11 ms·

if someone drinks from 5pm-10pm one can of beer every 30 minutes thats 10 drinks. they could easily wake up at 7am, hold down a job and rinse and repeat. a 30

if someone drinks from 5pm-10pm one can of beer every 30 minutes thats 10 drinks. they could easily wake up at 7am, hold down a job and rinse and repeat. a 30 rack of miller light (my beer of choice) is $22 which is 73 cents a beer so thats ~$7.50 a day on beer. obviously there are cheaper routes (buying $10 handles of vodka for instance). so at least in america, price really isn't a factor here. and holding down a job most likely isn't a factor since they are stone cold sober from when they wake until 5pm. i assume a lot of people silently live like this sadly

ChrisRR 6y ago
Even if you ignore the price and how fast drinking once every half hour for 5 hours straight seems, that's 13.86 units of alcohol every day. So 10% of the population are in a state of being permanently hungover? It just seems odd that in the UK, binge drinking is considered to be an issue, and yet a significant percentage of the US population is drinking the equivalent of a night out on a daily basis.
- jboog 6y ago
  When you're a high-functioning alcohol like we're talking you get to the point you can down a 12 pack of beer in a night and feel relatively fine the next morning. Maybe a slight headache or mild hangover but nothing like the bender hangovers non-alcoholics have where they are bedridden most of the day. I've since cut back a lot but in my worst post-college days I could drink the equivalent of 8-10 drinks in a night and feel perfectly fine the next morning as long as I got a decent amount of sleep.
  - lisper 6y ago
    I was a teetotaler until my late 20s when I decided to try to develop a taste for wine for social reasons. Fast-forward 30 years and today my wife and I have a cocktail and a glass of wine most nights. That sounds like two drinks, but one day I started measuring how much alcohol I was actually putting in to the cocktails and they turned out to be triples. So technically we're having 4 drinks a day. We get a slight buzz, but never feel impaired, never drink before dinner time, and never have hangovers. When we travel we will often go a few days without drinking at all and it's no problem. A few years ago I bought a blood-alcohol meter and have never registered above the legal limit, even immediately when I feel buzzed. The highest I've ever registered is 0.04. And over the years I've used three difference BAC meters with consistent results. I think the conclusion to draw here is not that having 4-5 drinks a day is no big deal, but that different people react to alcohol and other drugs differently. For some people, like me, it turns out to be no big deal. For others I'm pretty sure it would be a very big deal. A one-size-fits-all drug policy is never going to work.
    - biolurker1 6y ago
      It's very well established that over two drink increase multiple cancer rates, just keep that in mind.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- n4r9 6y ago
  It's been estimated that during the "Gin Craze" of the early 18th Century, the average Londoner was drinking a pint of (strong) gin every three days. the-east-end.co.uk/the-gin-craze
- mod 6y ago
  I own a bar so I figured I'd chime in with some personal observations of my customers: The bulk of my customers drink 5-7 nights per week. We call them "regulars." They come every night when their shift ends, and most of them stay until close (although they are primarily service industry, so this is 5-7 hours per day). If they have a day off, they often show up earlier. For these people, I think that one drink every half hour is an understatement. They're having a beer/cocktail every half hour or so, and mixing in shots, jello shots, etc. If they have limited time, they will up their rate of consumption. They're after a specific result. I have no idea what percentage of the population they represent. We have a lot of other customers who we see maybe once a week, every other week. Some folks come in to eat our food special and just have a couple beers and go. Stuff like that. I think that you are probably in the latter group (or the non-drinking group) and so you don't see the former group. I very much agree that the heavy drinkers are not living normal lives; they ARE in fact permanently hungover (or should be--they learn to deal with it in various ways). It's a continuing problem with my own staff, actually. Anyway, they're out there, they're holding jobs and making children, and they undeniably have a problem with alcohol. But again, I have no idea what percentage of the population they make up. Maybe I'm seeing the worst of the problems--but I don't actually believe that.
- jessebro 6y ago
  You aren't hungover if you never stop drinking - which is the point. It's really, really prevalent in some industries. I've hired concrete finishers before (multiple times), and I've never NOT had a bunch of empty cans crushed up and hidden somewhere random on the worksite afterwords, even if it's only for a couple hours. When I worked with some writers years ago, they kept bottles of cheap scotch and 2 buck chuck in their desks, and had to replenish them regularly. The go to drug selection in tech skews our perception a bit (weed being incredibly pervasive, but lsd,shrooms,stimulatns far from absent).
  - emteycz 6y ago
    Don't forget about the amphetamines and cocaine... I actually think more than half of people in tech take something regularly
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 6y ago
>> if someone drinks from 5pm-10pm one can of beer every 30 minutes thats 10 drinks. The bars are open until at least 2, you know.

ChrisRR 6y ago

Even if you ignore the price and how fast drinking once every half hour for 5 hours straight seems, that's 13.86 units of alcohol every day. So 10% of the population are in a state of being permanently hungover? It just seems odd that in the UK, binge drinking is considered to be an issue, and yet a significant percentage of the US population is drinking the equivalent of a night out on a daily basis.

jboog 6y ago
When you're a high-functioning alcohol like we're talking you get to the point you can down a 12 pack of beer in a night and feel relatively fine the next morning. Maybe a slight headache or mild hangover but nothing like the bender hangovers non-alcoholics have where they are bedridden most of the day. I've since cut back a lot but in my worst post-college days I could drink the equivalent of 8-10 drinks in a night and feel perfectly fine the next morning as long as I got a decent amount of sleep.
- lisper 6y ago
  I was a teetotaler until my late 20s when I decided to try to develop a taste for wine for social reasons. Fast-forward 30 years and today my wife and I have a cocktail and a glass of wine most nights. That sounds like two drinks, but one day I started measuring how much alcohol I was actually putting in to the cocktails and they turned out to be triples. So technically we're having 4 drinks a day. We get a slight buzz, but never feel impaired, never drink before dinner time, and never have hangovers. When we travel we will often go a few days without drinking at all and it's no problem. A few years ago I bought a blood-alcohol meter and have never registered above the legal limit, even immediately when I feel buzzed. The highest I've ever registered is 0.04. And over the years I've used three difference BAC meters with consistent results. I think the conclusion to draw here is not that having 4-5 drinks a day is no big deal, but that different people react to alcohol and other drugs differently. For some people, like me, it turns out to be no big deal. For others I'm pretty sure it would be a very big deal. A one-size-fits-all drug policy is never going to work.
  - biolurker1 6y ago
    It's very well established that over two drink increase multiple cancer rates, just keep that in mind.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
n4r9 6y ago
It's been estimated that during the "Gin Craze" of the early 18th Century, the average Londoner was drinking a pint of (strong) gin every three days. the-east-end.co.uk/the-gin-craze
mod 6y ago
I own a bar so I figured I'd chime in with some personal observations of my customers: The bulk of my customers drink 5-7 nights per week. We call them "regulars." They come every night when their shift ends, and most of them stay until close (although they are primarily service industry, so this is 5-7 hours per day). If they have a day off, they often show up earlier. For these people, I think that one drink every half hour is an understatement. They're having a beer/cocktail every half hour or so, and mixing in shots, jello shots, etc. If they have limited time, they will up their rate of consumption. They're after a specific result. I have no idea what percentage of the population they represent. We have a lot of other customers who we see maybe once a week, every other week. Some folks come in to eat our food special and just have a couple beers and go. Stuff like that. I think that you are probably in the latter group (or the non-drinking group) and so you don't see the former group. I very much agree that the heavy drinkers are not living normal lives; they ARE in fact permanently hungover (or should be--they learn to deal with it in various ways). It's a continuing problem with my own staff, actually. Anyway, they're out there, they're holding jobs and making children, and they undeniably have a problem with alcohol. But again, I have no idea what percentage of the population they make up. Maybe I'm seeing the worst of the problems--but I don't actually believe that.
jessebro 6y ago
You aren't hungover if you never stop drinking - which is the point. It's really, really prevalent in some industries. I've hired concrete finishers before (multiple times), and I've never NOT had a bunch of empty cans crushed up and hidden somewhere random on the worksite afterwords, even if it's only for a couple hours. When I worked with some writers years ago, they kept bottles of cheap scotch and 2 buck chuck in their desks, and had to replenish them regularly. The go to drug selection in tech skews our perception a bit (weed being incredibly pervasive, but lsd,shrooms,stimulatns far from absent).
- emteycz 6y ago
  Don't forget about the amphetamines and cocaine... I actually think more than half of people in tech take something regularly

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bluedino 6y ago

>> if someone drinks from 5pm-10pm one can of beer every 30 minutes thats 10 drinks. The bars are open until at least 2, you know.