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America has a drinking problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: America has a drinking problem

#551

Post by 8192kjshad09- »

amscanne wrote: post #531
gcanyon wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK expert disagrees —- marijuana does less damage to the user, and much less to friends and family, than alcohol does: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11660210

That article is about the harm to society as a whole. Pulling a single line from the article to summarize: > Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.

There are lots of ways to measure the harm of drugs. But pretty much all of them result in cannabis being among the least harmful.

Another way to measure is the therapuetic index. It's the ratio of the lethal dose divided by the effective dose. It's about 10 for ethanol and 30,000 for cannabis. Larger is safer.

This means drinking ~10 times as much as your usual amount of alcohol has a 50% chance of killing you. For cannabis you would need to consume ~30,000 times as much (which is probably not even physically possible).

Re: America has a drinking problem

#552

Post by baby »

Barrin92 wrote: post #135

Article mirrors my experience. For context I'm German, my wife's French and we've got family in Croatia who own a vineyard so I'm used to being around alcohol and people drinking. My first impression when I spent time was in the US was indeed how bipolar drinking is compared to Europe. We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the…

When I moved to Canada, what really shocked me if that people would drink alone, or be the only one drinking at a table. Alcohol is something social in France.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#553

Post by cable2600 »

Of course it does. Even had an amendment trying to ban alcohol. You ban alcohol and you get people in hospitals with withdrawal symptoms.

It is like trying to ban other drugs, withdrawal symptoms.

They are addictions and hard to overcome.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#554

Post by swensel »

renlo wrote: post #484
Sophistifunk wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, I'm clearly not talking about camping. I'm talking about parks in the suburbs and cities. Secondly, "having a wine with my wife" is treated very differently from "having some beers with my fellow twenty-somethings," without needing to bring in the extra baggage that would be included if those twenty-somethings happen to be black. I'm sure I can drink a wine in the park with my wife too, now that I'm old. Doe…

People in the US drink in the parks, the suburbs and the cities, especially in the evenings. The care and discretion one needs to take is proportional to how much free time the cops in the area have and circumstance / setting. You can drink openly at the beach. If in a small town park, you'd want to either have the alcohol in an unmarked bottle, a soda can, or a brown paper bag. In the cities the cops are typically c…

> You can drink openly at the beach.

In CA at least, drinking at most beaches is not legal: https://beachlifeexpert.com/beaches/alcohol-guide-california...

Re: America has a drinking problem

#555

Post by agumonkey »

roywiggins wrote: post #228
agumonkey wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anxiety in general is noticeably lower you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread. [0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me…

Alcohol can reduce anxiety in the short term, but it can bite you in the ass in the mid-to-long term by making you even more anxious the next day. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jan/27/hangxie...

aight, i see my shortcomings, indeed it's pretty unsurprising that it messes with your emotions long term.. i only saw the usual removal of inhibition on occasional drinking.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#557

Post by rkk3 »

6foot4_82iq wrote: post #477
bradleyjg wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the response. Mostly I hate throwaways but this is an appropriate use. As I’ve gotten older (I’m 40ish) hangovers have gotten worse and worse. It’s now to the point if I have 4-5 medium beers on Friday night I can write off Saturday. Has your subjective experience of hangovers gotten easier over time?

If you drink 4-5 medium beers everyday, you'd need to drink at least 10 to induce a hangover.

hangover's get worse when you are older, or when you are older you drink less regularly so you get a worse hangover?

Re: America has a drinking problem

#558

Post by Aeolun »

redisman wrote: post #482
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #153

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live. I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each o…

Europe is exactly the same though. Majority of the countries/people don’t drink fancy wines for dinner but binge drink to party and forget about their troubles. Upper middle class in a few wine producing countries does not create a continental monoculture. Anyone from Northern/Eastern Europe or UK will be shocked by US drinking culture in the opposite direction. My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine f…

> binge drink to party and forget about their troubles

Party, yes. Forget their troubles? Not in the context I’ve seen it happen in.

Drinking was always a strictly enjoyable activity in itself, not something you did to forget your troubles.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#559

Post by my_usernam3 »

Tyr42 wrote: post #290
svachalek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a book about this called the Paradox of Choice. Basically, that we want choices but they make us less happy. There's a related phenomenon, I don't know a name for it, where given a choice between convenience and happiness people will almost always choose convenience, generally without even realizing they've made a choice. Our genes have a deep, deep preference for minimizing energy expenditure.

This happens with video games too. Players hate restrictions, but if they were removed, would get board and stop. For a recent example, look at Valheim. They explicitly block you from using portals to move metal ore, which forces you to use a cart or a boat to move it. Suddenly I was a highway engineer for a few hours and pay more attention to harbour than before and had a blast. Yet there are mods which remove this…

World of Warcraft classic is another example. It's a beautiful world thats a pain to get around, but forces you to enjoy it.

Re: America has a drinking problem

#560

Post by gnat »

ABCLAW wrote: post #485
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #153

It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. Alcohol consumption habits vary greatly from region to region, or even city to city depending on where you live. I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each o…

>It's hard to reduce the US to a single culture. The US had a very particular set of economic conditions in respect of infrastructure quality, volume of arable land for corn production, and corn vs corn mash distillate transport costs. The result? "[In the 1790s], the settlement of the so-called “corn belt” in the Midwest created large new supplies of corn, which was cheaper and more profitable to convert into whiske…

Great book to read about the history of American drinking is "Drink: A Social History of America" by Andrew Barr https://www.amazon.com/Drink-History-America-Andrew-Barr/dp/...>. It covers the historical forces behind the current state of drinking, why the drinks are what they are, and more. Fascinating, and full of anecdotes. This is a parallel book to his "Drink: A Social History" which was about the British social history of alcohol. Also fascinating.
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