Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
My 20s and early thirties are a blur. 2009-2015 is pretty much completely missing from my memory. My 6 year binge (with my overall drinking) might have some presents for me in my future.
I’ve been sober for 2 years but it does scare me that I already did the damage. Oh well I guess. At the time, it was my coping mechanism. I don’t have cravings anymore because now I can clearly see it as poison but the damage might already be done.
As someone who drinks pretty much every day, how much were you drinking??
It was different every day but the absolute minimum was a 6 pack. That was on a day I had things to do. If I had a day where I had obligations, I’d settle for a six pack with a 6%abv because I could regulate it by the hour because of my body weight.
On average I was drinking a handle a day. Easy.
On days I was trying to “regulate myself” I was still drinking 9%abv IPAs.
Was in it.
Edit: if you start hiding any of your drinking even in the slightest, it’s time for a life change. Also, all of the above was when I was in my early 30s. In my 20s, I was buying 30 packs of Busch daily
Thank you for the insight and well done from staying sober!
Sorry the answer wasn’t so concise. I was drunk everyday and learned to mask it. Some days I failed masking it or shorthanded how much I’d had to drink and it caught up with me.
Have had MANY incidents that would keep the layperson up at night for the rest of their lives. I’m just built different.
I’ve spent a collected 1 year in county jail. 6 months was the longest stretch. I’ve avoided prison but that 6 month stretch made me wish for prison.
I’ll say my boredom now (when I drank it helped speed up the day, I just wanted the day to be over) is constructive. I’m playing piano and guitar again. I’m writing.
Things still suck but I know they’ll suck whether sober or drunk so I just do sober. Saves me money
Edit: also saves me from being alone. I’m in the greatest relationship and I can’t jeopardize that. It means more to me than being numb
A handle meaning 1.75 liters of something 40% ABV? A day?
Seems almost hard to believe. Did you have any seizures or anything when you quit? Did they taper you off on some medication?
No seizures. DTs landed me in the icu a few times with major hallucinations going on.
It was recommended I taper with gabapentin. It helps manage but I still have trouble with nearly nightly sweats and insomnia. I still shake and tremble if I try and do something that requires finesse or dexterity.
A handle EVERY SINGLE DAY is a no, that was overstated. 4 days out of the week, yeah. Red stag was my liquor of choice for a long time. I’d blackout and just keep going until I woke up wherever. Drunk tank, ER, in the grass on the side of the road in the middle of the night.
Last summer through fall I restarted drinking after nearly a decade of very light occassional drinking, about 12 or more ipa's a day, two hearted ipa and a local one.
Roomate was cool but drank a liter of scotch a day, happy drunk though, both of us. Worst he did was exitedly tell or play things for you he had previously, especially of his glory days.
Congrats on your sobriety!
If someone is really lucky they can develop alcohol intolerance like I did. It's a medical condition. I used to enjoy the occasional beer, red wine, bourbon, sake, whatever. I really liked them. Not to excess, except occasionally when out with friends. But it crept up on me slowly— at first the next day became harder and harder, and soon it was later that night, then within hours of having a drink or two, then while I was drinking the first glass... I thought I was just getting old, but it just kept getting worse.
Those "non-alcoholic" beers taste great these days, but they still have <0.5% alcohol. The last time I had a single NA pale ale I had a headache, brain fog, and lethargy for over 24 hours. God help me if I were to have even a lower % IPA now... I haven't tried it in years, but last time I had mild nausea and other hangover symptoms halfway through sipping it. Water, drinking extremely slowly, etc. doesn't help. My body just can't metabolize alcohol anymore.
Of course I don't feel compelled to drink in the same way an alcoholic does, but I do empathize in my own small way with their plight when going out. I want to join in, but I stick to water instead, knowing that a drink would completely wreck me and I'd regret it for days.
This is entirely unrelated to cancer, but I just thought I'd share. Maybe someone is experiencing similar symptoms but doesn't know it has a name.
I have the opposite problem. I have the mutation that allows my body to crank out massive quantities of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. So back in the day, I could drink like a fish and almost never suffer a hangover. While this might be convenient in the short term, it greatly increases the risk of alcoholism, since it disables the main feedback mechanism telling you that you're harming yourself.
Luckily, my mother gave me a chat about our family history (lots of early deaths from alcoholism and alcohol-related suicide and misadventure) and I had recently had some disturbing close-call experiences of my own while drunk, so I quit in my mid-20s. I don't abstain completely, but haven't had more than a couple of pints in a day since. It's been 40 years. For long periods, I had no alcohol at all. I get it that some people can't cut back without abstaining completely, and can't quit without support, but I was fortunate in being able to. If you're trying to quit, do whatever works for you. Not everybody's the same and there's no shame in getting help.
Incidentally, cirrhosis is just as shitty a way to leave this world as cancer is, so the cancer news is a drag, but other factors already motivated my behavior change.
I share your "gift". No matter how much or how many days I drank, next morning the only symptom was tiredness. My partying never really got out hand, but I just kind of lost interest in it after my studies.
My both granddads died of alcohol-related causes before my birth, so the danger was very real. Without the fear of hangover it would have been so easy to just keep on going. Luckily I never felt any pull towards it.
I got my first real hangover when I was closer to 30 and it was a mindblowingly horrible experience. Nowadays I get drunk maybe once or twice a year and I do enjoy a craft beer or two on weekends, but that's it.
I previously quit for a decade almost completely, drinking like you a couple here and there, by restarting running distance, also using kratom to help get started until the endorphins take over.
Physical exertion and alcohol do not go well together, I wanted to go running not drink.
I restarted drinking homebrew by choice just last year. Working on maple wines and other herb infused drinks, with syrup I make, until I start malting barley and growing hops to make ipa. But I do not get falling down drunk and am happy regardless but I choose to get buzzed lately if at home, I may mostly transition to traditional herbals soon though.
That <0.5%, if I understand it correctly, is basically nothing. A cursory search showed that there are a lot of food and drinks that are at around that level. A ripe banana can have 0.4% by itself!
Sure. It's possible it's in a different form in food versus e.g. beer. I can eat all of those foods without a problem. I can't drink any of those things I listed anymore.
No, it's exactly the same form, ethanol. It's just a matter of how much there is. You probably have a threshold, and 0.5% is below it.
Thanks. In that case I suspect many (not all) NA beers must exceed that threshold despite their labeling. That would match my experience, since a handful are OK and some consistently produce symptoms. It's even within the same manufacturer, as certain varieties have an effect and others don't. I love beer, but I've given up on all of them, because it's just not worth the hassle and taking the chance.
The beers may also have low levels of fusel alcohols, which would not be counted, in addition to the residual ethanol
Is this a known medical condition, alcohol intolerance?
I know enzymes in the body break down and remove it, and certain people genetically have more or less depending.
Cultures that have been drinking for thousands of years have more of the enzymes, those that just started have way less like the natives in america and I think australia but idk on that. Basically the entire old world has more of the alcohol metabolizing enzymes from eurasia to africa. Not sure of inuits and far northern tribes but if they milked animals in prehistory they probably fermented milk for kefir.
Also women metabolize alcohol less than men due to these enzymes.
So the same amount of alcohol can have wildly more or less pronounced inebriation even before taking tolerance into account.
Yes, it's real. Here's a good overview:
That is interesting thanks. As an aside an herbal I was doing for a while, Devil's Club, also known as Alaskan wild ginseng, opplopanax horridum, that I harvested for a bit, is a very powerful medicine in a great many ways.
Some of the earlier Russian scientists that were looking at it back when they had Alaska, wrote that they found that it seemed to inhibit the removal of alcohol from your body.
Congrats on being sober 2 years! It's not easy.
But the good news is that the longer you abstain from carcinogens like alcohol or smoking, the better your odds become. Each day sober is a day that decreases your risk of cancers from alcohol. Keep doing that (and avoid other risk factors) and your cancer risk essentially drops to the normal baseline governed by your genetics, environment, etc.
Congrats on 2 years! Im in a similar boat where I don't remember my 20s either but I got sober around 30 and have been picking up the pieces ever since. Thanks for sharing your story.
In 2018, the Ontario Ministry of Health guidelines changed to 7 to15 drinks a week as "safe". Federal Canadian guidelines are zero.
Alcohol is a great way to control the voters.
Not me I'm built different
This is difficult to read. The redundancies and repetition while never getting to the point.
Seems pretty straightforward to me, especially the section titled “The Alcohol Intake and Health Study’s conclusions, explained”
Their big-picture conclusion: Among the US population, the negative health effects of drinking alcohol start at low levels of consumption and begin to increase sharply the more a person drinks. A man drinking one drink per day has roughly a one in 1,000 chance of dying from any alcohol-related cause, whether an alcohol-associated cancer or liver disease or a drunk driving accident. Increase that to two drinks per day, and the odds increase to one in 25.
Alcohol use is associated with increased mortality for seven types of cancer — colorectal, breast cancer in women, liver, oral, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus. Risk for these cancers increases with any alcohol use and continues to grow with higher levels of use, the study’s authors concluded. Women experience a higher risk of an alcohol-attributable cancer per drink consumed than men. Men and women who die from an alcohol-attributable cause die 15 years earlier on average.
Amid all of the public discourse about alcohol and its health effects, here was a clear and authoritative summary of the evidence that would be most relevant to Americans. It was, its authors told me, consistent with the scientific consensus at this time.
“Nothing we’re saying is all that surprising or controversial to those of us who know the field,” Keyes said.
Alcohol increases your risk of cancer, no matter how moderate your intake. And the risk increases substantially the more you drink.
This administration appears to find that difficult to accept and they are actively ignoring this information.
Ironic, considering Trump famously avoids alcohol.
Cancer research is woke
