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 $$$$$
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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.
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.
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 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
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
Feminized seeds aren’t worth it and IMO they’re just a trick from unethical breeders
to make it so you can’t make your own seeds. If you have the extra space you’re better off buying regular seeds and throwing the male plants away (or extracting their pollen, or making tea from their leaves). One European seedbank I just checked has 10 regular seeds Afghan Kush for 25€ excl. shipping, so it’s comparatively cheap. Male/Female (of course speaking strictly of plants here) ratio should be about 50:50. This has the added benefit that you’re then capable of producing more seeds almost for free by manually pollinating some branches of the female plants. Definitely look into specialized weed grower online forums for guides and tips. Be wary of advice from seed sellers, they have their own 
interests to push feminized seeds and autoflowering seeds.dawg I do not have time or space to grow a bunch of plants that might be useless
Point taken, I just like talking about growing weed.
you can get an astonishing amount of shit just online on grey market or totally legal sites, but yeah, I get not really wanting to get into dabs.
mushrooms are so much easier to grow :(
Same. Also having a lower tolerance would make smoking weed on my smoke breaks at work less viable
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.
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.
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.
It’s the worst drug. And people look at you like you’ve lost your mind if you say you don’t partake
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”
me_irl
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.
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 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
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.
I’ve heard Gen Z doesn’t like to drink because they’ve grown up being filmed all their lives and don’t want to be caught on camera being an idiot
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.
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.
Similar story for me. It wasn’t always a migraine trigger, but then one day it was always a migraine trigger.
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.
Unfair to compare injection sites which are focused on harm reduction with bars which are financially incentivized to increase the consumption of alcohol.
That’s a good point. Key difference
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This is so sad. I’m sorry for your loss.
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.
all good, i didnt feel attacked, and you didnt make me any sadder than i already am.
Me, an addict: I don’t want a tasty drink, I want to be drunk
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 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.
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.
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
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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.
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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
oh wow my dad has severe psoriasis. he started taking meds that stopped it a couple years ago, but before that there were often skin flakes everywhere when i went to his house on weekends. never considered alcohol was the likely cause
his vision is terrible so he rarely drives at night anymore. has tinnitus and bad hearing. processing time and short-term memory is pretty bad but definintely improved since quitting (big part of that could just be his ADHD). he had bad muscle spams after climbing into the attic a couple weeks ago but thankfully has govt insurance and goes to doctors regularly. he goes for walks at night and takes meds, and his gait’s improved in the past months. my main concern’s his appetite is still very small and he regularly skips meals. but for the most part he’s really working on himself
all hope to your dad, it’s a disease i thought would be impossible for mine to break out of and i’m still genuinely surprised rehab did it. it took him i think 3 DUIs (at least in my lifetime, his ass got banned from canada 30 years ago lmao) and the ignition breathalyzer thing to quit. couldn’t even stop when he got in trouble drunk driving my brother and i when we were young kids, not sure why he wasn’t forced to detox earlier. being retired probably gave him the motivation to stick with it, he now goes to regular meetings and replaces beer with sugary ice tea
personally i force myself to only drink socially, and i’m often scared of drinking at all (usually have more than i planned). seeing how he ended up i think i have the self-control for at least that. weed dependency’s a bigger concern for me right now, i think i also likely inherited ADHD (and people with it have insanely high rates of drug/alc abuse), so getting tested for it soon and maybe treatment could help my impulse control
his vision is terrible so he rarely drives at night anymore. has tinnitus and bad hearing. processing time and short-term memory is pretty bad but definintely improved since quitting (big part of that could just be his ADHD).
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Yeah, that all tracks. One of the things besides his skin problems and worsening temperament that stood out as really concerning was the visual recognition stuff. He’d always worn glasses and sometimes wouldn’t wear them around the house and then have a hard time reading something from some distance, but at some point that turned into him opening the fridge/looking in the pantry/looking for kitchen implements in drawers and looking for something specific, not remembering where it is, also not being able to visually differentiate anything, and then almost immediately flipping into a rage, yelling expletives and blaming other people for shit he misplaced and couldn’t remember, or blaming inanimate objects for conspiring against him. He’s lived in the same house for like 25 years, and one time forgot where the light switch in the laundry room was, then acted like other people conspired to hide it somewhere while looking for it in the cabinets for some reason.
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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.
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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.
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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.
That’s how they get you hooked.
