7 ms·

Incidentally and completely off-topic, unless your mental associations are as loose as mine, but I was recently rather shocked to find out that alcohol is a neu

• dsrguru 15y ago
  Alcohol is toxic to virtually every kind of tissue in your body. They say drinking enough to feel drunk is much worse for your long-term health than a moderate dose of recreational powder cocaine. But it feels good, it's legal in most countries so you don't have to risk contaminants on the black market, and lots of people pretend it's not even a drug, so Christian fundamentalists and old people won't even look down on you!
  • stray 15y ago
    Nice try, cocaine dealer.
    • ludwigz 15y ago
      just what I was thinking
  • Produce 15y ago
    That's not what's scary to me. What's scary is the number of people in my country's parliment who drink like fish and, more than that, the number of them who drink at lunch. Some of these studies plainly state that behavioral and decision making side effects have been observed. I hate to sound alarmist, but my country is being run by people with compromised cognitive ability and, I assume, personality. I wonder if there's a threshold at which the toxicity starts or if it's just an inherent quality of alcohol just as the high from huffing paint is an integral part of the brain damage that it causes. Pretending it's not a drug is certainly an interesting perspective considering that it's one of the harder drugs out there.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
      I understand your concern, but I don't see how that's any different than any other country for the last few thousand years. If anything, people probably drink less these days.
    • wyclif 15y ago
      England, I'm guessing? Parliament even have their own pub! The joke is that at floor level, there are little arrows on the wall pointing to the door so that drunk MPs can find their way out.
  • mgkimsal 15y ago
    A lot of Christian fundamentalists will look down on you. That's sort of the point of fundamentalism - extreme adherence to some principles. "No alcohol" is a pretty common one in a lot of Christian churches. Many will perform their communion with grape juice, not wine.
    • ido 15y ago
      I think that's a very American thing? Never encountered it in (Central/North/East) Europe.
    • dsrguru 15y ago
      I was under the impression that Christian teetotalism, at least among the predecessors of present-day social conservatives in America, became much less common after the prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. ended. I guess that's not the case. But there are certainly lots of people, many but not all being religious Christians, who define alcohol as something other than a drug (as can be seen from the phrase "drugs and alcohol," which in my view is even harder to defend than "humans and animals" or "doctors and dentists," but I digress yet again...), which allows them to drink while simultaneously criticizing other recreational drug users. Oh the wonders of cognitive dissonance.
      • warfangle 15y ago
        The Presbyterian church I grew up in used grape juice instead of wine. In other ways, it was fairly progressive - especially in the kind of music played/performed during services. And the teachings were fundamentalist in a completely different way than most folks think of fundy christians.
        • angersock 15y ago
          they put the "fun" in fundamentalism? :)
          • warfangle 15y ago
            Not...quite. ;)
  • carbocation 15y ago
    > They say drinking enough to feel drunk is much worse for your long-term health than a moderate dose of recreational powder cocaine. Then "they" are proffering dangerous medical mis-advice that you should probably not be repeating on a forum.
    • dsrguru 15y ago
      The they was the World Health Organization. I can't actually find the article, but http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-science-cocaine-study http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/13/bad-scie... suggests it was suppressed by the U.S. government, so I must have read a leaked copy that I can't find anymore. The leaked copy the Guardian links to doesn't appear to exist. But it was found that very low doses of cocaine such as the amount found in tea brewed from coca leaves are marginally healthful, and infrequent lowish doses of uncomtaminated powder cocaine aren't good but aren't very harmful. High doses of powder and basically any effective dose of crack are highly cardiotoxic and addictive. And cocaine combined with alcohol reacts synergistically and creates cocaethelene, which is very, very cardiotoxic. Also, saying that alcohol is even more harmful than cocaine and that you should probably avoid it (well I sarcastically said you should drink it, but no one would interpret the above post as a recommendation for alcohol) is providing very safe medical advice. I don't see how you got me recommending black market recreational cocaine use from my previous post. If that's how it came across, I'd like to make it clear I do not endorse cocaine use either.
      • carbocation 15y ago
        * Surely the amount of cocaine found in "very low doses" of brewed coca tea is not what one would consider, in your words, "a moderate dose of recreational powder cocaine." So I don't think that what you've posted really supports your claim that the WHO finds recreational cocaine usage to be less hazardous than drinking enough to get drunk. * Whether or not the US's drug policies are more harmful than the drug itself is a totally different question.
        • dsrguru 15y ago
• epo 15y ago
  Off-topic and irrelevant to the OP. Have you been drinking by any chance?
• bonzoesc 15y ago
  > Incidentally and completely off-topic, unless your mental associations are as loose as mine, but I was recently rather shocked to find out that alcohol is a neurotoxin Of course it's a neurotoxin, the whole point is that it messes up the way your brain operates in a way that happens to be enjoyable.
  • dholowiski 15y ago
    If we're talking about this, let's not forget that it also causes brain damage, in moderate to heavy drinkers. http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa53.htm http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa53.htm
  • Produce 15y ago
    I'm sorry but what? There are plenty of drugs which are not neurotoxic and are still enjoyable.
• peterwwillis 15y ago
  Death can result from a blood alcohol content of 0.4%, so yeah you might want to consider its toxicity. Ever had moonshine? The old saying "it'll make ya go blind" is based on the improper distilling by amateur moonshiners, but not because of the equipment they use. Methanol has a lower boiling point than ethanol and as such will vaporize first, but some distillers don't remove this and other harmful compounds properly. Methanol is incredibly damaging to the optic nerve, so even in small amounts it can destroy eyesight over a period of time. If you really want to be freaked out, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_and_health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_and_health
  • mmagin 15y ago
    It's fairly difficult to produce significant quantities of methanol from the likely mixtures most people would be fermenting to make their own vodka/whisky/etc. Typically it's found (at all) if you're fermenting fruit juices, not grains or sucrose. I can't find any good references right now, but it seems that a lot of the widespread idea that it's easy to screw up amateur alcohol fermentation is probably a lie that was spread in support of strict regulation on such activities.
    • peterwwillis 14y ago
      With a perfect still and no additives it should be relatively harmless, but depending on the individual set-up the simplest safety measure is to discard the first 50mL per 20L. Moonshine isn't made by people with rigorous safety and quality practices, so better safe than sorry.
• cullenking 15y ago
  The benefits of stepping away from being overworked and overstressed, to relax and have one or two beers, far outweight any toxicity in those two beers. If you can always mentally shutoff and relax after a day of concentration without a beer, then all power to you, but a beer (read: 1) is a well known and decent shortcut.
• lambda 15y ago
  Yes, lots of drugs are neurotoxins. Caffeine is a neurotoxin as well, so is nicotine. However, that doesn't mean that consuming moderate amounts of alcohol or caffeine will kill you. When people look at all-cause mortality data (here's one example picked at random from Google http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/8628131/reload=0;jsessionid=kQVdMY7roAXgF2ODgffC.114 http://ukpmc.ac.uk/abstract/MED/8628131/reload=0;jsessionid=... , I've seen several studies that come to more or less the same conclusions), they find that moderate drinking (1-2 drinks per day for men, 1 drink per day for women), is associated with lower all-cause mortality than abstaining. And I've seen studies that show that this effect is even present if you control for factors that may be correlated with abstention, such as poverty (can't afford alcohol), or previous alcoholism that may have had health effects (some people are teetotalers because they have previously had problems with alcohol, so they may have had any ill effects outside of the study period). Don't assume that just because something is neurotoxic in high doses means that it's bad in low doses as well. There are many things that can kill you if you take too much, but are healthy in moderation.
  • Produce 15y ago
    Please show me a study which demonstrates caffeine's neurotoxicity in humans if you're going to make a claim like that. I can only find ones exploring neurotoxicity in rats and at some pretty high doses. Nicotine has only been found to be neurotoxic in adolescents or in extremely high doses. At the normal rate of consumption, it acts as an anti-oxidant and has a protective effect on the brain. That study demonstrates an association and does not suggest one way or the other that drinking is in any way healthy. What if people who choose to drink in moderation just happen to be more likely to do everything else in moderation too? What if people who choose to abstain are more likely to fall into extremes and affect their life span that way? What if someone who moderates everything else and chooses not to drink is healthier than the moderate drinkers? On the subject of low doses being completely safe, from a link someone else provided (http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa53.htm http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/aa53.htm): >...some deficits are possible even in people who are not heavy drinkers.
    • hcarvalhoalves 15y ago
• Alex3917 15y ago
  Actually it's not especially neurotoxic in and of itself. It's the withdrawal from alcohol that causes brain damage, IIRC because when you drink a lot your brain starts getting its energy from alcohol, and when you stop it takes a while to switch back to burning regular glucose. (This is probably not exactly correct, but it's something like this.) Anyway there are various neuroprotectants you can take to reduce the amount of brain damage. Although if you are drinking in moderation it isn't much of an issue because your brain won't be getting its energy from the alcohol to begin with. That said, alcohol is pretty terrible for you in general, and it definitely isn't a good idea if you're depressed because it causes inflammation, among other things.