Why I Abstain from Drugs and Alcohol

I consider myself lucky to have never enjoyed drinking alcohol. Whenever I drink, I enjoy the taste, but I start to feel a vague revulsion. I feel as if alcohol is making me a worse version of myself, and I get the intuition it’s hurting me in some way. In the past I’ve enjoyed marijuana occasionally, but mostly haven’t made it a part of my life.

Now I think there is a social benefit to voluntarily abstaining from drugs and alcohol. I like Tyler Cowen’s perspective on the issue:

It worries me when people focus on “guns” and do not accord an equivalent or indeed greater status to “alcohol” as a social problem. Many of those people drink lots of alcohol, and would not hesitate to do so in front of their children, although they might regard owning an AK-47, or showing a pistol to the kids, as repugnant. I believe they are a mix of hypocritical and unaware, even though many of these same individuals have very high IQs and are well schooled in the social sciences. Perhaps they do not want to see the parallels.

I don’t anticipate drugs and alcohol will disappear, of course, but I want to help make it more socially acceptable and even laudable to completely abstain.

Setting aside the personal costs to one’s health, the following issues are made much worse by alcohol: gun deaths, abuse of women, crime full stop, deaths full stop.

“But I drink safely.” I’m sure you do, and many people use firearms safely. But I don’t personally use firearms, I don’t endorse casual use of firearms, and I try not to glorify firearms, for the same reason: they are dangerous (yes, the distribution of danger is not anywhere close to uniform), and their casual use embodies a callousness.

For clarification about related issues: I do support experimenting with psychopharmacology with your doctor, for all the imperfections of current psych drugs. I view that as a fundamentally different issue, but I grant that there is a gray area there. I also believe that locking drug users away in prisons is a disaster and I would never support treating alcohol that way. And I do use caffeine.

I also understand that there is a class issue here: drugs and alcohol, in the short-term, may substitute for expensive things like therapy and psychopharmacology, and a lot of drug abuse comes from undiagnosed mental illness, which I don’t at all want to stigmatize.

Thanks for reading!