Deaths from alcohol at record-high in England
 

Well when we have a culture that actively encourages drinking yourself to death, then the cause of death from drinking too much of it was always going to increase.

There's nothing wrong with casually drinking Alcohol imo, but it's not "boring" if you don't want to drink 6 pints of Beer every night.

Many countries simply laugh at our excessive drinking
..

Because tbf we do take our drinking culture to an extreme.

And yet some people swear cannabis is the problem. It is well.

I feel quite shamed by the behaviour of Brits abroad on the pi55. It seems to be some kind of badge of honour, get as drunk as you can as fast as you can. We certainly do have a strange and dangerous relationship with alcohol.

Yeah the young guys get drunk and cause bedlam whilst the drunken , young women are seen as the ‘easiest’ in the world to bed .

Well we now have a test for those driving under the influence of cannabis aswell as drink driving

Both can be abused by the person taking it

And the the idea of your friendly drug dealer is bollox

I'm always worried by the sight of young women staggering around drunk, not knowing where they are or what they're doing. They make themselves so vulnerable.

Best thing I ever did was quite drinking at 32. TEN years ago.

I've saved thousands of pounds and lost 10 stone in weight. I feel younger than I did.

I still feel like when I was 26. :p

It's very sad what alcohol does to people. There was a guy who lived near us. Just 49 years old and never considered himself an alcoholic. But his belly started to swell, he went to the docs and was told he had a month to live. Cirrhosis of the liver.

Docs were right. He died a month later. :(

Thank God I will wake up every day of the festive season sober . :D

Not surprising post covid and cost of living crisis where people have needed an outlet for misery. Not that alcohol is the solution for that of course

Most of the damage here is done by people sat at home drinking strong, cheap booze rather than people enjoying a pint in a pub

For what that's worth, I've never really heard of the UK being part of that culture. We know about the prevalence of pubs and how much drink is relished (as a pass time), but not binge drinking per say... it's more often connected to Irish culture more than anything because of St Pattys

Binge drinking is very common with parts of Mexican culture though, so it's certainly a thing culturally. We have an alcoholic (prone) family member who travels well and could make a nice living here, but then to move this direction, because of the proximity to alcohol we couldn't recommend it because they'd almost certainly be a part of that with their job (they work in a luxury brand dealership)... :spin: It's mostly for the young though... there are older people who obviously cling to that in their spare time, but it seems less and less the more well-employed they are. So it's not like there aren't huge swaths of that culture that work very hard and don't have time to sit around be drunk because they have to get in the morning. So it's just in balance...

As for death, unfortunately, most of our alcoholic deaths are going to be connected to vehicles and mixing with Fentanyl. Cars are absolutely required here. There's Uber, obviously, but it's not like there aren't people who get brazen and in the car all the time and drive despite whatever they have taken or have had to drink... in TX, it used to be more normalized and some of that stigma still hasn't gone away from the 80s... so I'd say that's our alcoholic curse in the South, is there are still remnants of a relaxed mentality with driving vehicles while impaired like it's just a basic thing we laugh about... many of us don't, thankfully.

Driving under the influence is never a good idea, yet that has nothing to do with whether any-one substance should be legal or illegal. It’s just an obvious bad idea. That goes for certain medications that at various times (or even all the time, like certain benzodiazepines) might impair your ability to drive via sedation. So I’ve never understood why people bring that up as justification to keep cannabis illegal. But this thread is about alcohol.

thankfully not as dangerous as the classic gateway drug cannabis

the real threat to children

:skull:

Your baiting’s hilariously pathetic at this point.

Not St Patty's Day! St Patrick's Day or Paddy's Day.

Thanks. I wasn't sure :laugh: I have never seen it spelled shortform

Sorry, what?

Patrick is never shortened to Patty. The Irish for Patrick is Padraig so Patrick and Padraig are shortened to Paddy

Asking hubby he has seen it spelled as Patty usually but it's probably because we only use Pat for Patrick for short. A lot of weird things happen to names here when they get Americanized. Our last name is German-based but spelled differently. Even the pronounciation is Americanized. Same with my maiden name which is Irish.

TBF my wife's Irish grandad was Patrick and was always "Pat" or "Patsy".

Also interestingly, thinking about it, I guess in a US accent... "Patty" would pretty much be pronounced "Paddy" so I can see why there's confusion over the spelling.

Yeah that's probably why, but at least now I know.

It's definitely something that really annoys Irish people when Americans call it St Patty's day. Yeah Patrick is sometimes Pat for short never Patty though and never St Pat's Day

Sorry but just No, that's all wrong

And yet we all can seem to spell alcohol correctly each time despite our differing nationalities and dialects...

Even changing the spelling of last names in America still doesn't fix the pronounciation problem. My last name is spelled differently than the original German, sure, but then the pronounciation is even different than how it is spelled out in both US English and German... I remember someone saying English is harder to learn because so much of our spelling and pronounciation often needs to be memorized and doesn't follow a convention... and that's certainly true for American English, especially names.

OK but we're talking about the Irish holiday St. Patrick's Day, there's really no confusion. St Patty's Day is very very annoying to any Irish person.

English lightweights.

Ok. I am not disagreeing with any of that.

You keep telling yourself that. In the meantime I’ll wait for you to pull out 1 statistic listing even a single direct death from cannabis or comparable rates of knife-crime, domestic abuse and saturation in prisons fuelled weed vs. alcohol. Everything from you until then is just white noise. Alcohol is a far, far more dangerous and destructive drug than cannabis could ever be on most solid counts. It might not suit you to admit it but there’s no way around that fundamental truth if we put bias and hypocritical anti-drugs propaganda aside.

Sorry that sounded a bit snappy

Not all countries collect stats in the same way. I would have thought the reporting of covid cases around the world would have educated everyone on how false statistics are

It's not meant to be. I am not trying to be argumentative, which it started to seem to be coming across that way, so I conceded to your main point. But I think even an explanation would've sounded that way so kept it simple. It doesn't come across in text so I apologize if it sounded rude.

No I meant I sounded snappy and was saying sorry [emoji23]

I'm still convinced the confusion is in pronunciation, and that when Americans say "St Pattys" it will sound identical to them saying "Paddy", and they just assume it's spelled "Patty" :joker:.

Nah I don't think so, they're shortening Patrick to Patty, Paddy's Day is from Là 'le Padraig

My issue isn’t so much with alcohol as it is hypocrisy but I guess most of us will be having a drink or two tonight, still (I may, I may not). If there’s one day in the year that can compete with St Paddy’s Day in terms of consumption besides Christmas, it’s tonight, for better or worse. I … meh. I only judge hypocrisy. Getting leathered tonight is a choice.

I'm teetotal, don't like the taste or smell of alcohol.
But I do drink the non alcoholic versions.

And yet weed Is the substance that's illegal, I know which one I feel safer using, Moderation is everything though

Absolutely.

Anyone still hypocritically biased against psychedelics, ketamine and cannabis compared to alcohol? Let’s tap in: https://youtu.be/c-EUR4E33G4?si=qROWXy9cmrzrF4Sr | https://youtu.be/gPpOrZ11SoI?si=KToyiq1UpbnEO7_4 | https://youtu.be/hgO_6Oni-RA?si=zKfr9sNyF9j341mv | https://www.youtube.com/live/k6kmkGf...pTQWu0sP3IGCIs | https://youtu.be/fwI63rMfKNs?si=eVDTTQ5IpxT6oXqk | https://youtu.be/TknaM6okZM8?si=ypPVp8wLTP3rszbI | https://youtu.be/cPvr4j3rwac?si=iYkL_rWIPucPOO_e

Tip of the iceberg. The world’s waking up. The British Isles still has a tendency to a backwards, hypocritically overly alcohol-friendly lay understanding of drugs at that baseline but it won’t be forever. It’s never been sustainable.

Enjoy

Play LOUD !

Listen to the beautiful bridge late in the song