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Comment by moroleth | Hacker News Reader

Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to. It's also far less harmful when consumed in moderation, no matter how many elusive studies want to push how "there is no safe alcohol dosage" because you might have 15% more risk of cancer in 30 years or something. I agree advertising is bad but you're going to have a hell of a hard time convincing billions of people that they should stop socializing the easy way.

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Alcohol helps people socialize and is significantly harder to get addicted to – the 1st part of your sentence seems to contradict the 2nd: nowadays people can't think of getting together and not drinking and that's to me exactly because they got addicted to socializing under alcohol so much they can't socialize normally without it.

And that’s reinforced by advertisement over and over again.

While there are so many fun activities not involving alcohol. Seems like most of team building events nowadays boils down to pretentious dinner plus drinking to celebrate?

> significantly harder to get addicted to

Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.

"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."

One in eight American adults.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

I'm talking about typical usage in a social setting. People may drink a few beers a couple days in a week for months, or even years, and quit without any issues. Hardly the same with an equivalent "social dose" in cigarettes.

Alcohol dependency has a genetic component. The promotion and ingraining into the culture is the big problem.

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