"If P Then Q" does not imply "If Not P Then Not Q"

Just because bad politics can drive you to drink does not mean that you can fix politics by stopping the drinking.
Over 73 percent of Democrats would give up alcohol for the rest of their life if it meant President Trump would be impeached tomorrow, according to a survey released on Thursday by a drug and alcohol rehabilitation group.

Only 17 percent of Republicans would give up alcohol for Trump’s impeachment. The poll also found that nearly 31 percent of Republicans would give up drinking if it meant the media stopped writing negative things about President Trump.
Sorry. You can give up drinking if you want, and it might improve your health outcomes -- or it might not. But it's not going to do anything to change your political environment.

UPDATE: By the way, if you're trying to understand health outcomes from drinking, this article is quite helpful.
So at what level does alcohol consumption become equally as dangerous as alcohol abstinence? It appears that the cut off point is somewhere between 20 and 40 US standard drinks per week. We will split the difference and say that it probably lies at around 30 US standard drinks (420 grams of ethanol) per week, a far cry from the puritanical US government limits of 7 for women and 14 for men. Current government limits may have far more to do with the politics of the addiction treatment lobby than any relation to scientific evidence.
That recommendation happens to line up with an earlier study out of Australia, which occasioned a poem.

4 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Plus, all of those polled have no idea whether they can do what they say. If they aren't lying, they are at minimum not insightful. The Cabernet sauvignon is a necessary accoutrement for many.

Anonymous said...

And yet some alcohol overusers have been dropping the habit, following Trump's example. Oh, my.

Seriously, ethyl alcohol is the least poisonous of the organic solvents, and 2% ethanol added to damn near any unstable mixture of organic/inorganic materials will will stabilize it against normal, weather-related temperature swings.

What that means to people is that two glasses of wine or a couple of beers at a meal will facilitate the absorbance of all kinds of plant and animal based nutrients.

Drinking is probably meant to be done with meals, but all of the "research" I see focuses on the amount of alcohol, instead of the timing. Big mistake.

Valerie

E Hines said...

I read the poll question/answer pairs not as "would your doing this stop that," but as the respondents saying what they would be willing to pay in order to get the service offered.

Eric Hines

Grim said...

Drinking is probably meant to be done with meals, but all of the "research" I see focuses on the amount of alcohol, instead of the timing. Big mistake.

I don't know about that, but I have a similar concern. The very first lesson you learn about treating poisoning in Boy Scout First Aid is to dilute the poison. Yet we constantly hear that the amount of alcohol is to be considered independently of dilution: 1.5 ounces of whiskey = 8 ounces of wine = 12 ounces of beer. But the whiskey is an order of magnitude more purely alcohol than the beer (Jack Daniels is ~40%; Guinness is ~4%).

I strongly suspect that beer drinking is just much less damaging than wine or (especially) whiskey drinking for this reason. But I've seen no evidence even examining the question. It may well be that a six pack a day is mostly dangerous for the carbs it entails, whereas six shots of vodka has real toxic problems (but zero calories!).