I’m not sure I buy this, from anecdotal evidence of friends who have 1-2 drinks a day vs those who have let’s say a similar amount of weed a day… the friends who drink are vastly more functional.

Arguably the friends who drink are indistinguishable from people who don’t aside from maybe some weight gain if it’s all beer. My weed friends though, you can tell they’re not doing as great, on or off weed.

Arguably, drunk bad decisions were the only thing keeping the population up, and now they're not. Kinda like AI data centers and the stock market.

Now Our Benefactors will have to figure out ways to make people want to reproduce, or just deal with the low population and racial demographic shifts (just kidding, they'll probably find ways to force people to reproduce).