[sebrof]

I use marijuana to help me sleep, I have friend who uses it to alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s. As for slow and stupid, I play a much better game of chess UTI. As for driving, people UTI are far less prone to road rage. Pot and alcohol are as different as east and west.

The drunk driver will blow right through the stop sign.
The stoned driver will sit there and wait for it to turn green.   

[WGH]

The stoned driver will sit there and wait for it to turn green.

Then yellow, then red, then green, then yellow, then red, then green. But no problem, drivers texting do the same thing.

[charmerci]

My grandma lived to 95. She drank, smoked cigarettes, and dipped snuff most of her life.

Exceptions don't prove a rule.


The thing about studies to remember - doing stuff increases your chances of - you are far more likely, it does NOT mean you will. Some people just have hardy genes.

[OzarkTom]

Exceptions don't prove a rule.


The thing about studies to remember - doing stuff increases your chances of - you are far more likely, it does NOT mean you will. Some people just have hardy genes.

Agree, that is why I don't.

Then there was the woman that lived to 122 1/2 years and did all the bad habits.

http://allthatsinteresting.com/jeanne-calment

[charmerci]

Figured as much based on the way you said it. I was just sayin'...

[Jon L]

Drinking just a few sips of red wine and I can tell I’m getting stuffed up and if I continue I get a sinus headache.   

Wine, especially red, contains a lot of histamines and also promotes histamine release.

[gregcss]

Pass on the beer. Gimmie a 48oz big gulp soda.

Just kidding folks. I haven't had soda in a number of years. Beer on the other hand....

[Johnny2Bad]

Alcohol is the only substance that is generally non-lethal (1) and eats Arterial Cholesterol.

*All drugs* harm the body. There are no exceptions; some just harm the body in smaller incremental doses than others. Some are so good at it that only a few users of the drug will die from it ... they die from some other natural cause. That's pretty good parasitic dose control, folks. (2)

It is neither safer nor in many cases a better treatment to insist on one drug (anti-cholesteral field of pharmacology) when another (alcohol) may do the job at a lower risk to the patient.

With regard to operating machinery, again, any drug has the potential to cause failure of cognitive and muscular response. Responsible treatment of any ailment requires responsible use of the medicine. Limits should be determined slowly and responsibly (and that is where 0.05% bac comes from). No should it be assumed that every patient will react differently to the same dose; experience shows we should expect the opposite.

In any case, I don't see a problem with having a drink. Ironically my health issues are such that I don't want to anymore, but it's not because I can't or shouldn't (according to my Dr). In fact the drink-a-day thing is recommended for me. I just don't feel the need and can barely finish a single beer when I do imbibe.

(1) "Generally non-lethal" in the sense that the lethal dose is accompanied by enough musculature and cognitive degradation that it is self limiting; more than half who experience alcohol poisoning survive, and those that don't often didn't administer the fatal level alcohol themselves or alone with no other medication.

(2) We live in a society that counts everything countable, and some things that aren't, we count anyway. So, medicine and the law have this conflicting duality ... we are all mortal, yet we never "just die" but instead we must attribute some disease to the passing. The 96 year old man didn't "just die", he died of complications from his cigarette habit (aka heart failure). (3) You could live to 135, and some coroner or doctor will have to give a cause of death that doesn't include "he was too old". Funding for pet ailment research *relies entirely* on these conclusions. There is no charity to fight the curse of people who don't make it to 96 from 95, but if his ticker was a little weak, well, now we have a "preventable death from heart disease" to throw into the statistical and fund-raising data buckets.

(3) This is similar to the "Aircraft Pilot's Dilemma". When an agency investigates an aircraft incident ... doesn't have to be a crash, necessarily ... and they can't find an obvious scapegoat ("the flight attendant accidentally deployed the emergency escape slide" which means the airplane cannot take off and is grounded) and there is no provable mechanical failure, then it's "Pilot Error", regardless of what, exactly, the Pilot did, up to and including saving everyone's life. Did you know that if they cannot find any cause for an aircraft crash, more than once the cause was then determined to be "Pilot Error" and the error is described as "taking off from the runway and therefore initiating a flight". AKA "getting out of bed". They love to drag that one out when the skies across the entire planet Earth are not clear blue without clouds and the air temps are not 72F everywhere for a hundred miles in any direction of the flight path.

How would most people feel if they lost their job because they got out of bed?

[sebrof]

Exceptions don't prove a rule.


The thing about studies to remember - doing stuff increases your chances of - you are far more likely, it does NOT mean you will. Some people just have hardy genes.

This is just one study where they asked people about their habits and drew conclusions from those answers. In this case people who SAID they drank X amount were found to be more likely to have certain health issues.
These types of studies are among the least reliable because people often don't answer honestly. 

Also, maybe people who drink are more or less likely to smoke, are more or less likely to exercise, are more or less likely to be poor, etc. IOW it's not the alcohol, it's the person who drinks the alcohol.

The real thing to remember is the media will jump on any "news" it can find to gain readership, and many (most?) don't care at all about what effect their story has on people.
Coffee causes cancer!! News at 11.

[Johnny2Bad]

This is just one study where they asked people about their habits and drew conclusions from those answers. In this case people who SAID they drank X amount were found to be more likely to have certain health issues.
These types of studies are among the least reliable because people often don't answer honestly. 

Also, maybe people who drink are more or less likely to smoke, are more or less likely to exercise, are more or less likely to be poor, etc. IOW it's not the alcohol, it's the person who drinks the alcohol.

The real thing to remember is the media will jump on any "news" it can find to gain readership, and many (most?) don't care at all about what effect their story has on people.
Coffee causes cancer!! News at 11.

^^ this

It's the media's *job* to get viewers for the advertisers who pay the wages, and sensational reporting works, so you are naive to assume it won't be used. (1) It is *not* the media's job to tell the truth; (and it never has been), it's the viewer's job to discern the truth from all the best information she has at her disposal.

*NO STUDY* is valid until it is fully and satisfactorily peer reviewed, which takes about a decade or so, usually. So, in essence what we're being told is not "story at 11" but "story in 11 YEARS". And the *majority* of published papers in peer-reviewed journals cannot be repeated, which means the conclusions of the first study were, more than half the time, to put it simply, TOTALLY F*N WRONG.

(1) A study released recently, maybe friday (I just saw the first news report on it) says that an even better emotion to generate viewer / listener / reader reaction, and therefore "eyes" as they say in the media advertising business, than fear, which is the basic tool of most TV ads, and the only tool some industries can use (are you going to explain to me the advantages and disadvantages of a life insurance policy in 30 seconds? I don't think so). And that is one uncovered by recent trends in Social Media, and the emotion is anger. Now, someone explain to me how *that* is going to reduce sensationalism? And yes, I know this is probably the most hypocritical paragraph I've ever written. I guess we'll know in 10 years if it's true or I've been schooled.