Alcohol death toll is growing, US Government reports say | Hacker News Reader

Alcohol death toll is growing, US Government reports say

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93 pointsgeox105 comments

My partner just lost her mother to alcoholism. Lockdown absolutely did a number on her. Being stuck alone and isolated made it impossible to keep her addiction in check. Who can say what might have happened otherwise, but this news is not surprising to me.

The end of alcoholism this way can be drawn out as the body fails, it is a terrible thing to behold. I expect there will be a 'bump' in deaths of this kind around the world as those who did irreparable damage to their bodies meet their end. The US may hit it sooner due to the complications of obtaining healthcare. Here in the UK we had several trips to the hospital over the last 2 years as her organs failed and were picked up again, with stays of weeks at a time.

During lockdown South Africa actually banned alcohol sales for quite a long time. It was to have less pressure on hospitals. I actually think it was a good decision.

All for the low cost of killing those that were already dependant on alcohol.

There were ways of getting alcohol for those people who are dependent to that level.

What were those ways?

Black market, home brew, Listerine...

Prisoners manage to make the stuff.

Ah yes, let's make deadly stuff more deadly. The US tried this during prohibition and shifted from one problem (mass drunkenness) to black market mafias committing violent acts.

Huh. Around here, liquor stores stayed open as essential, because severe alcohol withdrawal sends alcoholics to the ICU.

I suspect it is a trade off: problems for alcoholics if you cut off the supply versus more problem drinkers if you maintain supply but people cannot go to work, spend time with others etc.

Could we have required that they only sell vodka, so as to target only alcoholics? Perhaps this would have just made "casual" beer drinkers into more hardcore alcoholics, though.

I don't think that would have worked. Even the cheapest vodkas can be made into pretty good-tasting drinks by adding fruit juice.

Ban people from leaving their homes and then ban alcohol so they don’t kill themselves from the depression. We’re gonna need a bigger hammer.

In the US we took the complete opposite approach (at least where I live) and massively deregulated alcohol sales during the pandemic. For example, it became legal for restaurants to deliver alcoholic drinks (including spirits) to people's homes.

OK, and we see that alcohol related deaths are up by a lot ...

Wonder how many people it sent to alternative drugs, that were even more harmful to them but won't show up in the numbers as having been victims of government one-size-fits-all policies.

Probably very few because you can’t just substitute intoxicants like that. People with aud aren’t dependent on being unsober, they’re dependent on alcohol. If they could be swapped like that it would have actually been an improvement because they would have stopped destroying their liver. There are lots of studies that have tried to treat aud with various substitutes as harm reduction, usually weed since the effects are similar, with little success.

Remember we are all human and cope in different ways. Authoritarian approaches are barbaric.

Support groups and mental health should have been deemed essential.

The true cost of lockdowns is finally coming to light.

It is possible that the cost of reducing alcohol availability during the pandemic outweighs not restricting its use.

Especially considering the fact that alcohol is a drug where withdrawal can be lethal.

Our first baby arrived premature in June 2020, middle of no-alcohol lock down in South Africa. Doctor at the time told me the hospital was uncannily quiet despite a pandemic and that it really highlighted how busy alcohol related incidents normally keep them.

South Africa is not alone here, but we have a serious culture problem around alcohol. It’s too common that people (middle class, several years out of university people included) drink stupid amounts of the stuff not caring that they become loud and disorderly and apparently often violent.

Pretty much every week I see one or more traffic lights were run over on the weekend, no doubt by people doing 100km/h+ on 80km/h roads while drunk.

But this does not even seem to be acknowledged as a problem here.

Companies like SAB Miller are a major employer, spend fortunes on advertising and probably have major political influence which I’m sure contributes to lack of media attention to the problem.

Attempting to ban it would never work (as evidenced by the lock-down ban creating a black market). But ideally, we should be working on making binge drinking culturally unacceptable.

> acceptable

unacceptable?

Yes, thank you, corrected.

That's something I noticed. There were a number of people who were on the edge but managing to hold things together, and the lockdown just sent them off the edge into a spiral they couldn't get out of. Some of these impacts won't be full understood for years.

Ironically, during lockdown I had the longest streak of sobriety I've had in years. I'm a social drinker, and there were no social occasions or pressures to drink. I lost a good deal of weight and looked 15 years younger. Lockdown was a relatively peaceful time for me, so there were no stress triggers.

Now I'm trying to get back to that healthy modality, but there are more social events than ever.

I've found switching every other drink for an Non-alcholic beer is working quite well. They're pretty tasty these days, and your hands are still busy with a drink.

Similarly, “Session” beers (4% and below I think) have helped me moderate—I don’t consume quickly enough to start getting buzzed so it never progresses past that. In fact I’ve been surprised to find that I forget about the session beer before I’m finished.

To be clear, if you really suffer from alcoholism don’t follow random advice from internet strangers on how to manage it - seek out qualified professionals.

For what it’s worth, this might be good advice for drinkers, but I don’t think it’s good advice for alcoholics (but again, please seek professional advice).

This sort of PSA feels very… inhumane - for lack of a softer word. Professional advise and all is great, but humans talking to other humans about the experiences, problems, and solutions is rarely a bad thing. And if the reader isn’t capable of thinking critically, then that’s a problem this sort of PSA won’t solve. Are you assuming the GP is extremely impressionable to the point they implement the advise of internet comments without any critical thinking whatsoever?

Sorry for the rant, but this is exactly the sort of almost-helpful comment that leads people to roll their eyes at appealing to the experts.

Sorry you disagree, and sorry I wasn’t blunt enough to say “the above advice is akin to enabling”, because I’m not qualified to make that assessment but I suspect it could be.

You cannot “life-hack” an addiction in this fashion. I mean, you’re welcome to - but I don’t think it will really help. Delaying the inevitable and all that.

> Are you assuming the GP is extremely impressionable to the point they implement the advise of internet comments without any critical thinking whatsoever?

I think that people with addiction often seek out advice that matches or re-affirms their priors and reduces cognitive dissonance they may be feeling, yeah. Just from personal experience with loved ones.

Just getting back to this as work has been busy. I think you're right that I should get professional treatment for alcohol use disorder. On the other hand, one of the things that is often recommended to begin tapering off alcohol is to switch to drinks with lower content or to alternate, as was suggested above. Rarely do they recommend stopping cold turkey. Both of your suggestions came from a place of wanting to be helpful toward another human, so I appreciate them.

Sorry about your mother in law, that sucks. During lockdown I went sober for a year and a few months. I don't have a problem with alcohol but there was no reason to drink so why not.

I cut out alcohol a year and change ago. I was starting to get bad heartburn and I wasn't bouncing back the next day like I used to. Not just physically but emotionally. Kind of a dead to the world/not firing on all cylinders sort of thing.

Even with essentially a 1:1 replacement of alcohol with weed I feel much better. I don't have the heartburn I did and even if I get super stoned on night I wake up normal the next morning.

It's just kind of obvious in retrospect. Alcohol is a substance that will kill you if taken in a dose 2-4 times what people drink. Not shocking that those sub-lethal doses have side effects.

Alcohol is bad. But smoking weed on a daily basis was worse for me. After a good while a sense of general anxiety settles in, you’re dumber, head is always in a fog. I’d much rather moderately have alcohol. Weed is great if you don’t have anything to do and can just hang out in life though. Weed in moderation is probably the best but it’s hard for me to smoke weed only a couple of times a month. It’s all or nothing.

To each their own! I would much rather moderately have weed.

It tends to make you stupid, and seriously degrades short-term memory after prolonged use.

I think all of those things have really only been shown for continued prolonged use, ie. not after cessation for a few months.

I agree that smoking weed is harmful, my addiction is causing me quite a lot of mental issues, but if I had to compare it to heavy alcoholism, it's night and day ...

Definitely no comparison to alcoholism. But even having two drinks a day works for me over having any amount of pot everyday.

Be mindful of your liver enzyme test results at your annual physical (as part of a metabolic panel). That’ll give you an indicator that you’re exceeding the budget of your liver and headed towards cirrhosis (which you most definitely don’t want). Your doctor may also order an ultrasound. Have it done if ordered.

(not medical advice, talk to your doctor)

I think for infrequent users it is a very strong drug, but when you use it all the time it doesn't do much.

Someone I know replaced alcohol with THC edibles recently and had the same experience. She loves it.

For the rest of us looking in, she has become more irritable, anxious, and depressed when she doesn't have the drug, and has become effectively dependent on it to socialize. There was also one study I saw that attributed an 8-10 point IQ drop with long-term weed use.

The effects of weed on your body are a lot less noticeable to you, but they do exist and are harmful for you over the long term. The systems that weed targets (particularly your long-term reward and habit forming systems) are not the same as other drugs, but they change in response to the drug nonetheless.

There are definitely a lot of people whose “casual” weed use is uncomfortable and not fun

One day we will be able to call them out the same way we do to alcoholics

Right now there is a hysteria towards people that are prohibitionists, and anyone pointing out moderation is overfitted into prohibitionist

So this is total anecdata but I have never been assaulted by someone that was stoned, and never seen someone become sexually aggressive or belligerent when stoned. I'm sure they exist, however those type of folks seem to be much less frequent that people who exhibit this behavior when drunk on alcohol.

I think it really comes down to the fact that weed was originally made illegal through disinformation and policies motivated by racial discrimination, when in reality it is at absolute worst, just as bad as alcohol. We need to stop policing people from themselves, especially when it is so hypocritical because of the massive alcohol and tobacco industries. Why do we need to keep wasting money on this?

I think your response is based on assuming what I would advocate for regarding moderation

Just like with alcohol its not a role of the government to say “thats too much, get help”. We can absolutely shame people into moderation, just like we shame people into limiting drinking till after 5pm, with limited discretionary exceptions. People are worried about breaking those social conventions at work functions, they’re worried breaking them socially, they’re worried about doing it by themselves knowing the cautionary tales of those who normalize the behavior.

We can maintain that peer based moderation with regard to weed consumption, and right now we don't have those conventions at all. Its all or nothing at the moment, where most people can read the room and use discretion, other people are getting high the same as people would take multiple daily coffee breaks, alongside coffee in the morning, and other intervals. A mental security blanket they think helps them with X, Y, Z while the rest of us see a degraded stupid human that is missing stimuli for a good chunk of time, and then making silly decisions after.

> also one study I saw that attributed an 8-10 point IQ drop with long-term weed use.

Cite? I definitely have not seen long-term effects from consumption starting in adulthood as the consensus/proven in the literature.

IIRC the only smoking gun effect of consumption starting in adulthood is a significantly higher risk of developing schizophrenia.

Please google things instead of saying "cite" if you are curious, since a lot of scientific studies show up, but here are the receipts on IQ.

Here's an old one where I got my original number: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1206820109

Here's a recent one showing an average of 5.5 points: https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2...

No, if you claim you bloody well cite. It's not on us to fill in your omissions.

Given that, your 2nd paper is interesting and supports you. The first seems (emphaisis: seems) to back up findings that most damage is done to the adolescent developing brain with cannabis, but still reading it.

Edit: 2nd paper doesn't seem to ask when cannabis use started so it's quite possible the damage was done in adolescence, not adulthood:

"Cognitive tests were conducted at ages 7, 9, and 11 using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised and again at age 45 using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-IV. Additional neuropsychological tests were administered to measure the participants’ verbal learning, attention, memory, processing speed, and more"

so tested as pre-teens then at age 45. That seems a very big gap between them.

Yeah no, I am going to ask for a cite if you reference a study.

Looks like the first study is for adolescent-onset usage of cannabis and they were unable to show any long term effects for adult-onset users after cessation of use, even in this observational study.

This tracks with my general understanding of the literature, and it seems like this does not really apply to an adult who has substituted cannabis for alcohol.

Can you cite a source for your understanding of the literature?

At least a few studies disagree with you about adult onset, and it does appear that adolescent use amplifies the effects, but is not the only factor:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

https://www.nature.com/articles/tp2015201

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352250X2...

The last one is a review article.

Not in a position to respond longer right now, but that last study you referenced is actually one of the ones I had in mind, in that there is not evidence in this literature review for long-term effects after cessation.

The first study there shows some evidence of performance decline after cessation, but they do not eliminate adolescent users. The second study was unable to distinguish brain structure for users that had ceased consumption from normal brains.

I definitely was not trying to suggest that there are no cognitive impacts on current users.

Oh, ok. I think we are in agreement - I didn't mean to suggest that there were long-term effects years after quitting, but that there are long-term effects of use - which perhaps I should have described as "effects of long-term use."

I agree that the jury is not in yet on whether there are long-term effects years after cessation except for adolescent use (and - by the way - old people: if you are over 70, smoking pot does appear to retard dementia and cognitive decline).

Yeah, my point wasn't that weed was harmless. It was to show that alcohol is so bad that even replacing it with another vice was a massive improvement. Don't dispute that weed prevents me from being my physical or mental best.

My personal experience strongly differs from yours to the point that I am willing to doubt your ability to self-analyze, at least if the discussion is happening in a public forum.

I expect there's a whole class of pandemic-induced, alcoholism related deaths that will be severely delayed. If alcoholism can be acquired, which I believe it can be, alcoholics minted by the lockdowns could have decades before they start to drink themselves to death. For example the article mentions alcoholic cirrhosis -- see below, my liver is fine. I would speculate that the increases the CDC notes here are existing alcoholics whose physical deterioration was accelerated by the lockdowns and don't include those who began drinking alcoholically during the pandemic.

I've been sober for 6 years and drank like a fucking maniac for 15 years before that, averaging roughly 25 drinks per night for the later half of that. Even through some of that level of drinking I could show up to work the next day and turn in something that passed for a productive workday as a programmer. I expect there are a lot of people at this stage now.

Deaths from other drugs also rose sharply in the last few years, associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns. Alcoholism does seem to be a bit of a slower burn because it's a lot harder to overdose on.

I feel like I experienced a bizzaro pandemic (though I've experienced that feeling most of my life, so why should the pandemic be any different I suppose?). For instance, I never want to work from home again in my life after living in what amounted to solitary confinement for over a year. Being metaphorically chained to a desk alone in a room for 8 hours a day for the next 30ish years sounds like diet Hell to me now; being permanently chained to it for eternity would be actual hell.

The other instance is the alcohol thing - I'd say my drinking was similar to you maybe minus a couple years, but I've not drank since May 2020 now.

I've also never had any reason to take a covid test and in fact have had no respiratory illness at all for the last 3 years after a lifetime of getting a cold or two every year and the flu on occasion. (I wonder if the covid vaccines I take have any cross-protection against common cold coronaviruses?)

So who knows, maybe I'll live longer now that I don't drink and actually leave my house and walk around a bit at work, but it's weird how antithetical my experience seems to have been to the average of the pandemic.

Most places you could still go outside, parks, camping, hiking, beaches, etc. other than a few brief shutdowns for places with admission booths and stuff.

I remember dog parks being chained and barricaded, skate parks being filled with sand and nutjobs dressed up like the grim reaper while people were on a sunny beach (you couldn't get better ventilation).

I remember golf courses being designated essential businesses.

Are you in favor of workers' rights or not? Every job is essential, insofar as declaring any job nonessential under the justification of not-obviously-effective public health policy is arbitrary and an obvious overreach ripe for abuse.

Never mind that sport is healthy. Especially outdoor sport. While the establishment was busy huddling people inside, they should have been making people bask in the sun. Sun kills coronavirus fast, and hard to imagine better ventilation than open air.

I tried to get an hour of "yard time" in every day, but it didn't help much.

Which is why all pandemic policies only exchanges lives, never saves them. Should have just let it rip, been done in July-August of 2020. Now we'll leak deaths slowly for years if not decades.

Alcohol sales have also been growing in Russia since the beginning of this year (roughly +8.5% compared to 2021). The reasons for that should be obvious.

They had only been going down before that for the past 20 years. It wasn't so bad as cultural stereotypes would have you believe: I've had lots of friends there (most of whom have moved to other countries by now), and many of them didn't drink at all, the rest doing that in moderation, like what you'd expect to see in countries with a developed wine culture.

Blue collar folk is another story altogether.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5560109

Across the border: Ukraine completely stopped alcohol sales for the first couple of months (approx) of the war. Bars* and restaurants were closed, markets would not sell alcohol to anyone.

* there was a single bar open in Kyiv - where the foreign journalists hung out.

Yeah, the first week's they were giving arms to everyone, I guess in desperation and anticipation of partizan war.

Then they found out that alcohol, guns and high stress situation are pretty bad deadly mix. Removing alcohol was easiest (as removing stress would require Russia to stop trying to destroy them).

> Blue collar folk is another story altogether.

Around these parts of the world blue collar (and former blue collar) work has got the very end of the stick for the last 20-30 years now, I can't blame them.

I change the message and behaviour about alcohol in my family and company. It can be small changes like, renaming event from "Beer afterwork" to "Gettogether", offering water before any other drink etc. Slowly removing the social pressure and availability.

So many of my older coworkers only seem to want to drink. Every outing is to a bar or pub of some sort. I do not drink at all, and often feel excluded. Constant questions and pressures "Why aren't you drinking? Just have one..." Even in the office there are mini bars scattered about. The culture needs to change.

I wonder if there could be a stand in beverage for crap like this. With the right color and frothy bubbles. Idk sparkling apple juice?

Liquid Death is going for that niche

I quite enjoy Heineken Zero, doesn’t taste exactly like normal Heineken, but definitely tastes like a lager and has <0.05% alcohol.

Sometime in my 30s I found that alcohol (even just a couple of beers) can make me feel really fatigued the next day, so I drink it quite rarely these days.

So far the only NA beers I have found that taste like real beer are from Athletic Brewing. I avoid alcohol but also really like the taste of beer, so I'm loving the Athletic beers. I highly recommend them.

My girlfriend has been drinking NOMO from crux fermentation project as a lower carb alternative.

Club soda with a lime is a good way to go

Or just non-alcoholic beer. That’s like half it’s purpose.

Or you could drink Liquid Death, legit really good water and a meme.

There's been a ton of innovation in that space recently, and I'm seeing a lot of bars and breweries starting to carry N/A options now. Athletic Brewing is doing a lot of stuff in the US that I see around. There's also a lot of places making Hop Water that's essentially house sparkling flavored water that's really nice.

Shout out to Lagunitas Hop Water. Also Trader Joe's just started carrying it.

Also, unironically, r/HydroHomies, it has been my drink of choice in social settings for a few years now. That and coffee.

Shirley Temples and Rob Roys

Alcohol free beers are in every bar I go to. Sparkling water with lemon will pass as a gin and tonic in most too!

I've seen some products like this advertised. Seedlip, for one.

It's okay, not great. I'd rather drink tonic with an lot of bitters tbh.

I for one don't mind if alcohol is available at work events but I agree no one should be pressured to participate

I have a coworker who I've worked with for 9 years of which the entirety I've been sober, he offers me a beer multiple times a year.

Deaths of despair -— deaths by suicide, drug and alcohol poisoning, and alcoholic liver disease and cirrhosis, have been trending up in America for the last 20 years.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?a=Files.Serve&Fi...

The article relates this same fact, with a focus on alcohol:

“The rate of such deaths had been increasing in the two decades before the pandemic, by 7% or less each year.”

I quit drinking nearly ten years ago. My purely anecdotal thought is that I've noticed a marked increase in consumption over the period I quit drinking, possibly escalated more thanks to the pandemic.

For me, I left the homebrew and craft beer scene after I began to think I had a problem. Now there's starting to be conversations about alcoholism in the industry, leading to some breweries having lower abv options or NAs. Frankly I think that's only the first step of what's going to need to be a long journey.

This is surprising given that alcohol sales have been dropping due to cannabis legalization.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomaspellechia/2018/01/22/alco...

It seems like the same bifurcation trend that was being reported in younger generations as they reached different ages. The usage overall can be down with the most at risk drinkers drinking more than ever.

My public policy idea is that we should limit bars & restaurants to serving customers 3 drinks, and also have a mandatory cover charge to get in. I think it's rather strange that we that we have these licensed, socially acceptable centers right in the middle of a downtown commercial district where it's basically normal that people get blackout drunk and commit crimes every weekend, year in and year out. If people have a serious drinking problem, they're free to get drunk in the privacy of their own homes or a private party- just not at a licensed, regulated facility in public.

It might not work, I realize this! And yes yes I'm sure people have their Prohibition analogy ready to go. I just think it's worth trying, and also within the power of any individual town or city to experiment with (there are already dry towns and counties all over the US)

Bars are usually in clusters, so all your rule would do is force people to walk 50 feet

Well a mandatory cover charge would probably be effective, the same way that higher taxes on alcohol have been proven to be effective. Towns could make bars share IDs on one server, you have to check to see if a customer has already been served earlier in the night

Do you imagine a real-time database that is only available to bartenders? This would have exciting implications.

This is technically already a rule in most places in the US. It's not a "3 drink limit" but just that you are not allowed to serve alcohol to someone who is intoxicated and most people would be legally intoxicated after three drinks in a short(ish) amount of time. It's just very rarely enforced. I suspect the reason is mostly that probably 99% of bars would go out of business if they could only sell 3 drinks per customer per night. Alcohol, like many things that are fine(ish) in moderation but really bad in excess, as an industry is completely dependent on problem drinkers. They are a small minority of alcohol consumers but make up a hugely disproportionate share of total spending on alcohol.

i like to live in a free country. as an adult my mistakes are my business

I developed a fond appreciation for wine during the pandemic and am grateful for this discovery. The vast majority of people still drink alcohol responsibly. The anti-alcohol lobby has been especially active since COVID and it’s not clear how neo-prohibitionalism will move society forward.

I stopped using alcohol this summer, after it made me sleep worse. I also dislike the idea of having it act as a crutch for personality. It was fairly easy for me to learn how to be gregarious and engaged without it.

Alcoholism often turns into a lifelong addiction. We can expect elevated alcohol health-related death rates in the future. A proper accounting of lockdown policies must take into account life years saved during the pandemic and life years lost afterwards due to secondary health and economic effects of the lockdown.

I lost a few friends to alcohol recently. They were in their 30s and they died of organ failure caused by chronic alcohol abuse. I didn’t know this was possible. I assumed a life long alcoholic might get liver cirrhosis in their 50s or something. Is this common knowledge?

Really? Public Access Version Available on: November 09, 2022, 12:00 AM https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/121795

Lost a friend to heart failure from alcoholism a few years back when she was in her 30s. Another friend recently had a life-changing hemorrhagic stroke due to alcoholism before he hit 50.

Legalize Cannabis!

They say alcohol death is big right now. Then they cite stats and cause from a couple years ago.

Are they intentionally avoiding addressing the present cause? IE the crazy inflation bumming everybody out.

It's not just alcohol. The surge in use of opiates was roaring a good 20 years before national attention started to emphasize it. Governments and media always seem to be behind the curve when addressing new problems that arise. Usually, a crisis or reality is needed to force the issue to our attention.

To cite present causes is to accuse the present administrators. Citing past causes is safer.

Maybe?

Or maybe citing causes after they've passed gives investors a chance to shift their investments before the hammer comes down.

So are they dying of alcohol or bad government decisions?

The news at the time were how millions of litters of beer, for bars and restaurants, had to be thrown away because of the lockdowns

So the population drank less, but certain people drank more?

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