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"But here’s the really weird data point: Heavy drinkers also live longer than abstainers." Really? Really? I don't believe it. I'd like to look more closely at
by retube 16y ago
"But here’s the really weird data point: Heavy drinkers also live longer than abstainers."
Really? Really? I don't believe it. I'd like to look more closely at the data that supports this. And it depends on the definition of "heavy" drinking. If it's a regular one glass a day, sure. If it's a bottle a gin a couple of times a week I would beg to differ.
Alcohol is insanely destructive. Whilst no doubt this study is picking up on correlations between lifestyle characteristics which would explain these results, there's no doubt that booze is bad for you. It rots your brain, wrecks your liver, makes you depressed and makes you violent.
It's mental that for £20 I can pop into any off-licence, corner shop or supermarket in the land and buy enough alcohol to literally kill myself. It's a factor in 100s of thousands of deaths a year (UK) via heart disease, liver cirrhosis, car accidents or violence. It costs the NHS and police forces 10s of billions of pounds a year. It turns town-centres into virtual no-go areas on the weekend. It ruins lives.
Yet for some reason not only is it legal, it occupies a cherished position in our culture.
Edit: just to clarify, i'm not a prohibitionist. I think alcohol _should_ be legal. Personally I love booze and having a few. But our stance on alcohol versus our stance on other drugs (pot, coke etc) is just utterly illogical, non-sensical, even I would argue, immoral.
- brownleej 16y agoThe full study is available online, and is linked to in the article. Their definition of "heavy drinking" seems to be more than three drinks per day, which seems like a reasonable definition to me.
- hugh3 16y agoThe problem with that definition is that it still lumps modestly-heavy drinkers (two small beers after work, two glasses of wine with dinner) with really heavy drinkers (guzzle whisky until you pass out every afternoon). If you plotted "health problems" vs "amount drunk" you'd probably see a fairly flattish curve from zero up to some level, combined with a sudden increase at very high levels of consumption. The "heavy drinking" number you're getting here is going to be a section of the flat curve combined with a section of the sudden increase, so the number you're getting doesn't tell you much.
- sliverstorm 16y ago> It's mental that for £20 I can pop into any off-licence, corner shop or supermarket in the land and buy enough alcohol to literally kill myself If you're concerned about that, boy have you got a lot of other things to start being concerned about. You can kill yourself with pennies worth of water, or £2 of petrol and a match, or jump off a building, or... My point of course being that while it might be a little unsettling to look at the alcohol aisle and think "enough of that could kill me", there's a million easier, cheaper and faster ways to attain the same thing.
- retube 16y agoYou are sort of right. However people are not encouraged to drink petrol, whereas we are bombarded with advertising messages about the glamour and sophistication of alcohol. I was sort of going off on a tangent, and playing devil's advocate really. The drugs legalisation debate is picking up steam in the US and Mexico (I wish it would in the UK) and I was just having a bit of a rant - I think it's incredibly hypocritical that alcohol is legal, whilst pot - demonstrably less damaging - is outlawed.
- sliverstorm 16y ago> I think it's incredibly hypocritical that alcohol is legal, whilst pot - demonstrably less damaging - is outlawed. Not necessarily; IIRC the reason pot is not legal is (or was) because there was not sufficient scientific evidence it wasn't about to pull a Thalidomide. There are plenty of things that are perfectly healthy that are illegal; that is because we haven't proven they are perfectly healthy yet.