The Truth We Won't Admit: Drinking Is Healthy

[© tweed]

props for quoting a Peele article, Torie,  I'm more or less a disciple of his when it comes to the intersection between drugs and public policy.

[© tweed]

This is all quite a crock of BS -- the conclusions it draws (the U.S. has more diabetes and heart problems because we drink less than Europeans?) are laughable. Yes, talk to any medical professional and that is exactly the answer you'll find :eyeroll:

Really? Drinking, more often than not, is glorified in the U.S. - every advertisement, every song, every piece of pop culture exalts drinking excessively when it's arguably one of the most toxic drugs in existence

You're crazy if you believe this. Go crawl back into your puritanical hole.

well, he's right that it's "toxic" in that the recreational dose can often find its way pretty close to the fatal dose, quite unlike drugs like marijuana and LSD (but similar to certain narcotics).  this is why alcohol leads among recreational drugs in overdose-deaths.

the rest of xavier's post shows a shocking naivete about the ability of the medical-industrial complex to be level-headed in their approach to the drug question.

[© tweed]

This is all quite a crock of BS -- the conclusions it draws (the U.S. has more diabetes and heart problems because we drink less than Europeans?) are laughable. Yes, talk to any medical professional and that is exactly the answer you'll find :eyeroll:

Really? Drinking, more often than not, is glorified in the U.S. - every advertisement, every song, every piece of pop culture exalts drinking excessively when it's arguably one of the most toxic drugs in existence

You're crazy if you believe this. Go crawl back into your puritanical hole.

Admittedly it is not as bad a Heroin, but it does more societal damage than any other drug due to its ubiquity.

it's probably about equal to heroin under the toxicity standard fleshed out above, with the qualifier that many accidental heroin overdoses could be avoided were the drug legal and regulated like alcohol, so the user would actually be able to know how much he is putting into his body.

when it comes to harm to third parties, alcohol takes the cake: it makes the user more immune to a sense of risk. most notably this takes form in the flagship alcohol-related crime of our era, the DUI/DWI.

[© tweed]

This is all quite a crock of BS -- the conclusions it draws (the U.S. has more diabetes and heart problems because we drink less than Europeans?) are laughable. Yes, talk to any medical professional and that is exactly the answer you'll find :eyeroll:

Really? Drinking, more often than not, is glorified in the U.S. - every advertisement, every song, every piece of pop culture exalts drinking excessively when it's arguably one of the most toxic drugs in existence

You're crazy if you believe this. Go crawl back into your puritanical hole.

Admittedly it is not as bad a Heroin, but it does more societal damage than any other drug due to its ubiquity.

Alcohol has, without a doubt, done more damage to society than any drug in all of history. Period. This is not puritanism; this is a fact. I'm not calling for prohibition - but if people need better drug education, it's regarding how to handle alcohol.

To claim this remains ludicrous. One word: tobacco.

refined sugar might beat out tobacco. omitting that, and not attempting to adjust for per-capita, the answer is clearly 1. tobacco 2. alcohol 3. everything else.

[© tweed]

Y'know what's also socially detrimental? Losing scholarships or being arrested for underaged drinking. It's is a pretty big deal now with schools and the police ruining lives with this stuff

it's important to distinguish the harm that stems from the intrinsic properties of the drug, vs. the harm that stems from the way that society is structured in its attitudes and practices relating to the drug.  for instance, the harm one can expect from using marijuana has far more to do with the unsafe nature of the black market and the tendency for colleges, the police, employers, etc. to do negative things to you than it does the actual drug itself.