> Alcohol is not just a problem for those who start yumg or who've had abusive childhoods. Alcohol is a causal factor in many deaths and accidental injuries; alcohol is involved in many suicide attempts; alcohol is involved in a lot of violence. It is wrong to suggest that all those people started drinking young or had abusive backgrounds.
Alcohol is involved in a lot of things because it's the only legal consciousness-altering drug available in many countries. If you're going to start making statements for or against alcohol, you need to account for this cultural fact.
> People tend to under-estimate the number of glasses they have, and under-estimate the size of the glasses, and under estimate the amount of alcohol in each glass.
They do because they have a reason to, nobody wants to be seen as a drunk. If they didn't they'd self-report more accurately. Studies on the social effects of alcohol probably don't account for this, considering the difficulty of doing so.
> You've said that 3 beers produces a de-stress result.
The beer I typically drink is 3.2%. At my bar they serve 14 oz pints. Strong beers can be anywhere from 5-10%. I know roughly how much I've been drinking both because I keep track of my intake and because different amounts feel very different.
For me, the line between "comfortable buzz" and "achey, dizzy, ready to throw up" is a skinny one. So in order to keep my nights and weekends fun, I have to moderate pretty strictly. On weekends, I've learned to have a few beers during the day, go home for a few hours, then go back out for the evening. At bars there's pressure to drink more, I mostly manage to avoid that pressure simply because it can ruin my night fast.
> it is wrong to suggest that it is a healthy activity.
I honestly don't know whether it's healthy or not, I personally have a tough time understanding what is meant exactly by "healthy", but there's some recent archaeological results that suggest that our evolutionary history with ethanol is long, meaning our brains and bodies would have had ample time to adapt to it.
Personally, I'm convinced that stress, both self-induced and external, has a far worse effect on a person's quality of life over time than any of the physiological effects of moderate drinking. So to compare the effects of drinking alcohol to not drinking alcohol, you also have to understand the effects of the stress that's being relieved. Of course, there are social costs that one can incur as well, the most dramatic of which seems to be DUIs or worse, alcohol-induced accidents, but again, I suspect that on the whole, especially if one can avoid getting those, a stressed person is better off drinking moderately and letting it go than he is holding it in. Of course, there are other ways of relieving stress, but they may not be as effective or as cheap. Alcohol is incredibly reliable at doing this, that should count for a lot.