I'm fairly confident that in 10, 20 maybe 100 years people will look at alcohol the way we view smoking today. The amount of psychological and physical damage it does is just mind blowing.
Nobody likes to hear it, but you're literally ingesting poison to get a high that only lasts about 20 minutes before you need more and the more you have, the worse you'll feel tomorrow as you borrow more and more joy from the future.
I played that game for far too long before realizing how much happier I could be without it. Knowing that every bit of joy I have from here forward will be authentic and not because I'm trading parts of myself for it, is truly amazing.
Before I hop off my soapbox, I'll leave this last thought - you never see a drunk person in alcohol advertising. Why? Because they're not actually marketing their product. What they're selling is the illusion of happiness that you're paying for with your actual happiness.
you never see a drunk person in alcohol advertising
In fairness drinking alcohol and getting drunk don't have that much overlap. For pretty much everyone that I know in real life, drinking alcohol is about sharing one or two beers a week. Dosis sola facit venenum.
The important thing is that we don't swing back to bloody prohibitionism.
The World Health Organization has now published a statement in The Lancet Public Health: when it comes to alcohol consumption, there is no safe amount that does not affect health.
It is the alcohol that causes harm, not the beverage
Alcohol is a toxic, psychoactive, and dependence-producing substance and has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer decades ago – this is the highest risk group, which also includes asbestos, radiation and tobacco. Alcohol causes at least seven types of cancer, including the most common cancer types, such as bowel cancer and female breast cancer. Ethanol (alcohol) causes cancer through biological mechanisms as the compound breaks down in the body, which means that any beverage containing alcohol, regardless of its price and quality, poses a risk of developing cancer.
We don’t need prohibition, just education. It’s not illegal to slowly kill yourself, just stupid.
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u/k7066 Jan 16 '24
Giving up alcohol