Why Are Older Americans Drinking So Much?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
His son, in a blog post easily Googled using the names in the article, indicates that his father had been in a facility to treat his Alzheimer's (and, we assume, as the article states, free from alcohol) since 2011 - and had likely not had a sip of alcohol since that time, over 12 years ago.
(The article itself indicates that the son has been free from alcohol since hearing about his father's initial hospitalization 13 years ago.)
Alcohol abuse is a real thing, but this is some seriously bad reporting that does not seem to have much to do with the specific state of things in 2024.
I mean even the subtitle describes that: "The pandemic played a role in increased consumption, but alcohol use among people 65 and older was climbing even before 2020"
I don't know if you are aware, but you've almost directly stated the core thesis of Mein Kampf.
Here is a Yale professor of history explaining just that:
I had no idea, but I doubt that it is written from the perspective of looking at this as an "unpleasant fact".
That definition encompasses significantly more than half of the population, at least measured in terms of lifelong taxes paid vs social services received.
For example, minimum wage workers, stay-at-home parents, etc. They receive social services, such as roads and education, that are substantially more costly than what could be supported with the taxes they will pay in their life. Those services are paid by a small percentage of workers, something like the top quintile or the top decile.
That said, I would argue that e.g. the work performed by stay at home parents is on the whole positive to society, since at the very least older generations (retirees) need the goods and services provided by the younger generation of workers, and somebody needs to have raised them. But it is still interesting to think about how our societies economically rest on the shoulders of a snall fraction of the population.
there's also the issue that compensation doesn't actually track contributions to society very well. I build things at huge scale that are at least somewhat useful. I now make about 10x what I made heating up $2 slices of pizza, which seems about right. but I could get paid the same or possibly more to optimize ad clickthrough, which doesn't seem quite right. a lot of money gets spent on trying to win red queen races. I don't really fault the individuals involved for following the local incentive gradient, but they're essentially getting paid to break each other's windows and then fix them. there's no net value there.
From the perspective of our skin cells, which constantly live and die to protect the rest of the organism from outside threats, our own biological evolutionary process has not led to their flourishing. And yet here we are hunans, a society of cells, rather fit to survive yet abother day in the real-world evolutionary environment.
Older people who live in cities and planned, theme park-like communities - which facilitate car-less, low-distance daily social activity outside the home - tend to do better.
I don't think they would have ever gotten addicted to heroin otherwise, too far out of their comfort zone to just jump into, but the lack of stigma around kratom and way it was marketed online gave them a taste for it and made it easier for them to take a more lax approach to opiates in their own mind.
It's like recommending someone take morphine or codeine to cure themselves of alcohol addiction.
My brother got addicted to heroin when previously he had only used alcohol and cannabis (it killed him). My mother drank herself to death. How about those for counter anectdata?
Most brain altering chemicals come with risk. Doctor prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depressants have long lists of warnings (including death).
Your last line is disingenuous -- there's a significant difference.
And let's go back to alcohol, the socially accepted and celebrated form of "taking the edge off"
https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-death....
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-to...
So 178,000 deaths from excessive alcohol abuse per year in the US. Yes, everything is fine.
Brain altering chemicals do come with a risk but there's a big difference between being prescribed a drug by a doctor and deciding to use it yourself without supervision. You mentioned in another post of yours that you ended up abusing kratom as well, that's where the "risk tolerance" you railed against another poster for bringing up comes in. I'm very glad it worked out for you, I just said that I personally would not recommend replacing one substance with potential abuse for another as a means to quit, because I personally think it can have adverse effects in sidetracking people into harder drugs (and new addictions).
I don't think comparing and opiate to an opioid is disingenuous at all. Kratom may be "safer" than morphine or codeine at first glance but it produces comparable effects, induces a comparable addiction, and we also don't have the thousands of years of feedback through history of people taking it the way they take it now to compare to like we do with alcohol or traditional opiates. The full safety profile just isn't there yet. For example, it's wasn't unheard of for people to develop issues with their liver, or other physical problems after months/years of use though it's not very clear to me if it's from the kratom alkaloids themselves or that some of the early suppliers had issues with heavy metals / pesticides in their crops. And that's not something we tended to see recently or historically with traditional opiates being used by long time patients in moderate doses, but it pops up in kratom after just a few years of it blowing up and becoming more commonly used at recreational doses.
You have quite the risk tolerance.
Now you shift the goal posts to be about social acceptance. Your moralizing on your superiority of drug choice has only demonstrated that you have nothing to offer in this conversation accept your smugness.
(hope you're doing well btw)
I know people who switched to cannabis and found good success with it. They've since gotten help with the underlying addiction issues, and are in a much better place.
Probably not a good idea to see substitution as a long term solution though.
But I hope no one is trying to roll their own addiction recovery program out of the HN comments today. If anyone thinks they might need it they should get competent help.
And while it is technically an opioid, the safety profile is significantly different than traditional opiates. I used (and at time abused) it for years and am now taking a break as it has significant trade-offs. Getting off of it was way, way, way, easier then quitting cigarettes.
I'm doing quite well in this regard. I have low-level chronic pain and it did wonders there too. Took it for years and only recently have stopped to do a reset/reevaluation. Tapering/quitting was rapid with the only impact of sleep issues for a week. It was definitely worth it.
One proposal for combating alcohol misuse among older people is to raise the federal tax on alcohol, for the first time in decades. “Alcohol consumption is price-sensitive, and it’s pretty cheap right now relative to income,” Dr. Humphreys said.
But it's significantly harder to raise taxes high enough to discourage people from using a product if they can just make it at home in a five gallon jug with water, sugar, and baking yeast.
That’s not really the goal. Getting the person drinking a bottle of hard liquor a night to cut back even 10% makes a difference. Forcing people to constantly make more to keep up with a serious alcohol problem is a larger barrier than the kind of taxes we had 20 years ago.
Essentially, across millions of people even seemingly small changes can have significant impact in aggregate. Or at least that’s the argument.
I guess it depends on how much they're planning on pushing the taxes up. I can't see Australia style taxes working out because of how easy it is to brew relatively strong and still palatable alcohol just about anywhere. Someone will pick up the slack. Legalized marijuana didn't kill off the black market in some states because it's still significantly cheaper to purchase quality and quantity outside of a dispensary due to tax costs.
Great hops flavor and it's literally water.
1. https://americanaddictioncenters.org/alcohol/withdrawal-deto...
I love the taste of beer and now there are so many good NA beers I can still enjoy one and not have to worry about effects of alcohol. Guinness, Blue Moon, Sierra Nevada, Athletic, Stella Artois, etc.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240330180810if_/https://www.ny...
It's not a good situation
Something is going wrong, have a drink. Not even get drunk, but a glass of something. This is what it is portrayed on tv and sounds terrible.
I like doing 4g of Japanese sencha leaves, 80-100mL of water, at 60-70C for 30s to a minute. Second steep 10 seconds, and third 30-40 seconds. But honestly the fun is in experimenting! (plus at lower temperatures you can drink it right away!)
Also 0 alcohol beer is totally a scam. It's just beer flavored soft drink selling at the beer price, which is absurd.
If Coca/Pepsi starts to sell beer flavored coke, it would be kinda hilarious
They have that in other countries, malt drinks but no booze. Kids drink them after sports.
Or now I saw, carbonated water soaked in hops a la le croix but instead of hints of lime it’s hops. Pricey too!
Is it just me or does drinking oneself to death at 77 not sound that bad when its compared to spending 6 years in a facility (for god knows how much money)
That's a good thing.
His first presidency was a resounding success for him. He found that he only has a few hurdles left to successfully become a dictator. He neutralized the press with the gish gallop and "lügenpresse"[1], he neutralized his party with the big lie[2], he neutralized the supreme court by installing loyalists and letting them take bribes, he neutralized congress through gridlock. The only real hurdle trump has left is the joint chiefs of staff and you can guarantee his first action as president will be to clean house of people who swore an oath to the constitution and replace them with people willing to ring kiss.
If he is installed we get either a military "coup" to protect the constitution from a domestic enemy or the constitution becomes just a piece of paper in exactly the same way the bible is just a book, venerated but not understood.
You hope the deep state and big business can limit Trump's power, but it doesn't take a lot of effort to find historic precedence that those are hopeful limits rather than practical ones, thinking otherwise is American exceptionalism.
I am pretty confident that most of our founding fathers would disagree with your complacence.
There is nothing all that exceptional about the fact that the US has gone a bit under 250 years without either a monarch or dictator.
Global warming is unaddressed and China is actively building a military to confront the US promising WW3. We have at least 2 major active genocides, one of which might succeed.
If you were to graph corruption, it is clearly increasing. Income inequality is increasing. Congress members are still trading stock. Supreme court justices are still taking bribes... Wages (measured in ability to purchase goods) are decreasing.
I'll happily engage in the thought exercise of thinking about some systemic graphs with a slope that inspires hope.
If America or the world had a dashboard, what graphs would you show me to make me think the world was "fine" or that I should feel positively about the future?
Share of people living in extreme poverty in the world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...
Child and infant mortality, world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-igme?tab=...
Maternal mortality: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maternal-mortality?tab=ch...
Prevalence of undernourishment in developing countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-undernouris...
I think for the world at large, more people, means more consumption, means more pollution and fewer resources per person. Those improvements are likely largely found in pre-industrial societies, and industrialization is environmentally expensive too.
I am willing to believe that while the velocity of global warming is positive, the acceleration of it might be negative. That would be hope inducing, but that's generally not the sense I've gotten.
When someone says the world is on fire, I think they are literally referring to the world being on fire, global warming, or the general rise of authoritarianism/strongmen across the world and the conflict they require to stay in power.
If you had that thinking, you'd have missed a great time.
A broken clock is bound to be right eventually.
At some point, the world will end, eventually.
Pick almost anything to see a positive trend.
- Arable acreage globally
- Topsoil depth/health in agricultural areas globally
- Biodiversity as a simple count of distinct species on the planet
- PFAS contamination (by either sheer area or PPM)
- Atmospheric CO2 and methane PPM
- Geopolitical stability (this one's trending down FAST)
- Healthcare outcomes in the US compared to any other industrialized nation on the planet
- Likelyhood that a nuclear weapon will be used in anger in our lifetime
- Percentage of GDP that makes it into the pockets of people that actually work for a living
I could keep going but why bother.
This is exactly the problem with this hopeless viewpoint. just like those wearing rose colored glasses, your shit colored glasses are preventing you from accurately understanding what is going on in the world.
Denial and delusions are the most basic of mental health defense mechanisms, but society cannot work if everyone is in denial or experiencing delusions. It is better for the individuals, but not better for the whole.
I'm not a proponent of being hopeless, but if everyone is living in la la land thinking nothing bad can happen until it does... I don't think that is a good way to conduct society. We have very real unaddressed problems. I think wanting to escape from that is at least understandable if not rational.
I, personally, do not feel hopeless when there are problems, I feel hopeless when other people do not recognize those problems. I feel hopeless when problems are not being addressed.
Historians at ivy league colleges are saying that the forces that made Russia Russia (increasing wealth inequality and decline of rule of law), and the forces that put Hitler into power in Germany (rampant nationalism, stoking the public with a desire for quick solutions, and appealing to the German aristocracy's greed) are both active in America.
So you can moralize about my shit colored glasses, but what if there is actually shit on those glasses, wouldn't they be shit colored?
> but if everyone is living in la la land thinking nothing bad can happen until it does... I don't think that is a good way to conduct society
Except that is not at all where American society is at. People (especially those chronically online or in front of 24 hour news programs) are expressing some of the most negative views towards the future as they ever have.
Yes, if the world is actually shit then you aren't wearing shit colored glasses. I don't think it is, so I will just laugh at and feel sad for those people who are so down in the dumps. Obviously I might be wrong about this, I guess we will have to wait and see.
So, start addressing them. Stop waiting around for everyone else.