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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

We often choose to consume alcohol in a setting with trained, paid drug administrators. There's some safety features to that.

But we also can self-administer, in large part because you can see how strong a drink is, right on the package.

I think GP is suggesting that, absent the lobbying power of the alcohol industry, you might see commercial development of safer ways of dosing alternatives.

If you could go to the store and buy a sealed bottle with 0.5mg ghb that might be compelling for some folks?

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It's a nice idea, but GHB really isn't safe.

While it's pretty hard to kill yourself with alcohol, but very easy using GHB. Even experienced users mess up with GHB, as it matters how much you are taking over time, and how much is being absorbed.

Are you calling bar tenders trained paid drug administrators making it sound like they have medical training? I want to go to the bars you visit. Of all the bar tenders or waitstaff that I have ever met, the closest to medical training were from the ones attending med school and working at the bar to pay for it. I don't think that qualifies.

It's more that I've known friends who think it's appropriate to put 3oz vodka in lemonade and call that a single drink, or they don't measure at all and one drink has 1oz of vodka and the next has 2.5.

At bars you get pretty consistent pours, bartenders are watching for overconsumption and often for potential DUIs. And you don't, typically, have to worry about a bartender spiking a drink with something else.

All of that helps make alcohol consumption with strangers safer.

A lot of the drug safety education for alcohol boils down to knowing how much alcohol is in each drink, and that there's nothing else intoxicating in it.

>A lot of the drug safety education for alcohol boils down to knowing how much alcohol is in each drink, and that there's nothing else intoxicating in it.

A lot of drug saftey education for anything boils down to knowing how much of it is in each serving, and that there's nothing else surprising in it. Knowing your drugs are important whether that's ibuprofen, alcohol, MDMA, etc. Obviously, much more risky with recreational drugs with people looking to spike with other things for the pizzazz or cutting costs, or buying pharma drugs from less than reputible sources.

However, there were a rash of people getting sick/hurt from receiving alcohol from bars at resorts in Mexico. So edge cases are always going to be there.

> I think GP is suggesting that, absent the lobbying power of the alcohol industry, you might see commercial development of safer ways of dosing alternatives.

Well yes, substances are like religions, and alcohol is like Christianity.

Nobody knows how or why it emerged, maybe one of the reason is that you could ballpark doses and unless you really screw up or have a deathwish you'd be able to survive and reproduce.

Same thing for Christianity, there is not a whole lot of stuff in there that prompts people to get in harms way.

Whatever the reason, it's now grandfathered in and it will be really hard to change this.

The fact that the alcohol lobby tries to fight alternatives, and also the fact that there is an alcohol lobby at all...is somehow embedded in society.

I honestly don't know why we are managing to get rid of cigarettes which were similarly grandfathered in and are much lower risk than alcohol

Alcohol is naturally occurring and ridiculously easy to make. Squeeze some fruit juice and let it sit, and it will ferment just from the wild yeasts on the fruit skins. All kinds of animals like alcohol, and will get drunk from fermenting fruit fallen from trees. There's no mystery here.

I think a helpful contributing factor is that cigarettes are immediately annoying and unhealthy to the people around the user so you had the non users motivated to stop the users.

A drunk person is also annoying , no?

Being around a drunk person maybe also statistically unhealthy given the increased risk of falls, accidents, psychological damage?

I don't know, it's one of those things where I can't point which was the reason.

If I had to guess, maybe it was babies, kids and pregnant women. People don't get shitfaced around those categories but they had to endure passive smoke.

And the reduction in cigarette consumption is to be ascribed to that, plus society being less and less fond of stimulants due to risk averseness (this includes nictoine and also cocaine consumption which are both way down compared to the 70s-80s-90s)

> A drunk person is also annoying , no?

The vast majority of people who drink aren't drunk, and not everyone who is drunk is unpleasant; everyone who smokes is putting out irritating smoke.

Intoxication can be annoying and dangerous. Changing the intoxicant doesn't help much.

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