this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Me, an addict: I don't want a tasty drink, I want to be drunk
yep, alcohol is def one of the worst drugs out there
Yeah, I think being drunk is very overrated. I've watched a friend of mine slowly gain the exact same unhealthy relationship to alcohol as their parents, and it's made me realize just how bad it is to constantly use alcohol as a social lubricant. Also, the more you drink the more alcohol tolerance you gain. Eventually you end up needing to drink 60% vodka just to feel something. I really don't want to go down that path
I've drank 80% vodka raw after a weeklong binge, wouldn't recommend
I'm very sorry for your loss. Alcoholism is a terrible disease. I'm hopeful that I'm seeing more ppl drinking less and seeking mental health care. It's a monkey that's been riding the back of so many families for generations.
Maybe I'm also an alcoholic, but alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively. Not unlike heroin I suppose. Or cell phones and social media for that matter. There's no single coping mechanism that can sufficiently help us deal with this hell world as someone on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. I don't think that's really the fault of the particular coping mechanism, although I am happy to entertain others' opinions on the matter.
alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively
This is so relative and variable, it's impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.
Like, is alcohol "fine" compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don't know if "fine" is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn't mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn't doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.
And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person's over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren't going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.
Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn't mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at "fault" either. But it's a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person's health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.
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This is so sad. I'm sorry for your loss.
Agreed. I just hit a year sober. Still crave a drink regularly, but staying strong.
If I ever get power in a future socialist experiment I will make alcohol illegal or at the very very least heavily restricted