Camera Obscura • 3 days ago
Nursing the second member of my immediate family who is dying from the effects of alcoholism - he's mumbling in a reclining chair while having a hallucination as I write this - I have to say that I am finding it impossible to see a down side to total abstinence for everyone. Though I do see your point it is a fact that there are health consequences to drinking and potential problems for a child born to someone who drank heavily while pregnant, those are hard truths. The chance someone is willing to take in doing that should be made on the basis of information. Drinking is more realistically seen as a responsibility to avoid harm than as a right. The consequences of drinking carry exigencies that make abstract assertions of rights rather moot.
My guess would be that more children are injured and damaged and killed from alcoholic males after they are born, but that's just based on reading about people who are prosecuted for injuring babies and young children when drunk and as a consequence of car accidents.
Lee Rudolph Camera Obscura • a day ago
I have to say that I am finding it impossible to see a down side to total abstinence for everyone.
Impossible? Really?
There are people who get pleasure from drinking alcohol, and neither suffer bad effects from it nor cause other people to suffer. There are others—as you say, alcoholics, and as you imply (correctly) some or all of the people who interact with (or are related to, or are neighbors of, or..., or..., alcoholics or alcoholically impaired drivers or ...)—who do suffer and/or cause suffering because they drink alcohol. It isn't immediately obvious (to me) that the first group's losing those pleasures (by having "total abstinence" imposed upon them) isn't "a down side" even though it
I guess that a calculus of balancing downs and ups is not immediately obvious. But I would reject any proposal for such a calculus that doesn't reckon pleasure at all, and considers only suffering. (I'm not saying that you are making such a proposal.)
Camera Obscura Lee Rudolph • a day ago
Perhaps you have to watch two people die horrible deaths from alcoholism to see what I mean. I mean their abdomens horribly distended with ascites, looking like they are full term pregnant, more so on their right side with hepatic hydrothorax until a blood vessel in their esophagus bursts and they die choking on blood. That's the way my first brother died of it.
People get pleasure from smoking cigarettes. Give me the down side of total abstinence from tobacco.
Lee Rudolph Camera Obscura • a day ago
I just don't see how any such horror can possibly be relevant to the question of universal abstention. Why should people who aren't alcoholics, and therefore are not going to make anyone watch them die horrible deaths from alcoholism, not drink for their own pleasure (if they also do it in such a way that they don't drive after drinking, etc., etc.)?
Smoking tobacco is, maybe, a somewhat different case. But there's nothing honestly analogous to "second-hand smoke" for alcohol.
Camera Obscura Lee Rudolph • 20 hours ago
Drinking too much can harm your health. Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years.1,2 Further, excessive drinking was responsible for 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults aged 20-64 years. The economic costs of excessive alcohol consumption in 2010 were estimated at $249 billion, or $2.05 a drink.
http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/alcohol-use.htm
That doesn't count those who are not chronic alcoholics who die as a result of alcohol or at the hands of those who are drunk. The same document notes:
"Most people who drink excessively are not alcoholics or alcohol dependent."
And, then, there is the issue not covered in that document, people killed by drunk drivers, drunk operators of machinery, etc. You don't have to be drunk to kill yourself or someone else with alcohol. Drunk driving, etc. is the second-hand smoke of alcohol.
The biggest problem with prohibition was it didn't work, it didn't keep people from drinking, it enabled organized crime. If it had succeeded, if it had completely stopped alcohol consumption in the United States the benefits would have massively outweighed any alleged down side. I'd never advocate prohibition be tried again, I'm in favor of decriminalizing most of the drugs with heavy control of their distribution and use by the government.
But I've learned, the hard way, that advocating drinking in the media, in movies and TV shows and on the radio has produced awful results. I would certainly take liquor sales out of grocery stores and make it harder to get while having real and effective anti-alcohol education in the media and in schools.
The idea that there is a right to drink alcohol is stupid, what there is is a responsibility of people to use a potentially dangerous substance responsibly in a way so as not to do harm. Considering he behavior of men who are drunk, far more so than women who are drunk, their propensity to attack people, to rape people, etc. it is insane for anyone to think that they are exercising a right by getting into the condition where they are more likely to do that.
Lee Rudolph Camera Obscura • 16 hours ago
I deliberate avoid using the language of "rights"; if I did use it, I would probably agree that "the idea that there is a right to drink alcohol is stupid". But I also think that your original statement, that there is no downside to total abstinence (from alcohol) for everyone, is stupid—because depriving people of pleasure that does not harm anyone (or, perhaps, does not harm anyone else) is cruel, and advocating cruelty is stupid. You surely do not advocate total abstinence, for all, from sex; yet such abstinence would undeniably improve some peoples' health! This is, in fact, where we came in.
Camera Obscura Lee Rudolph • 15 hours ago
I certainly advocate abstinence from any sex that carries a great potential for harm, I think the current fad for anal sex is insane after seeing what it can lead to since the 1980s - I certainly wouldn't want to see it criminalized again, but promoting it is immoral and insane considering that experience. I would certainly advocate anyone who is infected with an STD to not engage in any form of sex which carries a risk of spreading it. I would advise any heterosexuals who don't want to have children, if they aren't going to use effective contraception, to abstain from coitus engaging in forms of sex that don't carry that danger.
But all forms of sexual relations don't carry risks, last time I looked into it, frottage was associated with no known risk of infection and only among heterosexuals, in some specific forms risking unwanted pregnancy. I'd advocate anyone practicing it to do so with full information and with adequate responsibility.
If you can tell me how someone can drink alcohol without the aspects of it which risk injury due to impairment or addiction, real things that result from having alcohol in the bloodstream and nervous system happening in their bodies, I might consider your claim. I don't see how the two can be equated.
ethel Camera Obscura • a day ago
There are in fact health benefits from moderate consumption of alcohol, which is not true of tobacco.
Camera Obscura ethel • 20 hours ago
I doubt there are significant health benefits to drinking moderate amounts of alcohol, certainly none that outweigh the potential dangers of it and the fact that a percentage of people who begin by drinking moderately put themselves at danger of becoming an alcoholic. That is a real phenomenon, it's not some hack script writers' fodder for mockery.
ethel Camera Obscura • 4 hours ago
Any number of studies have shown that non-drinkers have an increased risk of premature death compared to light and moderate drinkers. That holds even for those who are lifelong abstainers (i.e., it's not because the non-drinkers are all people who have given up alcohol because of alcoholism or because their health was already bad). http://circ.ahajournals.org/co...
Obviously one's individual risk of alcoholism should be factored heavily in the decision, as should interactions with other medications (especially in elderly people), etc., but I don't think there is medical evidence favoring a blanket policy of total abstention for everyone.
Camera Obscura ethel • 9 minutes ago
There are better ways to improve the statistics on heart disease than drinking alcohol, decreasing the intake of saturated fats and the moderate intake of fats that are beneficial to coronary health. Neither of those carries the risk of occasional intoxication, even mild intoxication increases the chances of accidents and mild intoxication can so often turn into serious intoxication as anyone who has drunk or been around drinkers certainly has observed. Alcoholism isn't the only level of drinking associated with those results of drinking.
Alcohol interactions with other drugs is also a problem, for example, the cases of interaction with acetaminophen are associated with kidney failure and liver disease. Not to mention all kinds of other interactions that can happen with even moderate alcohol use.
Who said anything about "a blanket policy" of total abstention? What policy did I advocate other than that the media not promote alcohol use and that its distribution be regulated? There is a difference between promoting abstinence and prohibition. What I said that got people upset is that I didn't see any down side to total abstention from drinking alcohol. Other than the handful of studies that show a small association between moderate alcohol consumption and a smaller percentage of heart disease - which isn't, by the way, a positive correlation between the alcohol and those effects - I don't see that there has been one asserted. The health benefits of not drinking at all would, I am certain, more than outweigh the alleged benefits.
I'm not unrealistic, I don't think for a second that any country is going to have no alcohol use, I'm saying that if that were possible the benefits would be enormous. Consider the absence of alcohol caused accidents, the absence of alcohol induced violence. I would guess that there would be a decrease in attacks on people and I think women and children would probably be the primary beneficiaries of that. Even if half as much alcohol were consumed in the United States the benefits would far outweigh any alleged benefits of moderate drinking. And that's not to mention that in so many cases "moderate drinking" is claimed by those who definitely have a problem with alcohol. My family members whose drinking came to control their lives claimed that they were moderate drinkers for a time well after that wasn't true. If the studies are based on self-reporting - and just about all of them are - I wouldn't trust them to present a realistic general picture of the actual situation.
A) Never go to the internet looking for sympathy. It's not the environment for common humanity, it's the environment for common inhumanity. At least you can be sure to find someone who will want to argue with you, no matter what you say. Not all people are assholes, but all assholes are people, and they seem drawn to internet comments like iron filings to a magnet.
ReplyDeleteB) Interesting how these arguments on health and what we eat/drink always come down to "death," as if long life were the only standard for human existence. Of course, drunk drivers (anecdotally, anyway) are usually the survivors of collisions, so in that sense they live longer. Longer than their victims, anyway.
What of the quality of life, for the alcoholic and the family and friends? Is food and drink all about what helps you live statistically longer? Sounds awfully utilitarian to me. I think the studies on the benefits of drink are as misrepresented as the idea that all drink leads to perdition. Eating candy won't kill me, either, unless i eat nothing but candy. Then again, we could pretty well do without candy, too, if it's effects were as deleterious as alcohol.
Which brings us back to A). It's almost impossible to discuss these matters on the internet. I'm convinced human beings are not built for discussion and reasoning. You can find a handful who will engage one topic or another, but a "salon" of such thinkers is simply an impossibility. Even the vaunted salons of Paris prove, in Proust's telling, to be just social gatherings of snobs determined to disdain those who don't share the groups views/values. There is no group that engages in real examination of issues; there are only groups that want their prejudices reinforced. (and then there's a handful of individuals, but that's as large as I've been able to find.)
The internet just amplifies that tendency, turning the volume up to 11.