BF2S Forums Official Beer Thread

OK, good luck convincing the world not to drink at all. There's no safe level of breathing, or taking a bath, so what?

But David Spiegelhalter, Winton professor for the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, said the data showed only a very low level of harm in moderate drinkers and suggested UK guidelines were very low risk.

“Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no ‘safe’ level does not seem an argument for abstention,” he said. “There is no safe level of driving, but government do not recommend that people avoid driving. Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.”

You should probably kill yourself, since being alive carries a risk of death.

Still waiting for some non-Nutt evidence that alcohol is provably worse than crack cocaine.

Lets use his methodology to prove that family cars are more dangerous than sports cars:

Lets say in an average year 1.2 per 1000 family cars are involved in crashes, compared with 1.9 per 1000 sports cars.
But if you factor out the 75% of family cars which aren't crashed because they are driven carefully and within the law, and which therefore don't count, that makes for 1.2 per 250 family cars against 1.9 per 1000 for sports cars.

ZOMG 4.8 per 1000 family cars crash vs 1.9 per 1000 sports cars! So family cars are 2.5 times more dangerous than sports cars! We must ban family cars and get people into sports cars - statistics prove it.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-02 22:03:03)

Meanwhile, I have made the momentous decision to switch my beer supply from bottles to cans.
They should be more environmentally friendly, lighter and more efficient to recycle etc. than glass.

And having conducted a double-blind test (I shut both my eyes at the same time) the beer quality is indistinguishable - when drinking from a glass.
(Not being poor I don't drink from a can or bottle)

uziq wrote:

i also don't think anyone has ever said alcohol is worse than crack cocaine.

uziq wrote:

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

i also don't think anyone has ever said alcohol is worse than crack cocaine.

uziq wrote:

that's an australian drugs harm ranking, which i cited for your benefit, based on australia's stats and supplemented with 'prevalence of use' data pertinent to australia. do keep up. i thought you were an academic mastermind cutting down published research at one stroke? that's not a 'global objective drugs ranking'.

crystal meth is not that much of a global health issue. evidently bogans are losing their teeth to chemicals manufactured in SE asia rather than taking hugely expensive cocaine imported from south america. it's almost like you don't understand very simple drug trends.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 22:25:14)

my point being that its 'harm' in the 'australian harm ranking' is obviously inflated by its high prevalence of use in australia. not that australia is the only place in the world that takes crystal meth. everyone knows about rust-belt states falling to crystal meth. breaking bad was a decade ago, dilbert. if anything, the opiate crisis has superseded it as a public health issue.

Oh well if they're poor they don't matter.

my point was australia's stats are inflated towards crystal meth because of its availability in the region and cost, not that 'poor people don't matter'. it's very expensive to get cocaine to australia. you need coca leaves, which only grow in a specific region. meanwhile you can cook up meth in the back of a VW in the outback. point ... missing it ...

no crystal meth in cheltenham, that's true. barely any in europe, in fact, outside of the czech republic/poland i believe (that's amphetamines and speed generally). hence me saying it's not a 'global health issue' and isn't ranked quite as high as alcohol in the wider studies.

and again, i never said that alcohol was worse than crack, or crystal meth, or heroin. i've never once argued that any of these drugs should be legalised? it's almost like you're not listening. well done at being able to post alarming pictures. link another zombie video! that'll really bury the case for magic mushrooms.

people in cheltenham don't really drink cider, by the way. wrong stereotype. bristol, where i live, would be more like it.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 22:43:39)

what i've said is that alcohol is a harmful drug and is far worse than many other banned substances. you said it wasn't. i linked about 4 different studies, toxicological, epidemiological, sociological, which stated exactly what i said.

i said that certain drugs are relatively harmless, certainly not as deleterious to your health as alcohol, not as toxic, and not as bad for their effects on society and relationships. among them MDMA, mushrooms/LSD, drugs with next to no toxicity, in the case of the latter two no neurotoxicity whatsoever (alcohol is directly neurotoxic), drugs which are non-addictive and which are in fact being approved now for medicine. weed is also another obvious example of a drug that, in moderate amounts, is a lot less bad for you than habitual alcohol consumption.

i said that illicit drugs are not illegal because they're more harmful. you said they are. they patently aren't. the laws aren't based on rankings of 'harm' at all. the UN's initial guidelines outlined the logic: that drugs with no medical benefits and only recreational uses should be considered most illegal. this is now being relaxed as the thin edge of the wedge, i.e. medical applications of MDMA/LSD/mushrooms, is getting to work (mushrooms were legal until the 2000s in any case).

reforming the classification system won't result in everyone having a drugs bonanza. it'll just alleviate a senseless load of human suffering, costly incarceration, and criminalisation of people pursuing their own low-risk, low-harm consumption. your statements that all illicit substances should continue to be banned, and banned at the highest classification, is too ridiculous to even bother with in any substantive way.

your endless wrongheaded reply seems to be, 'it's illegal because it's harmful'. which has been shown, by various methodologies and rubrics, absolutely not true. they're illegal because they're illegal, and governments have't been inclined to change it and lose portions of their electoral vote; the US's pre-eminence in leading a conservative 'war on drugs' has seen many, though not all, countries toe the line. alcohol is more harmful than a number of drugs, or, to put it another way, is at least as harmful as certain other drugs, which makes a mockery of your whole 'logic'.

if you want to make some moral argument about 'society going to the dogs' because of what people choose to do in their spare time, in the privacy of their own home, then at least be open about it and admit that you're waging a culture war, not a medical one. drugs are not classified into legal brackets based on their putative harm. the system needs a reshuffle and people should stop duping themselves with this logic that, because alcohol (like tobacco) are legal, they are 'OK', and everything else, because they are illegal, are scary and life-ruining. it is illiterate.

the discussion we've got onto about taking acknowledged risks, and admitting that things which give us pleasure often come at some cost (pace the cambridge prof you quoted), seems to me to be getting at some sense, finally. that's essentially been my approach to drug-taking, period, people convincing themselves that getting drunk and going to the pub twice a week is 'OK' because it's legal and the social norm would do better to be more aware of this thinking. you're harming yourself, as the understanding used to go with anything more than 4.5 pints a week (now it's less, but scales with intake in any case), in the short term as well as the long, harming yourself more in fact than with the use of a host of other drugs, and you should stop deluding yourself about this fact. if that's a risk that you weigh up and consider worth the pleasure, then go for it. but drop the pious anti-drugs bullshit.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-02 23:14:55)

i didn't contradict the studies at all. one is based and weighted on australia, hence a different result. stop being so fucking obtuse.

all of the studies fit my assertion that alcohol is more harmful than most illegal drugs, invalidating your claims that all is right in the world, alcohol is legal because it's mostly harmless, other drugs are illegal because they're 'excessively harmful', too bad, etc.  every single one of them has alcohol in the top categories of risk. you being pedantic over whether it's more or less harmful than crack or crystal meth is not a rebuttal. i've never argued that crack, heroin or crystal meth should be legalised.

no surprises that every study with a different method and a different sample will produce slightly different results. wowzers! but how funny that all the results broadly agree and establish a pattern: a pattern with alcohol consistently in the top-rank of the most harmful drugs. my point being that many recreational drugs are banned for reasons that have nothing to do with their harm. you have said, time and again, that 'they're illegal because they're excessively harmful'. this is wrong. my own personal preferences, or the fact that some drugs out of the dozen or so most common are excessively harmful, and should remain banned, is not a rebuttal

the basis of your counter-argument against these studies, which all point in one direction, seems to be that you link videos of afghans taking heroin in the street, or zombie homeless, or crystal meth addicts with pustulating faces and 'brain effects', as if there isn't a shadow population across every suburb and city of alcoholics and people utterly wracked by alcohol. you show brain scans - wow! science! - of the effects of MDMA and crystal meth on the brain, when you know damn well that a google images search will return the same alarming images for alcohol. it's just dishonest in the extreme.






omFG!!!!!

it's worst when combining individual & societal harms, yes, with various methods to account for weighting of drug prevalence/availability. obviously the methods are going to be probabilistic and so making absolute statements is pointless. i'm not interested in saying 'alcohol is the worst drug ever' because it's hard enough to get it into your thick skull that alcohol is even properly harmful, even though it's legal, as compared to many other drugs which are outlawed.

2 of the studies had nothing to do with david nutt. completely different methodologies and studies. that they cite him, among any number of other studies in the field,  is evidence only of completely routine academic good practice. sorry, try again.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-03 00:08:34)

but people aren't saying that alcohol is worse, on an average person by person basis, than heroin. literally no one has ever said that. not even the studies i have linked which give alcohol a high harm/risk evaluation. the meaning of their results isn't a recommendation to take up heroin. drinking a beer every day with a meal is undoubtedly better for you than shooting up heroin every single day. who is claiming otherwise? the whole idea of 'risk' and 'harm' is abstract, and not just about the direct toxicology of a substance, but also its environment of consumption, etc etc, which need to be taken into account. obviously.

for the umpteenth time, i've never pointed out alcohol's flaws so that i can make a claim that heroin is an amazing drug. it is a terrible drug. just alcohol is also officially Very Bad. there are lots of drugs which are not as bad as heroin or alcohol. is this really so fucking complicated?

'75% of people' weren't excluded in that study at all, you just pulled that figure out of your arse, and besides it was an australia-specific study that took some (arguably outdated) australian government guidelines on 'low-risk' consumption as a noise filter. where are you getting it from that 75% of people's alcohol consumption is under 4.5 pints a week? and besides, plenty of governments and health ministers now advise that any amount is harmful, so even that 'low-risk' claim is spurious and up for debate.

Last edited by uziq (2020-01-03 03:56:00)

Oh hey, 87% of Australians consume 14 drinks or fewer in an average week, not 75%. Page 18.
http://fare.org.au/wp-content/uploads/F … -FINAL.pdf

If you deliberately exclude 87% of your data points (the awkward ones which don't support your argument) then your whole report is rendered rubbish.

Seems like the whole report was pulled out of someone's arse.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-03 04:53:09)

Thats the point dur, the 87% of 'safe' drinkers have been factored out, the 'safe' cocaine users haven't.

To compare like with like we need to divide the alcohol figures by 7.69.
Individual Harm - 36/7.69 -> 4.7
Social Harm - 41/7.69 -> 5.3
Total - 77/7.69 -> 10.0

Using the chart you keep pulling out of your arse that puts alcohol between Ketamine and PIEDs.

uziq wrote:

Since alcohol use is apparently so terrible thats really not an argument for legalising drugs with comparable levels of harm now is it?
Cocaine is now 2.5 times more harmful than alcohol, lets keep that in Class A eh?

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2020-01-03 05:03:29)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Interesting that you guys are arguing about drugs. My New Year's resolution is to stop smoking marijuana so I can become a police officer this year.

So that was a fucking lie. The first part at least.

I don't get my civil service results until March so I guess I can finish off the marijuana I have.

It really is a struggle to not smoke marijuana on my down time. Marijuana doesn't give you a hangover like alcohol or a crash/catatonia like harder drugs. You can also generally manage to do normal people stuff while high. And there isn't any normal people stuff that can't be improved with a little marijuana.

I have a nice full day at work and then sit down on my couch at home with my buzz-cut, shaved face, belt, and no pajama pants and think "what now?"