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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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