today is national wine day and i’m seeing girls as young as 18 joke about being “future wine moms” with their besties and while this is cute and seems funny it also reminds me how normalized overconsumption of alcohol is in our society. it’s a tough thing to talk about because these convos sometimes lead to full out shaming of people who engage in this behaviour. on the other hand, the complete acceptance and normalization of this kind of behaviour is extremely harmful. we live in such a pro-alcohol society that alcohol consumption is even pitched as being “heart healthy” when antioxidant benefits of the grapes in wine don’t even come close to outweighing the destructive properties of alcohol. we have to learn how to discuss substance “vices” – because, let’s face it, drinking, smoking etc are literally always going to be apart of the human experience and will always be apart of our community and our lives – without promoting their absolute acceptance or absolute dissolution. the trend of aggressively shaming people into quitting cigarettes without addressing why specific demographics suffer certain addictions more than others is not beneficial in the grand scheme of limiting self-destructive habits.
we gotta approach a model where we can discuss appropriate limits for all substances without shaming people and using holier than thou rhetoric, but also not making such behaviour marketable and neutralizing its harm with cute memes etc.
AGAIN
can yall stop comparing alcohol to drugs??????????
no amount of cigarettes is good, a moderate amount of alcohol IS
i get your point is alcoholism vs drug addiction but you need to say it as. and stop this shit of comparing the actual objects, theyre not the fuckin same
1. alcohol is a drug
2. i wasn’t comparing alcohol to cigarettes in their effect, i was talkin about our culture of shaming poor people without recognizing why they use what they use
3. no amount of alcohol is good for ya. there’s no health benefit of the structural compound alcohol is comprised of. it is always harmful. any proposed benefit (for example in wine) comes from the antioxidants in the grapes/berries
One of the reasons alcohol is removed from the conversation about drugs is that having an honest conversation about alcohol would include acknowledging that it is more physically harmful, more addictive and far more likely to kill you through overdose than most criminalized drugs.
Alcohol is also what makes other drugs more dangerous because alcohol has dangerous or lethal interactions with over a dozen other drugs.
We need honest conversations about the wide diversity of effects and risks of drugs, the circumstances that create addiction, how we can help addicts without criminalizing them and how we can build a world where there is space for all the pleasure drugs can bring and care for the consequences.
And one of those conversations needs to be about the fact that our go-to party drug, alcohol, is actually pretty shit.
I’ve known a couple of people who’ve died from drugs. I’ve known a lot of people who have died or become incapacitated through societally-approved prolonged excessive alcohol use.
Alcohol being good for you is a thing invented by marketing to get you to buy their product.
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