Agree entirely. The fact of the matter is that anyone who is drinking 1-2 drinks a day every day is not capable of stopping, and will definitely try to convince anyone that they can “stop at any time” when in practice they never do.
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Yes, it is, if you need that glass of wine and never skip it, it’s alcoholism. Alcoholism isn’t dose defined.
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No, that’s not a fact. I know two people who’ve done exactly that. And I’ve met various Europeans who drink that much, and don’t suffer ill effects. It’s just part of life. And I suspect that if many of them moved to a culture where that’s not the case, they wouldn’t have much trouble drinking less often.
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I used to drink one or two drinks every day and stopped easily 
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We do not agree entirely, because what you’re saying just isn’t true. My dad drank two beers every night for as long as I can remember. I never once saw the man drunk. And then, when I got sober in my 30s, and I would come to visit, there would be no alcohol in the house and he wouldn’t drink while I was there. Now, he’s in his 80s and he just doesn’t drink much anymore. My brother was a pretty hard partier and drinker in high school and college. And then, as he got older, he just grew out of it. He got married, raised a family, and drank less and less as time went on. And now, he doesn’t drink hardly at all. Neither my dad nor my brother are, or were, alcoholics. When they decided to stop, they did, and they had no difficulty doing so. Just because someone is having 2 drinks a night doesn’t mean they can’t stop. They may not have tried yet.
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Some people are more genetically predisposed to becoming high dependency drunks than others. My siblings and I were raised by two of them.
For that reason (as well as some unpleasant experiences in the college years) I drink as little as possible, often one or two times a year. I had hoped that society would move on from using alcohol as a primary social lubricant during my lifetime, but I have accepted the fact that it is going to be around long after me. Bummer that.
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I don’t want to belittle your experience at all, however your statement is like so many comments I see on social media to things like supplements. “I started taking supplement X and I also completely changed my diet and I’ve lost weight/gained superpower/am smarter/feel a lot better!”
With my own experiences of drinking alcohol regularly to not drinking much at all, drinking alcohol regularly makes one feel like shit. The effects of metabolizing alcohol out of your system are just rough and yucky and if you do it regularly you’re always feeling a little hangover until you end up drinking again.
Sometimes I’m really surprised that something so overtly damaging and unpleasant is so wildly popular and engrained in society.
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Sounds like you may be doing that foolhardy thing of thinking that what you experience is what everyone else must experience too.
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It’s a good thing that healthy living isn’t some kind of moral imperative. I know that it’s not good for me. No illusions there.
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same. healthy living isn’t good for me either 
( joking, not joking. trying to consider what is and isn’t going to kill me at every moment: it’s just too much. i do my best. gave up smoking, but enjoy my beer. ride my bike, and probably eat too much lead lined chocolate. is it healthy? i dunno. i guess i’ll find out someday. )
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chocolate <----> lead
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… I forgot about that
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yeah, on going …
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Of course, then it becomes a question of how much is okay, and how much of any particular brand. Le sigh.
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right? 
i just want to live forever. how hard does this have to be? ( oh, but also. not give up anything. that part’s important too. )
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No, give up everything that is fun or offers comfort.
You won’t actually live significantly longer - but it will sure feel that way!
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This type of definition can be problematic when some people become psychologically dependent on a substance. By this definition, if a person is not capable of deciding to stop drinking substances containing ethanol, the definition can’t classify them either way.
Absolutely! It would be great if we could accurately quantify the effect. Unfortunately ethanol consumption is correlated with lots of other risky behaviours and it’s fiendishly difficult to split the extra mortality/morbidity by cause.
Reminds me of a fact I heard many years ago, but had forgotten about until I ran across it again recently: Apparently females who regularly drink products containing ethanol are more far more likely to develop breast cancer than females who don’t. But does the ethanol cause the breast cancer? Hardly seems plausible given what we know about the chemistry of ethanol breakdown. But drinks containing ethanol tend to also contain lots of sugars, so regular drinkers tend to be heavier, and in females this tends to correlate with having a larger volume of breast tissue, which gives an increased chance of breast cancer.
With complications like that, it seems that no one is game to suggest firm numbers for extra mortality/moribidty arising from ethanol consumption. But the data is enough that organisations like WHO decided they could no longer make recommendations that say things like “don’t drink more than 2 standard drinks per day”, since people would inevitably misinterpret this a “WHO says that 2 standard drinks per day is safe”. So WHO now says “there is no safe amount that does not affect health”. (And I could have given similar quotes from other health organisations, but of course WHO’s on first.)
On another tangent, I usually approach threads about alcohol risks with the attitude of “I’m not going to learn anything new.” And then I found:
Damn! I love learning new stuff, but that’s one thing I did not want to learn. That’s going to be a hard one to give up. So seriously, albeit begrudgingly, thanks for sharing that one. I didn’t want to know it, but given my consumption levels, I needed to.
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