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7mo ago

Alcohol fuckin sucks(CW: substance abuse)

Got back from family vacation, got on the dreaded Facebook, found out the woman who was my first gf 12 years ago, and subsequently a friend I talked to pretty frequently, had died of liver failure at 33 years old.

Looking back on it, when she was drinking 12 years ago it just seemed like a fun time. I didn't know she sustained that pace for a decade plus. Some other things took a toll too, like an eating disorder.

Anyways, I am fuckin sad, fuck alcohol, it's as bad as heroin but capitalism gotta make that $$$$$

107 comments

Me reading this after falling off of the sober wagon

It fucking sucks...
- Stay strong comrade. It's not about total abstinence so much as trying to reduce consumption. At least, that's always been my attitude. I've seen people fall off once and then say fuck it and go on benders because of it and I don't think it's helpful to live in that binary.
  
  For me it was about abstaining but I slipped... again. I wish I could trust myself to have like a social beer or whatever here and there but it always ends up me buying a bunch and then losing control over it. Gonna just not buy it again because I can't be around it.
- It's never too late to try and improve and sobriety streaks are only as meaningful in of themselves as the importance they have to you if their lengths are helpful to be healthier long term. I went through a really bad wagon crash after two years dry and it really fucked me up for months until circumstances in my life changed enough to cut back again.
  
  This was only six months but I don't want it to be an excuse for not trying to keep staying sober. I really hate this about me though.
- you can do it, ya fuckin know it!
  
  Hangovers fucking suck too lol
- I haven't had a drink in like 5 months maybe. Haven't smoked since like 3. I'm getting close to smoking. I don't know.
  
  I was finally able to quit smoking about a decade ago but it still took me like 3 years of actually trying.
  What helped me with not smoking was doing theses little breathing exercises where I'd breath in and out slowly, almost as if I was taking a drag off of a cigarette.
  Drinking is somehow way fucking harder. I've gone through 3 sober spells now and this one I was hoping to go a year and then re-evaluate. Because I think part of my drinking is related to my autism and part is related to depression. I was trying to go about it from that angle this time instead of "drink bad!" lol. Maybe the fact that I'm a bit more aware this time is why I'm beating myself up over it so much.
  Starting today I'm hopping back on the wagon tho. I got weed for the weekends and occasional evenings for now so gonna go back to that, reading, and therapy and just keep trucking.

I have genuinely never had a sip of alcohol in my life. It’s just amazing how people still almost constantly try to get me to start. They seem offended as if I personally attacked them when I refuse. Could you imagine someone getting offended because you didn’t want to do heroin with them?
Almost everyone in my family is some form of an addict, and they all say they could definitely quit anytime they want to, even the one who mixes alcohol with coffee in the mornings and who gets drunk almost every night. The societal level of denial when it comes to alcohol is amazing, people treat addiction like it’s just a snack-eating habit and not drinking literal poison. A lot of my family basically just treats it as a snack that they “munch” on throughout the day. The physical and cognitive decline over the decades is readily apparent.
I clearly remember the amount of pressure I was under to start drinking myself to death the second I turned 21. I said no. One of the best decisions I ever made. But how is a 21 year old kid supposed to make a clear-minded decision when drinking is almost universally normalized and encouraged, so much so that they’ve probably already gotten dangerously drunk several times over by the time they’re 16? (at least, that was the norm where I grew up)
- Definitely never start. I’ve been heavy drinking for a decade and it’s almost completely destroyed my life. I have squandered ever opportunity and meaningful relationship I’ve ever had. I have profound brain fog and cognitive impairment and im not even 30 yet (and I’ll be surprised if I even make it there). Never let anyone convince you to start drinking
  
  it's never too late to quit btw, i was in a similar position (started at 14, kept going for a decade+) and it's been years now since i've touched the stuff.
  you can always escape
  
  I quit at 35, don't wait that long comrade
- People get offended because they know it’s bad for them and you’re showing the restraint that they themselves sometimes wish they’d have.
  The other side is that drinking makes them vulnerable and you not drinking puts you in a power position over them. Sometimes predators don’t drink because of that. But obviously that doesn’t justify their reaction to you not drinking.
  (This is the perspective of someone who does binge drink occasionally)
  
  Yeah true, I haven’t really thought about it from that perspective. I feel like I’ve always subconsciously avoided those sorts of sober-drunk power dynamics though. I don’t like to be around drunk people. It’s like going to a concert where everyone else is raving but you’re really not feeling it at all. Being the only sober person is an extremely off-putting feeling for me. And I’m not sure if it’s the autism, but bars induce a visceral feeling of disgust. It’s not a moral thing, it just physically feels gross. So if people are going out to drink, I’m not tagging along.
- I have genuinely never had a sip of alcohol in my life
  That's actually me! Just never seemed like the right thing. And know I'm regularly taking other depressants, so it's not at all safe.

I know someone who started drinking heavily at university, 18-21 or so, and in the span of ten years he needed double hip replacements. Apparently alcoholism can make your body stop absorbing calcium/vitamin D so he has the bones of an elderly person at 32.
It's such a horrifying drug to normalise. I didn't even know it could cause osteoporosis on top of the seizures and liver failure and cancer.

I'm sorry for your loss comrade. My mom died from her alcoholism problem too. I'm an alcoholic as well (it runs in the family). Shit is bad. I remember seeing a bit on tv about how alcoholism is a killer right alongside fentanyl but that gets all the attention because it's illegal.
- I remember seeing a bit on tv about how alcoholism is a killer right alongside fentanyl but that gets all the attention because it's illegal.
  too true. plus fentanyl can kill instantly so easily, and while someone can drink themselves to death in a night it takes a lot more effort than fent.
  hope youre doing well, the chronic pain and management of said pain my friend went through is something i'd only wish on the worst people in the world. And she was not a bad person at all, she was very kind and always thinking of other people before herself. But sometimes you have to be selfish...

yeah I'm also getting to an age where I'm starting to see the effects of alcohol abuse in people I knew from school. Several deaths, liver problems, organ problems. A friend of mine who's several years younger has a calcium deficiency and has lost teeth. Alcohol seems to have an endless list of problems it causes. It attacks your liver, that's where your minerals and vitamins get sorted out. You mess up your liver and it hurts you everywhere else, your body can't fix itself and your immune system goes to shit.
I've had five sips of alcohol in my entire life, I hate it. It should definitely be regulated. Alcoholism is horrifying and I really hope any comrades with a proclivity can overcome it.
Also read up on Korsakoff syndrome. Absolutely terrifying disease associated with alcohol abuse that traps you in a time loop since you lose the ability to form short term memories. You wake up in the same day over and over wondering why it's suddenly 2042.

I stopped drinking a bit ago and it rules. Not in the pocket of BIG HANGOVER anymore
- fuck yeah comrade. congratulations!

I had a much easier time quitting hard drugs than I've had quitting alcohol. It's so insidious, and so accepted to be an alcoholic. I really haven't faced many life consequences for my drinking in my life. Lots of health complications, but nothing the world threw at me.
- Yeah I have done just about everything except crack and had years-long habits with a number of them. I had to piece together a new personally when I quit hard drugs. I quit cigs during COVID. But alcohol is just so baked into society and such an easy way to help cope with capitalism that I find it hard to imagine ever completely quitting drinking.
  
  I'm an alcoholic and can casually smoke crack. It's got the immediate addiction aspect of any upper and you'll feel like getting more any time you don't have any, but really only the first hit is good and I've never wanted to blast more boulders the next day.

Alcohol is worse than heroin. Heroins problems come from it being unregulated. So us addicts have to get filth from the streets that we don't know how strong it us.
Alcohol is regulated and still kills tons of people and ruins lives.
- Yep, this is why I fundamentally do not believe anyone interested in the prohibition of drugs actually cares about saving lives. Alcohol is at once the most dangerous and most accessible drug. Meanwhile Weed, LSD, and Heroin are all treated equivalently more severe by the US federal government.
  If we can accept alcohol being legal, we can accept Heroin being legal. What we ought to do is make it illegal to profiteer in any way from either substance, while we give adult users a safe supply.
  
  Bars are just supervised injection sites for alcohol.

I think that it's unironically very messed up that we are not expected to put CWs on posts glorifying alcohol and drug usage when we are expected to put CWs on animal products.
I think that if we can be considerate enough to vegans to CW meat then we can also be considerate to people who are grappling with addiction or have lost loved ones to substances.
Truly sorry for your loss, OP.
- Yeah, this is why I made the drug comm in the first place. Drug chat is cool and fine, but it should be in its own contained area where everybody can ignore it if they want.
- thank you, and i edited the title.
  
  I didn't mean you comrade, I didn't think for a second you were glorifying alcohol. My heartfelt apologies if I made you feel attacked or sad.

It's very unfortunate that alcohol is such an extremely simple molecule that is just intrinsically connected to carbohydrates. It just happens. Monkeys get drunk of fermenting fruits lying around. Boil potatoes, let them stand around until it smells funky and you're already half the way to vodka. Even if you eliminated all remembrance of alcohol, some dude would drink a bottle of grape juice that was a little too long in the sun and enjoy the feeling it gives him.
Addiction often stems from the circumstances in your life. It comes from desperation, suffering, needing to forget or to feel something, the need to distract, to numb or the desire to fit in. It comes from poverty, isolation and the lack of a future, for which it would be worth being sober for.
Capitalism enables and enhances all these feelings and makes this drug so extremely available at the same time. It remains the true enemy and is again at the core of our suffering. Alcohol will undoubtedly remain a problem in any society, but in ours it is a scourge.

It's the worst drug. And people look at you like you've lost your mind if you say you don't partake
- In my experience they straight up don't know how to engage with you. Typically they get defensive about their own habit after you say "no thanks".
  Wife and I drank casually (but still too much) and stopped last year. We lost weight and our baseline sense of well-being is much higher. Once you get far enough away from drinking, it becomes alarmingly clear that people are straight-up poisoning themselves, and have no idea how to socialize without it.
  
  I work in the live entertainment industry which means I'm often sober working in a room full of drunks and it truly is like watching everyone slowly become brain-damaged
  
  Typically they get defensive about their own habit after you say "no thanks"
  this feels very similar to how people often perceive it as a personal attack when someone at the table says they're vegan
- I feel like that's changing, at least in my circles/generation. A lot of us still drink, but give mad respect to those who quit, its objectively just (kinda fun) poison.
  
  Alcohol consumption among millennials is plummeting, and Gen Z never fucked with it much to begin with.
- me_irl
- And people look at you like you've lost your mind if you say you don't partake
  I hate it so much. Some people can't even process the phrase "I don't drink"

i am unironically a prohibitionist when it comes to alcohol, the muslims were right. though we should treat it like a medical issue rather than a criminal one, like we should with any drug problems. it should at least be illegal to advertise alcohol or give it fun packaging, like they do with cigarettes in some places.
never ever giving up weed tho, maybe i'll switch to vapes and edibles instead of smoking eventually but its more expensive that way.
- Prohibition was a disaster in the US tho. You can't even stop people from fermenting sugar in prison.
- i switched from smoking to edibles after 18 years of smoking. I was coughing up black shit for months and now im good on that.
- Check out vaporents on reddit, there's tons of flower vapes that get you the same high off less weed since they're more efficient. The terpcicle from trww is an all glass vape for around 40, just need a decent torch

I consider myself lucky that my body started outright rejecting alcohol around 25. Prior to that I was drinking about 3 liters of liquor a month. Half a beer triggers a multiple day migraine now. It's the perfect excuse to not drink as well, so if you're getting pressured feel free to use it.
- Similar story for me. It wasn't always a migraine trigger, but then one day it was always a migraine trigger.
- It has probably saved my life many times over that I have a strong chance of going directly to hangover when I drink, the fun effects completely skipped over, often enough and badly enough to develop Pavlovian aversion. If my body allowed me the loop of feeling good or normal as long as I'm topped up, I think I would always be in danger.

I did a lot of the popular/common drugs, among a couple of others, throughout high school and only tried alcohol in my early 20's. As soon as the effects started to settle in, I immediately came to the conclusion that it was the most dangerous drug I had put in my body by a decent margin. It's still genuinely somewhat surprising that it's legal at all, and I would be in favor of prohibition (obviously with not criminalizing users) if it wasn't a futile endeavour given how entrenched it is in the majority of cultures. If relatively safer drugs like cannabis were legal instead, I seriously doubt people would resort to alcohol so much to alleviate emotional pain. I've seen it destroy a lot of people in my life because it was the only legal emotional crutch they could afford because mental healthcare in this shithole is abysmal at best.

Have lost family members to the stuff. It's horrible. I'm sorry for your loss.

I need to quit drinking but it's very habit forming and I frequently find myself just being like. where's my drink? I'm playing games at my desk, where's my sip of ambrosia? I'm taking a shower when I get home from work, where's my shower beer? like everything I do when I'm drinking gets associated with it and then it feels like it's missing. And part of my drinking is self medicating for insomnia so it's especially hard when it's like "well fuck I have work tomorrow I wanna make sure I fall asleep" but the thing is I always have fucking work tomorrow.
it would help if weed still like, got me stoned, but it really doesn't hit me like it used to, like I literally physically cannot smoke enough fast enough unless I'm taking edibles. And no, a tolerance break isn't a solution because then I have literal weeks to months of just fucking torment
- my main addiction is weed. I wanted to stop smoking, so i just stopped buying flower/vape cartridges and it turns out if i don't have it, i don't miss it. But alcohol is def more physically addicting. Weed for me was just the ritual of "guess i better smoke 4 times a day." Working from home made it much worse.
  
  And yet weed is banned and alcohol isnt
- tbh I stopped drinking recently and I found i got a lot of mileage out of replacing it with yummy things that helped trick my reptile brain
  the monkey clapping cymbals in my head thinks that a non alcoholic beer is a beer, and it thinks a nice soda water w/ bitters is a cocktail
  I take some drug store sleepy meds before bed since I had similar feelings you do re: insomnia / 'i need to drink to sleep'
  I find the combination of tasty fake alcoholic treats + things that accomplish what my body is concerned about creates enough of a placebo for me personally.
- not that you wouldn't still hit a limit but you could do dabs instead of smoking bud.
  
  yeah but then I'd need to buy all kinds of dab shit and idk if my weed dude is a dab dude, I just know he's a weed dude and can probably get coke lmao
  realistically what I need to do is start growing weed and processing it into tinctures since then I can concentrate it myself but then I'd need to buy like a tent and filters and shit and like learn how to set all that shit up because I live in an apartment and I'm poor and lazy
  i grew a couple plants so I know I can do it but unfortunately I did not buy feminized seeds so, while beautiful, they were useless
- I’m by no means sober, but when I don’t want to drink but still want the feeling of having a tasty drink with less candy sweetness than American soda, I have found a few good options. Italian bitter sodas like Crodino, Sanbitter and Chinotto. And pathfinder: hemp and root. They have the complexity of a good cocktail without the alcohol. Expensive though.
- Same. Also having a lower tolerance would make smoking weed on my smoke breaks at work less viable

my dad's been an alcoholic most of his life. he's in his early 60s but walks worse than his parents did when they were in their 80s and has a good deal of health problems :/
he was forced to go to rehab a year ago and has been sober ever since. i'm proud for him but wish it could've happened in my childhood instead of right after i go to college. we have a better relationship now at least, spending more time with him now than i did in late high school
there's defo still some permanent mental effects but it seems like going sober's even made his temper a lot better, he's even kinda sharper and a lot less reactionary
- Very similar except mine never actually quit.
  CW venting and gross medical stuff ::: spoiler spoiler I'm convinced he has Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and he's had cognitive evaluation that placed him as like, pre-dementia but he lies his ass off about the severity of his drinking to doctors and has gotten even more stubborn and shitty as his faculties have declined and doesn't want to try anything or get better.
  Super heavy alcoholics reach a point where they have severe enough digestive issues that they're getting little to no nutrition from what they eat at the same time that they're drinking a full caloric daily value of booze, so they never have an appetite at the same time their body is malfunctioning and eating its own fat/muscle/bone trying to get a bare minimum of vitamins and minerals necessary to function. When the liver gets overwhelmed, the skin tries to compensate and shed toxins getting greasy and sweaty, then the skin can't keep up and starts getting psoriatic sheds and cracks that bleed and scab.
  It's fucking horrifying to see and something I'd beg anyone struggling with alcohol to do everything in their power to avoid. I can't speak for everyone, but from what I've seen, there's a point of severe alcoholism that once someone passes, they lose the ability to get themselves out of it and would need a medically supervised gradual detox and rehab. :::

wife has been sober now for over 10 months after 20+ years of hard alcoholism. was hard watching her slowly kill herself and nothing you can do about it. you cant fix an addict just support them when they decide to fix themselves
i know that feel, i drink occasionally but ill never touch another drop if that what she needs to stay strong

Alcohol is dangerous, I limit myself to birthday and the 3 winter holidays since I've seen what it does to family, but totally cutting it off makes what little social life there is odd, especially here during the holiday. Seems the only thing reported in your typical rural paper is yet another death of despair or yet another drunk driver induced fatal accident.
My maternal uncle was a heavy drinker, ended up with an ulcer and drank himself to death with the combination. One of my many cousins was training to be an electrician and had a huge alcohol problem, he ended up falling off the roof he was working on during his apprenticeship, he lived, but he obviously lost his apprenticeship but broke his ankle and its been totally fubar since. He does retail now and blows his small paychecks almost entirely on booze, he long lost his house and lives with my uncle. He's only a little older than me and already showing signs of Korsakoff's.

Alcohol truly is the worst. I once saw it referred to as insidious and that's always stuck with me. It is a creeping poison that winds its way around your heart and strangles you to death. It's a fucking nightmare substance. And you can get it at any grocery store or gas station.

Very sorry for your loss, comrade. Alcohol is fucking horrible. Very few drugs come even close to how awful alcohol is.
I have a real nasty relationship with alcohol too, always had. I'm one of these people who don't drink often, but when I do, I go all in and do stupid shit. There's a whole bunch of alcoholics in my family, on my mother's side. Last time I drank was around August last year. I drank half a bottle of very strong liquor all by myself, much to the pleasure of my buddies who found it very funny.
They didn't know that I was on a pretty fucking dark place that day, and had no intention of drinking until they goaded me into doing so. It was my bad decision, so I don't blame them, but still it shows how alcohol can be very pernicious in that it's pretty much a requirement in most social occasions.
I woke up the next day half naked in my bed with zero memories, no idea how I got home, and my clothes were piled up next to my bed and covered in vomit. It was the second worst hangover in my entire life and I decided that fuck it, I'm not going to drink anymore, and yeah, I'm still keeping that promise!

shit

I'm sorry that you lost a compatriot.
"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." -- Samuel Johnson
Coming from a drug addict like me let me tell you that the truth is in Dr Johnson's aphorism.

I went to a family event this weekend. I was offered a shot. I was ridiculed by several people. Alcohol almost killed me and I was in a coma for the entire summer of '21. They all knew this. It's sad how socially acceptable alcohol is. I didn't have the shot.
- good for you, your family has an amazing lack of empathy
  
  I knew what I was in for before going. I didn't expect much. I think the two months in the coma detoxed me pretty well. Leading up to that, I had gotten to the stage in my addiction where I wished my body didn't need booze anymore, or I was dead. I just feel bad for people going to where I was headed.

I'm sorry for your loss, comrade. I lost my oldest friend to a death of despair stemming from alcoholism and everything about the decline, death, and then loss is just truly awful.

Me, an addict: I don't want a tasty drink, I want to be drunk

yep, alcohol is def one of the worst drugs out there

I'm very sorry for your loss. Alcoholism is a terrible disease. I'm hopeful that I'm seeing more ppl drinking less and seeking mental health care. It's a monkey that's been riding the back of so many families for generations.

Yeah, I think being drunk is very overrated. I've watched a friend of mine slowly gain the exact same unhealthy relationship to alcohol as their parents, and it's made me realize just how bad it is to constantly use alcohol as a social lubricant. Also, the more you drink the more alcohol tolerance you gain. Eventually you end up needing to drink 60% vodka just to feel something. I really don't want to go down that path
- I've drank 80% vodka raw after a weeklong binge, wouldn't recommend

- alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively
  This is so relative and variable, it's impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.
  Like, is alcohol "fine" compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don't know if "fine" is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn't mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn't doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.
  And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person's over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren't going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.
  Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn't mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at "fault" either. But it's a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person's health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.
- alcohol is really bad for your physical and mental health. i'd say about a year of my alcoholism was productively staving off depression and suicide, but then maybe 13 years of alcohol gradually erroding my brain and soul and body. its not bad as a temporary distraction from your troubles bit prolonged use will seriously compromise your ability to be healthy and sane in the future.

This is so sad. I'm sorry for your loss.

Agreed. I just hit a year sober. Still crave a drink regularly, but staying strong.

If I ever get power in a future socialist experiment I will make alcohol illegal or at the very very least heavily restricted

Drinking a solvent is not good
- Water is like the most common solvent on Earth lol
  
  Case in point, water's killed a bunch of people. Basically everyone that's drank water is dead now.

107 comments