it's been good for me.
Also, measuring consumption by number of drinks is very inaccurate(for example beer can be 0-32%/vol), plus individual metabolism plays huge role how well alcohol is tolerated.[1]
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ofc treat the it with the respect you'd treat any recreational drug.
> Nutt has his own set of policy solutions, and I think they’d be great: [...] stop selling strong alcohol in supermarkets [...]
I'm not sure whether this would really change anything. People get can and do get wasted on beer and wine just fine.
For me most bad habits come down to peer pressure or boredom.
I drink socially and people often gift me drinks in the club. Sometimes the parties are boring and I drink a bit so I stop caring.
That all went away with Corona.
What I don't like however is all the smart product placements that push people that don't otherwise enjoy drinking into it.
It makes me less fun at parties, but I can only imagine how much trouble I've avoided because of this.
That's why a ban on alcohol won't work this time, either.
food is a human right
therefore beer is a human right
No one gives me crap about shaky caffeine hands.
Oh well I'm off everything now, the neutral state is okay, but I wonder if I lost potential.