Yes, a fallacy is a reason to dismiss an argument, not necessarily the conclusion; it is a very good reason to doubt a conclusion though. My parent's formulati

Yes, a fallacy is a reason to dismiss an argument, not necessarily the conclusion; it is a very good reason to doubt a conclusion though. My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example: 1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age. 2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes. It also makes an implicit assumption that living for a long time is both necessary and sufficient to describe a healthy person. Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc. The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa. Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0]. There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8SvnmNo48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8SvnmNo48A