America has a drinking problem
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27357592&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27357592&p=3
(Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. I know it's annoying if you've seen them a lot. Sorry.)
You can allmost call it youth culture, most kids go through, before becoming adults. In my late teenage years, it was common and expected on parties to drink, until you have fun, who can drink the most (and puke afterwards), etc.
Most people, like myself, had enough of this after some time and matured - but I know too many people, where the booze and beer stayed with them.
Yes, exactly, this is "kids being kids", we all go through a period of our life where we do stupid shit, related to drugs or other "extreme" things where risks of hurting ourselves is probably higher than the reward, but it's fun so why not?
But then we grow up and change in "proper" adults.
I think when we talk about "binge drinking" it's important to understand the context. While talking about stupid teenagers is fun sometimes, when it comes to if a country has a problem with binge drinking or not, we should probably restrict the conversation to binge drinking with adults, not teenagers who do stuff they most likely won't do when they are adults. As you said, most people eventually do grow up and adjust accordingly.
The US has open container laws but they primarily exist for a pretense to arrest people for being disorderly, in my experience.
Edit: The person I’m responding to isn’t even in the US how is what they are saying more valid then my actual life experiences in the US?
Most places I know of in the U.S. if you're walking down the street and a cop sees you with a beer, they'll make an issue about it. The thing is, it's not always super obvious, and they don't bother to look too close usually if they don't have a reason to. I don't think this is the case in poorer communities. Not only are the police more likely to be looking closer, but the situation of the people involved sometimes means they're more likely to be outside in a shared location instead of inside (smaller dwellings, shared living, etc), and open container laws are used to exert control over this populace.
Put in much simpler terms, I wouldn't be too afraid of walking down my street with an open beer if I felt like it, because police driving down the street are rare and unlikely to decide I'm an issue. I neither of those things are true to the same degree just 4-5 blocks away from me though, and I wouldn't want to risk my luck doing the same thing on a street there.
I'm sure I can drink a wine in the park with my wife too, now that I'm old. Doesn't make it OK the way the police treat the young and/or brown.
And no, for what it's worth, it's not as bad in the US as it is here, because Americans (generally) respect the freedoms of others much more than Australians do. Which is why in my experience the subsequent dickheaddery isn't as prevalent or extreme there either.
Further, public drinking is all but restricted to destitutes outside of NYE and Aus day.
Contrast that with Germany. Every two blocks there's a Späti, many open 20–24h daily, each selling beer, wine, and spirits, at all hours of the day. You'll find hordes drinking in the streets, parks, and riversides anytime weather permits. It isn't unusual to see people sharing a beer on the U-bahn on the way to the work.
One culture demonises (although indulges in) alcohol, the other embraces it.
Yeah, as if repression is the answer to homelessness. Homeless people drink or consume other drugs to relieve the various stress associated with being on the street (as evidenced by drinking and drug use amounts immediately going down in housing-first projects), or to self-medicate physical health problems (alcohol is an effective pain number) that the life style brings with it or the mental health conditions that caused their homelessness in the first place.
Actually helping people with housing and healthcare would be a way more efficient usage of public funds than wasting it on police that is using it for power trips against the powerless.
I think your drinking laws are more rooted in conservative Christianity and disdain for poor folks that might just drink up their welfare money somehow.
Aren't there laws against assaulting people on the street that the police could use, then?
Just in this one month, I've already noticed a huge difference in my life. It's amazing to wake up rested and energetic every day, never having that dread about a hangover, being groggy, or wondering if I did something embarrassing last night. I feel present in everything I do, rather than having my routine and my attention thrown off by alcohol. Saving calories makes my weight more stable and lets me indulge in more food if I want to. I'm saving tons of money, especially at restaurants. I'm already regaining the hyperactivity and excitement towards life and events that I had in grade school before I started drinking, because now I can look forward to stuff other than getting drunk. It feels great to go to parties, restaurants, watch a movie, go on a date, do anything, and not even think about alcohol. For me drinking was fun and easy, but now I've learned that drinking is shallow and comes at way too high of a cost compared compared to the deep joy of living sober and enjoying life for its own sake again.
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend drinking less to anybody who does drink. You don't need to be black and white and think that it's either cold turkey or stay where you are. You don't need to worry about the "benefits" you get from red wine and whatever other stuff people love to talk about. Just try drinking less. Maybe don't drink on weekdays, set a maximum number you can drink in a day, take a 1-day break, take a 1-week break, start drinking lower-percentage drinks, set a maximum number of drinks per week, there are tons of options. I tried them all and over time I was able to consistently reduce how much I drank. I used to have trouble imagining not drinking during a weekend, and now I'm already having trouble imagining wanting to drink more than a few times a month at most.
Alcohol is like junk food or soda. It's fun and it's easy. But life is a lot better if you can break the habit and stop making it part of your life, or at least make it a once-in-a-blue-moon indulgence rather than a regular thing. Learn to love things with deeper and healthier value. If you don't control these things, there's the risk that you'll gradually get worse over time. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you gained 50+ lbs and don't recognize yourself because you didn't take the chips or chocolate seriously. You don't want to look at yourself in 20 years and realize you have cirrhosis or heart disease because you didn't tone down the drinking. You don't have to be obese or an alcoholic to benefit from making healthy lifestyle changes.
If these numbers are correct, the top 10% of alcohol drinkers consume the equivalent of 10 drinks per day: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think...
The unit for a single drink is a fixed measurement, so someone pouring a tall glass of wine or a very stiff drink could be consuming 2-5 “drinks” in a single glass, but regardless the consumption is extremely high.
Travel a bit, any you'll quickly discover that a couple drinks in the evening is basically normal in much of the world. I'm not arguing that it's healthy (it's not), but the median American really doesn't drink much - our Puritan values run deep.
For many of us, it's not about Puritanical values. We simply choose healthier behaviors.
It's true that the median alcohol drinkers in America doesn't drink much at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by 10% of the population.
Drinkers tend to cluster with other drinkers, and non-drinkers tend to become less interested with attending gatherings that revolve around alcohol consumption. This can lead to misperceptions that either everyone is drinking a lot or no one is drinking much depending on which cluster you end up in. It's strange to hear some of my heavy drinking acquaintances insist that everyone drinks heavily, because that's what they see in their personal bubbles.
That's why I never developed a taste for alcohol. I sometimes drink socially but that is very rare: 3-4 times a year, 1 or 2 drinks each time. That's about it.
The Puritans drank plenty. I suspect that many such misconceptions about them are derived from HL Mencken's (wildly inaccurate) quip that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy."
Not at all. It's expensive and very harmful. Why would I drink alcohol when I can enjoy a meal out with friends without drinking at all?
Some of us can't even stand fermented breads, let alone a light wine.
Not for me, I just hate the taste of alcohol, would much rather a can of coke.
The problem I have with it all, drunk people tend to affect other things: destroying public property, drunk driving (destruction of private property and death (sometimes death of sober people at wrong place, wrong time)) fights and injury (go check what an EC/ER looks like on a Friday night for hospitals in these countries), domestic violence, rape, animal abuse, emotional drunk spirals (can lead to suicide or relationship damage), financial destruction (lemme buy all you fine oaks 100 shots on my tab)..the list goes on.
Nah, skip alcohol if you can. I makes small men feel like strong men, and strong men feel like small men and creates a vicious cycle to cope with those false emotions, resulting erratic/impulsive/dangerous behaviours. Rather meditate, go to bed early, use cannabis (not daily) and make sandwich.. I've not seen a single instance where alcohol has improved someones life, mentally or physically. Alcohol is a false remedy that fills your hearts and minds with a false view of the world. Step away for a while.
Same goes for streaming/internet consumption, tv/news, caffeine, nicotine, porn, fast foods, religion, politics. All those things blend into a horrible mindset. Step away, introspect and modify your own behaviour/culture, reflect about who/what you are. It's a worthwhile experiment and costs nothing (in fact, it will save you time and money).
One of the “tells” of this class of alcoholic is drinks stashed all over the place to facilitate this round the clock buzz.
Ten drinks isn't that much hard liquor: it's about 450ml. That's a little more than a can (392ml).
Sure, the volume isn't unfathomable. But most people drinking a Mickey (13 ounces ~ 9 drinks) would render them useless.
It's high, but not even close to some of the historic records. In early 1800s the per capita consumption was roughly equivalent 90 bottles of whisky per year. And that counts a lot of non drinkers in the denominator.
1.5 ounces per drink
1.75 L per bottle (assuming a handle)
33.814 ounces per liter
59.175 ounces per bottle
39.450 drinks per bottle
3550.5 drinks per year
9.720 drinks per day
What counts as an "American drinker"? Apparently only 24M of our 330M population. That's 7% of the population.
So the average of the top 0.7% Americans consume 10 drinks per day. Since averages are heavily affected by the outliers at the top, you're looking at probably between 2-3 per 1000. I absolutely believe that many Americans consume the equivalent of 10+ light beers per day.
What's more surprising to me is that only 24M Americans count as "drinkers". Our college population alone is 17M.
The reality is that some stuff is power laws, some stuff is normal, some stuff is bimodal, etc. The more useful mental exercise is to try to learn what the actual distribution for something is, instead of assuming, and then try to dig in a bit more to figure out what causes might lead to that.
Power laws tend to arise when you have some amount of network effect and an iterative positive feedback loop. That shows up in popularity, wealth, etc. But things like, you know, height, are not a power law distribution.
Alcohol consumption does have some steep curve to that, but it's not clear if it's actually a power law. I assume its driven by both addiction times tolerance. In other words, if you couldn't build up a tolerance to alcohol, I'd expect something like a linear distribution reflecting levels of a addiction. But the more you drink, the higher your tolerance, so the more you need to drink, which leads to something more like quadratic or higher.
I've noticed that heavy drinkers tend to cluster with other heavy drinkers. The more you see your friends and coworkers binge drinking regularly, the more you feel it's an acceptable and even common behavior. Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because it gets tiresome to have friends who want every event to revolve around alcohol.
Statistically, the median drinker in the US doesn't drink much alcohol at all. The vast majority of alcohol is consumed by the top 10% of drinkers. You may have simply ended up with a cluster of heavy drinkers that aren't representative of the median US alcohol consumer.
Statistic here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/25/think... Note that the median US alcohol drinker consumes less than 1 drink per week.
The US had a very particular set of economic conditions in respect of infrastructure quality, volume of arable land for corn production, and corn vs corn mash distillate transport costs.
The result? "[In the 1790s], the settlement of the so-called “corn belt” in the Midwest created large new supplies of corn, which was cheaper and more profitable to convert into whiskey than it was to transport great distances without spoiling. Thus, as Rorabaugh notes: “Western farmers could make no profit shipping corn overland to eastern markets, so they distilled corn into ‘liquid assets.’ By the 1820s, whiskey sold for twenty-five cents a gallon, making it cheaper than beer, wine, coffee, tea, or milk.”
https://www.pastemagazine.com/drink/alcohol-history/the-1800...
Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze. While not uniform, the US has a consistently different relationship with alcohol than most other countries as a result of the impact of these events and responses to them upon it's food culture.
The article says something else:
>> the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.
You might get less than 1 / week by including non-drinkers, who are (according to the article) at least 30% of American adults. But they're 0% of American alcohol drinkers.
Anyone from Northern/Eastern Europe or UK will be shocked by US drinking culture in the opposite direction. My experience of Germany was also certainly not “wine for dinner” type of behavior
[0] https://www.addictionresource.net/blog/california-sober/
I’m curious what it looks by age, geography, and household income.
This is also true of Europe. What the parent said about France/Croatia/Germany does not reflect the drinking culture in other places.
Also the German standard drink size for beer is less than 12 fluid ounces. Similar differences exist for other beverage types.
These comparisons are not only difficult, but the survey takers vastly underreport their actual consumption (probably unknowingly).
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/americans-are-dri...
Something can be a problem in America without being a problem in every single instance. The point is not every single American culture is full of drunks, the point is that this is a problem that America is having.
When people were telling stories about Jesus, the central figure of their religion, one of the miracles they told of was him turning water into wine. This is held up as one of the most important stories in their entire moral system.
When the pyramids were being built, the builders were paid in beer.
People have been drinking, and enjoying the effects of drinking, for thousands of years, and "do not drink to excess" is a lesson the Greeks told us with their own myths and stories.
Be cautious of over drinking, however perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well. These are not new revelations.
If you like to go out on the weeks and drink 8 beers with your friends, all the more power to you. People have been drinking since time immemorial, it's part of who we are as human.
Life is too short to "dot every i and cross every t".
You might be dead tomorrow.
One of the anthropological theories is that it was a core reason for humans to take up agriculture in the first place and to domesticate certain grains.
And, the genetic mutation that allows us to process it in the first place (an enzyme in the liver to break it down much more easily than before) that we received in our lineage millions of years ago allowed us to descend from the trees to the ground. It was a key enabler to our expansion where rotting, fermented fruit sitting on the ground became an enabling calorie source!
Yeah, because water used to be much harder to sanitize, and “beer” (thick, lumpy, mildly alcoholic – think fermented porridge) is basically liquid bread. Doing manual labor all day takes a lot of calories, and cereals are much cheaper than alternative foods. It’s hardly a healthy diet though.
Keeping peasants drunk enough to be pliable is a side benefit much appreciated by the lords of just about every feudal/plantation economy throughout history.
Just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not mean it's something we should continue. In a lot of cases it just means we didn't have the knowledge that it was so bad for you. And that's exactly where alcohol fits in. We know alcohol is bad for us in just about every way. So there's really no such thing as "under drinking".
Cigarettes. Cocaine. Tanning. Not wearing seat belts. Not wearing helmets. Beating kids as punishment. Bloodletting. X-rays. I mean the list is just endless.
Folks should do as they please. I'm not suggesting everyone needs to stop drinking or anything. But to suggest that "perhaps also be cautious of under drinking as well" is just downright wrong.
You are associating alcohol == good times, which if you want to do so is fine (we are adults, we have free will), but know that you can have good times without alcohol as well. They aren't mutually inclusive.
There are a few other threads where people say similar things. If you need to have alcohol to have good times, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine going out with friends without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem. If you can't imagine eating a meal without drinking, then you do actually have a drinking problem.
Thank goodness the Roman's brought new light to Bacchus who shows us that excessive temperance is always punished more severally than excessive indulgence.
Aside from having better sleep than at any other point as an adult, I truly enjoy the activities I partake in just as much, if not more, than when I still paired them with alcohol. It took about 6 months to stop feeling like I was missing out, and now I feel like everyone else is.
Anxiety in general is noticeably lower (this was a huge windfall for me when the pandemic started).
Enjoyment of conversation, food, setting, all seem richer and doesn't flag as quickly once the alcohol is metabolized.
The end of the drinking activities don't leave me sleepy or craving bad food. I can go home and read a book or get some work done.
General reduction in workout recovery time and aches and pains.
Holidays are way easier to get through.
The only drawbacks have been the situations you discover are entirely dedicated to consumption, e.g. dive bars, beer gardens, work holiday parties and happy hours. Without having dulled your senses adequately, some of these things tend to be only loud, smelly, or without much to offer besides booze and banter.
you were more anxious when you were drinking ? that's a first
not to look naive, but there was a period of my life having a beer [0] was really the only way for me to exist outside my bedroom walls, i wasn't even tipsy.. I was just able to sit in a room without crippling dread.
[0] I didn't drink, but the few times I did at parties I realized how drinking a bit was lifting me up to ~people's normal
However, I also internalized being an non-drinker. It became part of my identity.
I don't notice a measurable difference in my life, which is also part of the reason I didn't pick it up again. It wasn't enriching my life, but I'm also not a better person without it.
Having said all that, I am still looking for a replacement for what to drink when I do go to a bar. So far nobody has hit the right mixture of a drink that isn't defined by being non-alcoholic, but replaces the "I deserve this" attitude of having a drink .
Not for everyone, because 13 year old nieces can be dangerous with drones.
This is one of my biggest motivations for reducing my drinking during the week. Even having just one or two beers after work, the probability that I read or work on a side project drops close to 0.
I don't plan to ever drink again. It is necessary to have the confidence to order something non-alcoholic and be straight with people if they question it. I don't drink. If they ask why (which is exceedingly rare), I ask why they don't smoke. That usually gets the message across.
Strangely, I didn't feel anxious at all, despite having pretty high general anxiety. My energy levels were higher than usual, which I felt was connected to not drinking. I felt totally normal in my social interactions, didn't force anything, felt good. I kept my water bottle in hand and never felt out of place.
It was a good lesson that alcohol is not needed to have a good time.
I really enjoyed my period of non-drinking and I feel exactly the same as you in regards to sleep, anxiety and well-being. But being in my late 20s I feel like people around my age just expect drinking and going out.
G.K. Chesterton, from Heretics
My friends, relatives, etc. all exclusively drink beer when doing yard work, home improvement projects, or hobbies like working on cars. When I’m at the marina, I’m the only one not drinking beer while working on their boat. Maybe all of these people stick exclusively to water in private, but I doubt it.
Given that, I can see how it’s quite easy for someone to consume 5-10 drinks per day. I’ll easily drink the equivalent of a six pack if I’m working outside, and if I were a beer drinker I don’t think I’d find it excessive to drink at least that much over the course of a day.
However, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the group drinking a six pack of 90-calorie light beer over the course of a day is healthier than people like me drinking a six pack of Dr. Pepper in the same timeframe. Cirrhosis on one hand, diabetes on the other. Pick your poison, I guess.
Most people choose neither option.
Drinking a 6-pack of beer every day and drinking a 6-pack of sugary sodas every day are not normal behaviors. We shouldn't try to normalize things like this when they're clearly unhealthy and definitely outlier behavior.
I was invited to my friend's bachelor party weekend. We rented a cabin in a fairly remote area of our province for an extended weekend with plans to golf, fish, campfire, and...drink.
I think by the time the first day was over, the majority of my buddies had each done 12 beer plus several mixed drinks or shots. No mistaking, we were all drunk. But what sort of set things apart was the next day. I basically just nursed a few beers/drinks through the day, probably 6 max while the rest of the guys were easily 12+ a piece, I know one of them had cleaned off his first 24pack by that night.
By the next day I was miserable. We were golfing in 30+ weather and I had 1 beer for the entire 18 holes, they were 6+ each. The heat, the hangover, I don't know how they do it. But it slowly dawned on me that they do this frequently. Most of their weekends are getting tankered at the lake or going through a case of beer in the yard doing chores and having impromptu bbq with the neighbors/buds while I pretty much only drank while at social outings (once a week top) and even then I never had more than 2 or 3 drinks.
When lockdown started a couple of the same buds got laid off from their jobs and mentioned how much they were drinking in isolation. Again, the quantities they drank were fucking astounding while I pretty much stopped drinking entirely due to the social outings coming to an end.
I've tried the "grab some beer and do the oilchange" type work myself but I find by the end my beer is warm, half drank and I was too involved in the work to think about stopping to drink. Even when I did stop, it was because I was thirsty so I'd be seeking water, not alcohol.
After all the experience with this lifestyle from friends I can see where its left us (we're mid 30s now). They're overweight, a few of them struggle with health issues while I'm the same weight I was 10 years prior and healthy as ever. I just think centering your activities around having a beer is something that these people do long term and what seems wild to you or me is normal for them.
Sodas are liquid candy. I don't think many people eat 6 Snickers instead of food to get calories while they work.
Dr. Pepper is tasty, but it and Coke are dependent on Phosphoric Acid to be able to deliver that much sugar to you. This along to caffeine mean it's dehydrating you and robbing you of nutrients, not hydrating you. It's really best if you can limit this to a single or find a replacement (Kroger has a seltzer with the Dr. flavor that satisfies my addiction nicely)
Ignoring the alcohol, the first near beer or light beer actually helps hydrate you and provides nutrients.
But the quantity of either is what quickly becomes the problem (2nd hand anecdote). Many alcoholics start with with the 1 beer a day after work which turns into a 12 pack a day after work (as suggested by this top 10%). And once an addict develops a tolerance to beer, they escalate in the top 10% rapidly; that vodka soda become an evening thing, then a morning an evening thing.
Of course I think all of this is alarmist. Alcohol is one of those great traditions that has transcended centuries and generations. If I live a few years less, so be it. I’d rather be happy.
Edit: I didn't down vote your comment btw.
If anything I'd say we're quicker to label drinking "a problem" here in the US than elsewhere - even though the drink amounts and resulting behavior are the same. YMMV I guess, but this seems like a lot of other articles I've seen lately that "throw shade" at America while ignoring the same issues elsewhere.
America also has a cultural obsession with self-reliance/liberty/frontier-as-a-virtue which makes "socializing" a bit of a taboo concept, in a weird way. It's a crutch to "need" to be around others, despite it being fundamentally human to feel this way.
When you combine these two things, I think you get a group of people who need to interact with one another, but also kind of hate one another, and refuse to admit the dichotomy. What we've discovered then, is by heavy drinking we can start to pick at those barriers, though maybe that is, itself, part of the problem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_levelThis is only a real problem for a small, but vocal part of the population. Most people don't think about these issues much at all.
I don't see why that is more true of the U.S. than say Germany, Japan, Russia, China etc.
What are you talking about?
Am I better off with 2-day shipping and the easy ability to read the opinions of enthusiasts and experts for any product I have a small interest in, then order it immediately? Does the change in what I buy actually pay off given the extra time-cost of that research, the extra brain-clutter of knowing things about products I'd probably never have though much about otherwise, and the extra money I'm sure I'm spending because of those factors? I kinda doubt it, but it's so damn hard to resist finding out what's the best way to do [thing] or the best product for the best way to do [thing] when you can do that, even if the result is that your life-satisfaction meter doesn't budge versus some hypothetical alternate universe in which, for anything you're not an actual enthusiast about, you just buy whatever looks good out of the selection at a local non-specialty store.
[EDIT] and yes I'm aware I'm dangerously close to realizing that almost everything "good" in life is just removing an irritation that only exists in the first place because of how life is and is structured, and how I'm choosing to respond to life and its typical structure, and then abandoning the material world to become a Buddhist monk or something.
It starts with the famous experiments where rats would prefer drugs to food and water but goes on to further study that lead to not so bleak conclusions.
Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk hospitalization or death.
I think I remember hearing a similar stat on the ken burns prohibition doc. I didn’t quite understand why it was supposed to be that much though. 9 gallons of liquor is 36 liters is roughly 100 bottles of wine equivalent per year so less than a third of a bottle of wine a day which is what 1 or 2 glasses per meal equivalent? So the question then is are people drinking liquor drinking wine on top plus cider apparently? Or is it just a lot because that’s the average and plenty of people aren’t drinking much at or at all and that makes for the right tail of the distribution to be really drinking a lot?
“Liquor or spirit (also distilled alcohol) is an alcoholic drink produced by distillation of grains, fruits, or vegetables that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation.
[…]
Liquor generally has an alcohol concentration higher than 30%”
⇒ For a 10% alcohol wine, multiply that by a factor of (at least) 3. That makes it a bottle of wine a day.
Also, it was the average adult. Women likely consumed less alcohol. If so, the average adult male must have consumed more.
9*11 = 374 drinks per year or 1 drink a day
Its probably that Average/mean drinking amount isn't a good statistical representation when almost all the consumption is done by the top 10% of drinkers.
Historical comparisons also are tricky because sizes and %'s aren't consistent to today. Beer/Cider weren't as strong and bottle's of wine were smaller than 750ml etc etc.
We probably drink a hell of a lot more in raw terms than the average American does.Two glasses of wine for dinner, another one in the evening, maybe some cognac to wind down, and so on. But it's for the most part not about getting drunk or coping with stress. I've got no illusions about the physical effects but speaking about addiction or being dysfunctional I've seen very little of it despite some people I know drinking enough to stun a mule probably.
The things that I noted were different in the US is how solitary everyone is, overworked and how little time people take for preparing food and just sitting at a table having a drink over conversation. People seem to drink to cope more, use it as a medicine rather than for pleasure or to enhance meals, and I think that turns very badly very quick.
That said I don't think solitary drinking is necessarily as bad as the article makes it out to be all the time, but it takes a certain personality. When you take drugs alone, not just alcohol, you need to be more mindful about why you do it.
German data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...
US data: https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...
One of my great bugaboos is these cultural definitions of alcoholism that are independent from the actual amount of alcohol consumed. You know “you’re only an alcoholic if you drink alone” or “you’re only an alcoholic if you pour your own drinks” (apparently this is a meme in Japan?). Every culture that consumes alcohol seems to have these, and they’re all laughably naive and easily gamed. Alcoholics can and do drink heavily together, and they can pour each other drinks if that’s what it takes to sidestep some silly taboo. The only definition of this that’s meaningful is how much alcohol you drink and how often, nothing else.
My generation in Italy (millennials) tends to drink a lot more and with the precise purpose of getting drunk. The way they/we do it resembles much more the American way than the way our parents used to drink.
Of course, this is based on personal experience, but I’ve seen this pattern across different social classes and it seems to be mainly linked to age, more than education or economic condition.
Do you do research on drinking habits? How can you assume to know so much about the US’ drinking habits in general terms?
Most people don't understand the concept of standard drink sizes (for medical purposes or blood alcohol calculation). Firstly the standard drink size in the US is larger than in the US, but even so it's still smaller than the typical size drink people actually receive. If there were more awareness around standard drink sizes we might discover that Americans drink more than statistics capture by a lot (though probably not more than Germans)! In Germany most of my friends in the US would be considered alcoholics.
- shots are typically much larger in the US - about 2x-3x
- the standard beer size (for beer on tap) is usually a pint in the US. In Germany it's about a half pint! (That's why Germans can have a lunch beer)
- Canned wine is fairly popular in the US, but nobody realizes that this is essentially half of bottle of wine.
On a related note: most people definitely drive under the influence (legally drunk) in the US! :(
I grew up in Germany in the restaurant business (family business) and was a bar tender from a young age (albeit in a fancy restaurant with a few locals who'd sit at the bar). The most shots I've ever seen someone drink in an evening was 9 shots - my staff and I thought that person was a crazy alcoholic. Those shots are 2cl. When you compare that to the typical tequila shots in US bars it's basically ~3 shots (a little more), which people in their 20s and 30s tend to drink like it's no big deal.
I have lived several places in the Midwest, in SF, Chicago and of course traveled lots of places in the US for business and vacation.
Disclaimer: German in the US for 15+ years.
I'm writing this right now whilst drinking my German Import Pilsener to wind down from work :D
How do you even know about solitary drinking in the US? Why are you unaware of solitary drinking in France/Germany/Croatia?
I have no way of quantifying any of your observations.
I am aware of people with drinking problems in France, Germany and Croatia. It is easy for alcohol to periodically become a problem in people's lives.
I'm not trying to defend American culture at all. These observations read kind of comically though.
I would probably say that Germany isn't indicative of the Eurozone at all.
But I'd consider drinking daily or even weekly much.
I went to an international school, so we'd get American kids coming in and realising that they could drink before graduating into a dry university. At least one of my friends got his stomach pumped after a massive binge.
I wonder whether the culture in the US encourages people to guzzle it all down at once to minimise the risk of getting caught.
I noticed something similar in the UK, where they do seem to somewhat enforce the drinking age of 18, and so when I got to uni here my new friends would act like they'd just discovered alcohol and get incredibly drunk.
Now it's not like kids in Europe never get drunk, but it's always available so not really seen as an alluring thing. On much of the continent it's also the kind of thing you might consume with your parents around, which is the ultimate excitement killer.
There are two possible relationships a person can have with alcohol - it is either primarily a food, or primarily a drug.
Americans have a hard time treating it as food, although thankfully that seems to be changing.
Funny, whenever I visit W Europe I find it pretty sad and people look pretty grumbling. America is a lot more lively.
I think of this Eurostory as a EU coping mechanism.
I honestly get sick when I drink more than three drinks within three hours.
It seems that continental Europe is the outlier.
[1] https://movendi.ngo/news/2019/04/18/study-germany-has-an-alc...
Can you clarify what you mean here? I was under the impression european habits of alcohol pairing takes much more space under this umbrella than, say, whether an american associates junk foods (pizza, wings) with beer.
Some references:
- https://www.thecut.com/2015/03/why-alcoholics-anonymous-work...
- https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/03/11/medical-science...
"Mostly it [the new review] looks like studies of either sending people to AA or frequent counseling, and that yields similar results to other kinds of alcohol use disorder psychotherapies. That's what their main finding is," Saitz said. "And I, unfortunately, I don't think that tells us so much about AA effectiveness."
As an aside the average AA member attends 2.5 meetings a week and membership is 89% white[1], I had no idea. Where do non-white people get help in America?
[1] https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/p-48_membershipsurvey.pdf
Yes, widespread obesity, but health obsessions also run deep in that country, gym memberships, elite universities with sports programs full of money. How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.
Bad education? Yes, pretty much. But also some of the best research institutions and universities in the world. Some companies with the highest R&D spending anywhere. Many of the foremost intellectuals end up living there once they enter the international stage.
Backwards, conservative, patriotic? Yes, but also extreme progressive bubbles and widespread leftist sentiments.
"American elitism"? Largely yes in many ways, but also very friendly, welcoming to strangers (even though they are just hyperbole with excitement in many contexts compared to us).
When I read the comment section here it seems like it fits my narrative. The US, country of the extremes. Drinkers, and puritans. Now fight! By the way: The article is so speculative, how can you discuss this in such earnestness? My problem with The Atlantic in general. Many articles are kind of "grand theories based on wild speculation, and creating a narrative out of that", which then has this "intellectual" appearance about it, but says very little. Not convincing at all.
The US is like a social experiment. Deal with your racism, alcohol, health, drug legalization, gender debates, sjw/pc culture, and all that, and please ship the solutions to us, not the movements and the fight (though sadly that doesn't always work out it seems). And before I get angry responses: It's written somewhat tongue in cheek, extend me the courtesy of not assuming the worst about my person.
Plus, this is a country made up of a little piece of every other country in the world. "American identity" is an ex post facto rationalization. Not to mention that politically we often operate like 50 small-to-medium sized countries. And there's less of a push to homogenize the country since one of our political parties fights against federalization.
All that adds up to a country with a whole lot of variation. Describing what Americans are like is pretty useless. We're like everything.
The social experiment seems to be about how extreme you can really make inequality before people starts to riot. Wages are so low in some places that people simply walk out of their work because they can't survive on it, while it's so high in other places that you barely have to do anything and still pull in enough to put you in the 1% of the world population when it comes to income.
He said in Japan, people are usually about the same. But in America, people are either really smart or really stupid.
Sounds like a lot of HN, TBH.
^ also written somewhat tongue in cheek
I'm glad this isn't completely tongue in cheek, because I consider this a huge compliment.
I'm extremely critical of the USA, where I do live. The name of the game for the last ~100 years has been to allow wild cultural experimentation so long as cash is always king and big business gets bigger. Both aspects have had worldwide repercussions and especially given US foreign policy everyone is allowed a seat at the table to love+hate the US.
The US is a social experiment and it's had some incredible fruit. It just feels so precarious with such incredible social and economic divisions.
I mean Americans could list a similar number of stereotypes about the British (for example), but if you’ve ever visited there you’d realize they’re not that different than anyone else.
People want giant alcohol super markets with every type, size and price point of alcohol imaginable and then people want to bitch that other people have drinking problems to make a point about their a priori political beliefs.
Very American.
Doing elite sport in those competitive teams is not all that much healthy. It is tangential to your main point, but top level leagues are not in opposition to un-health. The healthy thing is moderate amount of sport, where you get yourself to improve performance, but don't push yourself to limit. Cheap casual sport that dont require gym membership but provides some social outlet would be better for average person health.
> How many weird diet fads start basically in the US? Self-help books, alternative gurus, etc.
None of that is healthy and a lot of that contributes to obesity issue. Fad diets lead to yoyo-ing and to weight gain in the long term. It also causes proper health issues on its own.
I seriously doubt the entire articles premise that somehow alcohol binging is unique to the US. There are a lot of counties with a lot of forms of alcohol out there…
In the US and the UK, if you aren't drunk when you get home, it wasn't a good night. Nobody here "pregames", simply because getting drunk is mostly something to be avoided.
Also in UK you can buy alcohol from 18, (and if you go to the right places younger even...). It seems totally absurd that in the USA even a 20 YO can't buy himself a drink.
Likewise, non-drinkers tend to cluster with each other because after a while it's just not fun to hang out with people consuming copious amounts of alcohol all of the time while their health slowly declines. I had to stop inviting several friends to certain activities because they wanted to make everything revolve around consuming alcohol. It gets old.
Anecdotes aside, the statistics just don't support 10 drinks/night as being average. That's top 10-20% behavior.
How long are they staying out? I'm in my thirties, and a drink every 45 minutes seems pretty standard among my peers that don't have kids and still go out. In college we'd swing for the fences, but eventually everyone (well, everyone without an actual drinking problem) figured out that keeping a nice social buzz is a more pleasant way to spend an evening with friends.
Yes, the pilgrims preferred beer over water because the water kept killing them. Drinking tea or beer was a matter of safety, not mere preference or addiction. We now know that the combination of boiling, pH, and alcohol helped keep beer safer than drinking water of the time, but they were unaware of that and just knew that beer seemed safer.
Trying to draw a parallel between modern drinking habits and the pilgrims is just silly, because we’re drinking different things in different amounts for very different reasons.
That's a myth.
Are Americans on average in shields up / high alert / guarded / adversarial mode more often?
Every time I visit I always notice two things:
Americans are far more generous and polite than their reputation suggests.
Everyone always seems stressed and guarded and defensive.
Everyone seems to have security cameras everywhere. Fences. Locked everything. Guns. This general feel that everything is zero sum and you've got to guard your hoard, save your seat, not let drivers in, race to be first.
I just feel so exhausted being in high alert mode perpetually after a visit.
Now that I write all this I feel like it's probably confirmation bias or whatnot. But maybe others have thoughts.
Because you aren't allowed to hurt yourself through consumption of a substance, you have to perform bad science first to 'prove' that the substance is good for you.
If we would allow people to hurt themselves, we could be truthful. But that much liberty is terrifying to many.
Cannabis use is not even in the same order of magnitude as the harm alcohol does. Alcohol kills 10K people a year in the US just from drunk driving. I'm not sure why you are bringing this up?
I don't drink for one year every four years and have been through this cycle multiple times. I have one year where I drink quite a bit and my current year is the weekends only drinking cycle.
Some observations: I don't miss alcohol at all when I don't drink, but in dry years I can get quite depressed.
As soon as I do have one drink my mind immediately goes to having more, plans change - I grew up in a binge drinking culture (UK) and that never seems to go away.
I body check myself socially to see if I've drunk too much even when I'm not drinking. I think a lot of social drinking is actually psychological.
Hangovers suck but are a great safeguard. If you don't have them be alarmed. The year when I drink a lot I get overtired, generally puffy skinned feeling and lacklustre.
Most important tip: don't drink pints of mineral water instead of beer: I got terrible kidney stones
After doing that for a few weeks, I came home from work; my wife and son weren't home at the moment. I sat down at my computer and started working on my side project, as usual.
I was shocked to see that there was a large plastic container on my desk filled most of the way up with red wine, and I'd been gulping it down.
Honest to God, I had absolutely no recollection of getting that container, pouring the wine, and putting it on my desk.
That was very chilling, I poured the rest of it out and haven't had a drink since.
That said, I dunno if I'd be so strongly swayed either way by any single event without any real negative consequences such as you say here.
I do this with tea and coffee all the time, so I guess I don't see the connection, but probably better to be safe
We're all drunks.
I don't drink much anymore. I never went to work drunk, but I used to drink a fair amount. Now that I'm a truck driver, it's too inconvenient for me personally to manage drinking, so I just don't drink. Others' mileage definitely varies.
Since then I can't stop noticing the prevalence of alcohol in nearly all aspects of pop culture. Even innocuous seeming sitcoms have episodes where the whacky, lovable characters drink to excess and have to deal with a hangover.
In the UK you can be an alcoholic for decades and still hold down a respectable job. Nobody bats an eye at a few drinks at lunch. I remember feeling so weird the first time I was at a formal event in the UK for a lunch at noon where wine was being served. First time in my life I had felt buzzed and the sun was out and hot. I did not like it at all. But I imagine, with the frequency of these events in academic settings, that half the academics in the more prestigious universities are functioning alcoholics. Many students and young professionals in UK/Europe make it a point to go out and get wasted as much as possible. That happens in the US too, but it seems to be looked down upon more? I think the idea that drinking is more under control in Europe would fade pretty quickly if all alcohol was temporarily banned there for a week.
- Just had a tough situation? Have a drink!
- Feeling anxious? A drink takes the edge off!
- Feeling awkward at a social event? Drink!
Now, I have people working in the alcohol industry who insist that there is no direct product placement or company sponsoring going on. This seems believable, because oftentimes there are no specific brands mentioned in these scenes.
However, this did get me thinking: Is there any alcohol lobby that influences writers to include these types of "benefits of alcohol" scenes into their scripts? When you start to recognise them, you'll notice that a lof of these scenes are entirely unnecessary, to the point where you have to think that a script writer had to deliberately add the alcohol into the scene!
And if the employer is lucky, your coworkers become your drinking buddies in the process. Before you know it you're now spending all your waking hours with your coworkers. Makes quitting your post a lot more difficult.
Go Ghengis!
That's quite interesting. Lots of Mongol rulers drank themselves to death. The timing had world historic consequences: they tended to cark it just after they nuked the entire muslim world from horseback, and just before they moved on to Europe. Maybe the invention of distilled spirits was the key to European domination.
It's the same story at companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, drink fridges with soft drink, juices and then beer/cider/wine, it's such a strange thing when you think about it workplaces offering alcohol to their employees, allowing them to self-moderate their consumption. In Australia the concept of workplace provided drinks that are always there isn't a common thing, even in our startup scene. The closest I've witnessed is Friday drinks, which is where you and your coworkers finish a little early and have a drink to celebrate the week or milestone. Even then, people would have to go out and get the beer/wine to drink, it wasn't just there ready to go.
I wonder if any research has been done into the tech industry and its relationship with alcohol? Because I often saw the casual attitude to drinking as exclusive, especially to those who are recovering from addiction or have had complications with alcohol in the past. Imagine being an ex-alcoholic and getting a job for a modern day tech startup? Surrounded by young twenty-somethings who casually will down a few glasses of IPA and go home to hacking on their MacBook Pros until the early morning like it's nothing.
I don't see anything wrong with solitary drinking, unless you're doing it to deal with stress or problems. But, if you're like me (who works 100% remote now), I enjoy a good glass of scotch or a beer every now and then in the evening, even if my wife isn't drinking or we're not entertaining.
A few decades of bootstrap vs welfare paint don't fix the rotted and failing structure of a culture, if it can even be called that anymore, that had replaced well being with consumption and personal growth with work and public goods with privatized profits.
There is a pretty international audience here that can probably relate to seeing the difference between cases like the hard drinking work culture in many east Asian nations or the near constant casual drinking of much of Europe with the abject despair visible in the poorer parts of the US.
Naturally people have been crying for a social welfare system for basically the last 140 years with occasional fits and starts but mostly characterized by a complete failure to crib off the results of developed nations across the world that simply don't have constant ongoing crises about everything.
Alcoholism, poor mental health care, domestic violence, suicide, etc. etc. are all alive and well on the other side of the pond too. Just not in the "scandanavia plus rich parts of western Europe" parts that HN likes to idolize.
An ex-girlfriend's father was an alcoholic. He went out one day on a binge and came back with Korsakoff syndrome. Korsakoff syndrome causes apathy: it removes your emotions. He no longer spoke, except in monosyllables if spoken to. He wouldn't or couldn't feed himself. He sat all day at the kitchen table. His family took care of him. That's his life now! His daughter wonders sometimes what he thinks about her, if he does think.
I don't know anyone who goes out drinking to get drunk. I know people who socialize with friends and drink alcohol while doing it. I know some people who have a glass of wine or two with dinner. I myself drink a couple microbrews once a week with friends.
But what I'm getting from our European friends is that everyone they know from America is an alcoholic.
But that's not what most of the US is though. 3rd ave in Manhattan, from Lower East Side, to Murray Hill turns like a zoo, (pre covid), around midnight, with drunken 20 something acting like it is spring break.
The rest of the areas of NYC are not like that, but tourists are more likely to stay near these places, rather lets say, somewhere sleepy in UES, UWS, Brooklyn, or Queens.
This back and forth cycle in media coverage on any health topic is so predictable. At this point can any study be taken at face value, or is the only real answer "it varies?"
I'm... not sure it's a good thing, but it was an interesting/unanticipated development. I don't think the author should be so quick to dismiss "Zoom" drinking! UX matters in this space, in a weird way.
As an introvert, thankfully I have alcohol and bars. I don't give much thoughr to how much alcohol I consume. I don't care if Doctors say I'm an alcoholic because I consumed more 5 drinks in a sitting or whatever. I mostly listen to my body. If I am feeling shitty, I know I've been drinking too much, so I take a break. Today I feel shitty, it was memorial day weekend and I went to a baseball game with friends followed by bike rides and drinking with friends. Time to take a break for a few days.
The older I get the more people seem entrenched in their patterns and it seems like anywhere I go alcohol is available for sale.
Company events, family places for having drinks (i.e. pubs, parks etc). It seems that alcohol is everywhere and enabling a lifestyle. Not sure how I feel about it but it certainly feels very present in society much more so than 20 years ago.
I figure part of it is the rise of the local microbrewery/distillery, local job economy to promote specialist beverages and certainly the large corporates promoting alcohol throughout society.
Counter though is that the younger generation seem to avoid alcohol from what i've heard and some of the companies are concerned about the future. Sounds like big tobacco from the 90s.
Wayne Curtis reported that in the 1600/1700s the average person aged 15 years old and up drank 6 gallons of pure alcohol a year, equal to 75 fifths of 80 proof rum a year, or roughly 5 shots per day. Continental european emissaries who would visit towns in the new world would be shocked at the drunkenness of just countless near dead bodies laying in the streets, and from this British, and sometimes Irish, indentured workers got the reputation for being insane drunkards.
He posited that the main driver of heavy drinking was misery - in the colonies and early corporation towns back then, when the weather went bad and there was no work, you drank until things improved. Not too different from today imo.
My lived experience is much different; friends in their 20s/30s/40s drinking at every event and gathering. I live in an area full of very busy bars and restaurants with people drinking. Other wealthier areas are the same around the country. Traveling internationally, the story is the same. And even people like manual laborers drink a lot (I see construction workers regularly drinking on breaks, and I've known some personally), so it's not just a behavior amongst the college-educated professional crowd.
Maybe cities attract and sustain this behavior. People want to be around other people, to be around nightlife, etc. Characterization of this as a purely American problem (or a general problem America-wide) seems like a mistake given the numbers though.
For some people, it can really help live more in the moment, enjoy time with friends, and temporarily put aside all the stress and worries about the future.
Having no direction or hope for a better future (perceived or real) has driven people I've known to alcoholism.
Not an excuse. Just a perspective.
Take your pick!
[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/05/31/qanon-poll-americ...
As a non-drinker apart from rare occasions (1-2x per year), here’s my anecdotal experience.
Over the course of an evening:
- 5-6oz of a 7% IPA and I’m feeling good. This is around my personal cutoff if I do happen to have a drink.
- 1 16oz IPA and I’d be feeling borderline drunk.
- 2 16oz IPAs would leave me right and properly drunk with a good chance of a hangover.
- 3 or more and I am feeling way too drunk, my stomach contents are no longer guaranteed to stay in place, and I’m guaranteed to wake up with a robust hangover.
I drank quite a bit up until about 6 years ago, and back then I could consume multiple times these amounts and feel fine.
I am a healthy, fit person in my mid-late 20s, and to my knowledge don’t have any genetic predisposition to alcohol intolerance.
Perhaps not. I'm a Brit who has designed souvenirs in Plymouth (the one in Devon.) That does not make me an historian but I am a bit interested.
"who, like most Europeans of that time, preferred beer to water" - no they preferred NOT (Colera OR diarrhea).
"And so the Pilgrims were kicked ashore" Please do tell.
I just decided that there weren't any benefits but a lot of negatives, so I stopped.
When I tell people I stopped drinking they assume I had a problem. I laugh and say "No." Then I tell them I just did a pro's and con's evaluation and realized there were zero pro's and a whole lot of con's. I know 6 people that quit drinking after having a the pro's and con's discussion, they went off and did their own evaluation and realized that drinking wasn't providing anything positive. All the positives are imagined. The, "one or two drinks" have a positive effect is all nonsense.
Some days the cons still outweigh the pros, but for me "all the positives are imagined" just doesn't ring true at all.
I do not like alcohol in the long run. I like the first few sips and then it becomes a burden. Friends look at me as if I was crazy when I pour the remaining of my glass to the sink.
I learned to taste alcohol that way, for the taste and not the effects. My children are now teens and since they have seen me doing that a lot, they are not even drawn to alcohol. I let them taste in the past when they wanted to try but the taste was horrible for them and since they saw that I am not a big fan either they do not see it as a taboo thing.
I hate these moralizing articles, if we have a drunk driving problem then write an article about that. But if people want to drink in their own homes let them be.
I googled a whole bunch to try and find a survey that asks why people don't drink. I couldn't find one. I am guessing people's PERCEPTION is that non-drinkers are ex-alcoholics or devoutly mormon or muslim, and that's why I get the disapproving looks.
I am alcoholic Brit who has “not touched a drop” for nearly 5 years. I have also lived in America, Europe and Asia. My personal experience is still that America has way less of a drinking culture than UK.
Most people who drink alcohol do NOT become alcoholics. This is unlike smoking where almost everyone becomes addicted.
That doesn't mean some fraction are drinking 10X what everybody else is. It means some fraction are drinking 81X what a normal person does.
So yes it's a bipolar drinking culture in the US. Some folks drink, a lot, way too often. The rest drink occasionally or not at all (the liquor stores don't count those that never go into the store).
I still miss his blog and his writing from time to time ...
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/1566/north-dakotans-are-ameri...
The US basically requires that you drive everywhere. The penalties for DUI are incredibly stiff. So, you are forced to choose and most people had to choose driving over drinking.
Now, with ridesharing, you can choose drinking over driving.
Today? Are Americans (and Canadians) actually drinking more than they used to? Seems to me there was much heavier drinking in the 70s and 80s and the stats seem to back it up.
Didn't miss it, because I only drank at parties and even then I didn't drink at every party.
I like being drunk sometimes, it can turn a boring event into a fun night. But I don't think, I need it more than a few times a year.
For example: - 3 drink limit, unless it's some kind of special occasion - don't eat, drink, smoke after 8pm
It is like trying to ban other drugs, withdrawal symptoms.
They are addictions and hard to overcome.
Had a perfect example in my family, so I know for sure what alcohol can do and don't touch this crap since very young age.
This sounds like particularly weird Americentrism, but fine
This is almost certainly someone along the game of telephone taking the xkcd joke literally https://xkcd.com/323/
(the alt text says Apple uses schnapps IV’s - this is obviously not true in the comic context but someone along the way to printing this article “bit the Onion”)
My version of why it happened, is that
1) in the 2000s, Russians had an impression that everybody drank and had fun, and they tried to match the common standard. Same thing was revealed in sociological studies in Western universities: every student said he wasn't drinking much but others were drinknig, so he had to do the same. 2) In the USSR, propaganda condemned drinking and at the same time we had an impression we were the most drinking country (according to statistics, it was completely wrong in the 90s, but was almost true in the 2000s). The reasoning (to abstain or strictly limit drinking) was ready for anyone.
Alcohol consumption soared in 2000s, from 12 to 18 L/year. But when many tried drinking to have fun and discovered that it wasn't much finnier, but was definitely more painful, they decided to abstain and took the reasons from media/propaganda, which were bulletproof.
Another reason is that
3) Social fabric got denser, and you could find more and more ways to socialize and have fun: hobbyists groups, community meetings, debates and enlightment, etc. Grassroots socialization was moderately persecuted in the late USSR, while Communist party and trade union meetings were obligatory, hence until mid-2000s Russians were allergic to any collectivism.
So, many started having more social activities, and had less need to hang out with drinks, or drink at home.
Compared to 2000s,
* it's extremely rare now to make jokes, sketches or comedy shows around being drunk * people stopped having lots of drinks at office parties, stopped keeping alcohol -- nowadays nobody would care to bring wine or something else to the office in the first place
But generally, the culture is still quite restrictive towardrs drinking: student dorms strictly forbid alcohol, drinking is forbidden in most public spaces and in many cities it's enforced -- my friend got taken 5 times to police station to write a verbal, and then had to pay fines. (That said, in other cites one may walk down a street with a beer, nobody would care.)
[1] Road traffic mortality attributable to alcohol in Russia, Razvodovsky YE. DOI: 10.15761/MHAR.1000122 https://www.oatext.com/Road-traffic-mortality-attributable-t... alcohol consumption charts [2] Population Drinking and Homicide Rate in RussiaRazvodovsky YE*, DOI: 10.41 72/2167-0358.1000182 https://www.longdom.org/open-access/population-drinking-and-...
Islam prohibited intoxicating drinks over 1400 years ago, and for good reason.
What the hell?! That's absurdly irresponsible and dangerous considering most people travel to the grocery store in a car. Why aren't local authorities stamping down on this?
What about one that is served by public transit, but still has a parking lot out back?
Where is the right place to draw the line?
In many countries, you have a couple of social drinks - even gasp at lunch or in public - and it's not a problem. Being falling down drunk isn't considered 'cool' - it's pathetic and embarrassing. Drinking isn't a competition to see how much you can consume before you either lose consciousness, make idiotic decisions, or start street fights.
That said, I absolutely see no problem with drinking in parks or in public and this works fine in Montreal. We have laws already for public drunkenness. We don't need a nanny state.