The whole sleep rhythm thing; sorry, I've just read a handful of articles in the past few weeks talking about how alcohol disrupts our normal sleep cycles which prevents a lot of the brain's...I dunno, whatever hygiene it has to do when we sleep. And that is what the article is about.
I'm 33 and I've definitely lost interest in drinking. I'll do it on occasion at social things, but I usually partake in very limited amounts. (My girlfriend is actually a little sad that she's never had a chance to see me wasted.) It might just be that my body can't handle it anymore, but sometime over the last few years it just lost its appeal.
The thing is: alcohol is a very crude intoxicant, and we seem to have arbitrarily standardized on it as the Socially Acceptable Drug. I know this is obvious, but it really is stupid and it's worth reminding people how stupid it is.
I mean, take khat, for instance. Khat is a stimulant chewed by people in Yemen; it's their socially acceptable drug-of-choice. (It's so popular in Yemen that its cultivation consumes a significant portion of the country's agricultural resources.) But here? It's a controlled substance. Why? I don't know. Our drug laws are just crazy stupid.
I feel like we could do so much better in terms of recreational substances. People are finally getting smart about cannabis, but there are still so many possibilities we're not exploring. The fact that we're stuck with alcohol is ridiculous. Hell, even opioids are less harmful to the body than alcohol is (if taken at a steady, stable dose, which I guess is the hard part).
We should definitely be spending most of our scientific brainpower on curing diseases, but I feel like we could spare a few brilliant minds to work on better intoxicants. The masses deserve a safer opiate.
Khat is a good deal stupider as drug-of-choice in Yemen than alcohol would be. It's a crop that takes up tons of the scarce arable land and even more scarce water in a very poor country in which 17% of income is spent on khat.
More stupid? Alcohol kills 16,000 people in car crashes alone. 88,000 alcohol related deaths a year making it the third most popular cause of preventable death.
Then there’s it’s relationship with sexual assault and date rape as well.
It's not that alcohol is good, it's that it'd be better than khat for Yemen.
For example: Yemen has 35 cars per 1000 people to the US's 797. Yemen would have to leapfrog through several stages of development for drunken driving to become a blip on their public health radar.
