If I could give young people one piece of advice, it would be this, “You should just not drink alcohol.”
My reasoning behind this is pretty simple.
By drinking alcohol, in the moment, you will make your life slightly better, but, in the longterm, you will be taking the risk of making your life dramatically worse.
If you simply don’t drink alcohol ever, your life will stay mostly the same, and there will be no chance whatsoever that your life is made dramatically worse.
Now, you might be thinking that, while this is true of other people, it is not true of you because you will never have issues with alcohol.
But the data, at least, does not suggest that you should be so hopeful. 222 million adults have drunk alcohol at some point in their lifetime. Of these, 16%1 have had a “severe alcohol use disorder,” which is to say that they have found themselves unable to restrict their consumption of alcohol, and it’s had repeatedly had a deeply negative effect on their life as a result.
I’m going to be extraordinarily optimistic here and assume that you’re not related to anyone who has ever had issues with alcohol and that you have a particularly non-addictive personality.
Given this, I’ll be hopeful and suggest that your real risk of developing serious issues with alcohol is 1.6%. But, even 1.6% is ABSOLUTELY not a risk worth taking. Imagine if I told you that I would give you an all expenses paid trip to Costa Rica, but there’s a 1.6% chance that you’d never be able to leave. Why would that ever, in a million years, be worth it? (I mean think about all the time that you’d have to spend walking on beaches and drinking virgin piña coladas, absolutely miserable.)
And, even setting aside selfish reasons for not drinking alcohol, there’s really good societal reasons to think you shouldn’t drink it as well.
First, just from a basic economic perspective, drinking alcohol is really bad. In 2011, economists estimated that excessive alcohol consumption cost the US 250 billion dollars in costs related to healthcare, lost productivity, criminal justice, and other factors. This means that each time an American takes a drink, it costs the US around $2 on average
Second, virtually everything bad that happens in society is worse because of alcohol. Because it disinhibits people, it often causes them to do behavior that we don’t want them to do.
For example, in 37% of sexual assaults and rapes, the offender had been drinking alcohol. In 40% of murders, the killer had been drinking alcohol. And, in 30% of traffic fatalities, someone had been drinking alcohol.
And the list goes on for pretty much every kind of crime you can think of.
Lastly, alcohol kills people. Each year, 178,000 people die from drinking alcohol. Each of these people are real people with real loved ones and real lives.
One of these people was my father’s cousin. He tried to quit many times, but he ended up dying when he was forty three. He left behind three children. I remember one of them, his ten year old son, was planned to speak at the funeral. But, when he got on stage, he couldn’t stop crying.
Another was a girl from high school. She had been out drinking with friends when she got more drunk than she had planned too. Her family had extremely strict rules so she was deeply afraid of getting caught. Out of anxiety, she tried to drink water to reduce her intoxication, but it led her to die from water toxemia. She was only 16.
And, yet another was my aunt. She quit when she was forty three, and she succeeded at being sober for ten years. It was so important to her that she wrote a book about it. But, she eventually relapsed, and she died from liver failure within two months. The main thing I remember about her was how deeply proud she was over her kids.
I imagine that you probably don’t know as many people who died from alcohol as me, but I know that you almost certainly know someone who has struggled with alcohol.
The vast majority of these people only ever drank alcohol because it was considered normal within our society. By choosing to not drink it, we can de-normalize it and start to create a society where alcohol is seen for what it really is - a dangerous substance whose initial appeal is far outweighed by the suffering, violence, and death that it wreaks upon our society.