Alcohol Is Not Evil

Everyone knows the dangers of alcohol. If you drink alcohol, you are destined to become a worthless excuse of a human being, beating your children and throwing them at your wife. You will lose everything, your pants will dissolve in water, and to top it all off, chronic halitosis. These are all indisputable facts, right? Right? Well, no.

Calling alcohol a highly addictive poisonous drug, which I've seen people do, is dumb. Some people argue that life with alcohol is more exciting, more fulfilling, and other et ceteras. I'm not even going to bother disputing this anecdotally, I'm going to turn straight to the facts and figures, to show once and for all the any claims that alcohol is intrinsically harmful on the grounds that it's alcohol are pure unmitigated bullshit.

According to this website all about alcohol abuse, about 4% of people who drink alcohol become addicted to it. Compared with the addiction rates of other drugs, like crack, speed, and Pokemon, that actually makes it decidedly low on the scale of addictiveness. And yet it's often ranked as highly addictive. Now why is that?

The reason it ranks so highly is not because it's a recipe for success, despite millions of college students who swear by it. What makes alcohol addiction stand out is not that a lot of people become addicted to it, but that once you've made the commitment of becoming an alcoholic it's very difficult to break the addiction. So the myth that alcohol is highly addictive is nothing but a myth. A well propagated myth, but a myth nonetheless. Yes it's addictive, but it's certainly not this great vast danger that people make it out to be.

There's another claim that people who drink are somehow unaware of the harm they're doing to themselves. Anyone who's ever drunk so much that they've thrown up while fucking someone so ugly that even if they weren't drunk they'd probably throw up in response to actually touching that person knows they've gone too far, because otherwise they wouldn't be covering someone in nacho cheese and tequila. These people know the effect alcohol has on them, and by continuing to drink it they are only demonstrating that in their judgment, the reward outweighs the risk. Don't you see, alcohol leads to increased risk management skills!

"But everyone who uses alcohol becomes addicted, because they're abusing it!" Abuse is not the same as use. Drinking one glass of wine isn't alcohol abuse. Smoking one joint isn't marijuana abuse. One hit of LSD isn't abuse. Abuse happens when you're doing something habitually because you need it. By definition, if you're doing something recreationally it's not abusing that thing. Even hookers. Especially hookers.

Recreational drinkers don't go out and get tanked every night. Recreational drinkers go out once in a while with friends to share a couple drinks. Not all use is abuse, I can't emphasize that enough. Best I can do is NOT ALL USE IS ABUSE! It is fallacious and disingenuous at best, and deceitful and harmful at worst, to assert that everyone who drinks alcohol is abusing it, or is destined to abuse it. By claiming that use = abuse you are diminishing the value of the word abuse, in the same way that I would diminish the effect of calling someone a cocksucking cuntrag assjammer if I were to apply it to someone who thinks everyone who uses alcohol is abusing it. Think about it.

The other thing I keep hearing is that alcohol is a poison. A "highly addictive poison" no less. Here's what a PhD has to say on whether alcohol is poisonous. To save you the click, I'll copy the whole thing here; all emphasis is in the original source material:

A poison is any substance that is capable of causing injury, illness or death to an organism. Salt, water and oxygen are all poisons because in high enough quantities they can harm people. Too much salt in a diet can cause serious health problems, hyper hydration can kill athletes, and too much oxygen given to a premature infant can cause permanent blindness.

Toxicologists emphasize that "the dosage makes the poison." Although salt, water, oxygen, aspirin, alcohol beverages, and many other substances can cause poisoning in excessive amounts, it makes no sense to call them poisons.

So why do so many groups and organizations insist on calling alcohol a poison? Apparently to stigmatize alcoholic beverages and frighten people into alcohol abstinence. The tactic was first used effectively by the Anti-Saloon League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the KKK and other anti-alcohol groups. The technique is still widely used today.

Honest communication doesn’t mislead or deceive. Calling alcohol a poison is misleading and deceptive.

In short, anyone who tries to tell you that alcohol is a highly addictive poison, a highly addictive drug, a road to ruin, a path to destruction, worse than crack, the mother of their child, the child of their mother, or a social parriah, is a fucking liar. Whether they know they're a liar is a different story, as they might just be going by things they've heard elsewhere without checking the facts, but considering how large a part alcohol plays in society, that's no excuse. Now everyone go get shitfaced and bang an ugly chick.

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