As a Brit who was socialised to binge-drink at least once a week throughout my young adult life, with a default sober state being characterised by a reserved, inhibited nature, I have grappled with this recently.

This year, as per some previous years, I partook in "Dry January" — although this year I extended it to "Dry Q1" and then slightly longer. I enjoyed some of the sober benefits (no hangover, challenging myself to do self-work to function well in hectic social situations), but missed the joy inherent in feeling the altered state of disinhibition and mental & physical relaxation from the buzz of alcohol.

Indeed, I attended a networking event in May and felt I was lacking the edge to bond well with people I viewed as prospective employers/colleagues. I made the conscious decision to have a vodka redbull and the effect was immediate — my social anxiety dissolved away, and I was cracking jokes, driving conversation, and getting widespread approval.

It validated my theory that the self-work to reach that state of mind in a sober state was too hard, if not impossible, and I should embrace using alcohol in various social situations. I drank on a handful more occasions and had a good time.

However — and I'm going to write about this more in a full post — I had a breakthrough later on in the year. I think partly as a result of my experimentation with sobriety, plus very intentional breaking of the sobriety, I've built a mental model that allows me to access the same confidence, comedic expression, and disinhibition I cherished as a result of alcohol, purely through mental instantiation.

Having made this breakthrough I feel like I may never go back to drinking, since both my baseline and upper-bound mental states have raised. I don't this is a unique phenomenon — I have seen alcoholics that went sober describing a similar thing where after an initial dip — in their "sober adjusting period" — after a while "everything raises".

All this is to say that your defence of alcohol in my view is the defence of some local maxima, but I strongly believe there is a much greater stable state on the other side of sobriety that is broadly accessible.

I think there is one more positive effect of alcohol: creating trust between the drinkers.

Alcohol is like a mild truth serum; it makes it more difficult to create complicated lies, and more likely to tell the truth regardless of the consequences; plus it gives social permission to others to ask awkward questions.

If you come from a drinking culture, then people who refuse to drink with you are obviously the people who want to keep secrets from you, so it makes sense to treat it as a red flag.

Thinking slightly outside the box here... seems that most of the benefits you identify could also be satisfied by a drug (e.g. valium) that has similar effects without being so freaking toxic (though I understand valium is similarly addictive, alas). Maybe we need to bring back recreational valium. Casual pop-culture reading suggests to me that back in the 70s-80s, valium & quaaludes & the like were quite the thing in party circles.

I'm also generally pro-alcohol-in-moderation, but I seem to recall studies showing that most of alcohol's social effects are psychosomatic and can be achieved by simply tricking someone into believing they are consuming alcohol. I've experienced this myself during times I couldn't drink but was hanging out with drinkers and having mocktails or NA beer and could feel myself having permission to behave in ways that are allowed when drunk even though I was having no alcohol myself.

Now of course maybe these studies didn't survive the replication crisis, I'm not sure, but I think there is something to be said for alcohol's positive effects being more socially programmed than physiologically created.

In my opinion, there are far more effective psychotropic alternatives that have less negatives and even more pronounced anxiolytic and pro-social effects.^[1] 

My personal experiences with these alternatives have led me to agree that there are very real societal benefits from cultural acceptance and norms regarding substance usage and that humans have had a relationship with psychotropic compounds for a very, very long time. I think that we have not been evaluating societal norms dictating which substances we can engage with. Alcohol, Tobacco (Nicotine), and Caffeine have maintained the largest acceptance area within the "Substance Use Overton Window [SU-OW]"^[2] for hundreds if not thousands of years. This dominance within our cultural norms have made it difficult to adopt potentially better alternatives due to them residing outside the SU-OW. 

Some options that I have hundreds of experiences with that have all been better or more effective than alcohol: 

- Gabapentin
- Lyrica
- Phenibut/F-Phenibut
- L-Theanine
- GHB/BDO
- Kava
- Kratom
- Tianeptine

Some of the above options are also GABAergics, like alcohol, which avoid the toxic effects of alcohol. Not all of them are created equally and they each have their own matrices of considerations/dangers but I find them all to be better than alcohol. 

I think there are many good reasons for us to evaluate our relationship with Alcohol but I am unique in that I am in favor of ethical, intelligent, moderate substance use where others combine the health impact of alcohol with a broader philosophical decision of engaging with substances at all. There are REAL health impacts of alcohol but my values lead me to think we should be evaluating other replacement candidates rather than promoting full sobriety. 

1. ^{^}

   I must caveat this by saying that concept of critical, moderate, intelligent substance usage is a very complicated idea with real consequences to consider. It's not an activity that everyone can or should engage in, but I've been able to manage moderated substance usage for 15 years now and I have experimented with 100+ Research Chemicals, Nootropics, Peptides, Supplements and other chemical compounds with psychotropic effects. 

2. ^{^}

   I've just made this up but I may need to write a post about how there is a specific Overton Window regarding accepted substance abuse with unique features and dynamics affecting it. 

the risk of debilitating addiction

I worry the risk of occasional mild discomfort as a result of a very resistible slight addiction isn't being priced in. To the extent that it's permanent, even rare consumption would create the problem. Many people assume a sufficient buffer of willpower and habit to keep consumption at sane levels, but disregard the total cost in the long term of having to manage this constraint, compared to the alternative where even the slight addiction is completely absent.

I don't think alcohol as "social lubricant" is unknown in rationalist circles, but let's assume it was.  Does that new information update the utility of alcohol enough to outweigh the costs?  Statistics on this are still very influenced by COVID, but I've tried to pull data from 2019 where I could find it easily.  This is not exhaustive.

Per NIH^[1]:

• The Alcohol-Related Disease Impact application estimates that each year there are more than 178,000 deaths (approximately 120,000 male deaths and 59,000 female deaths) attributable to excessive alcohol use
• According to 2021 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 21.0% of suicide decedents have blood alcohol concentrations of 0.1% or more

Per NHTSA^[2]:

• In 2019, alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for 10,142 deaths (or 28% of overall driving fatalities)

1. ^{^}

   https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-topics-z/alcohol-facts-and-statistics/alcohol-related-emergencies-and-deaths-united-states

2. ^{^}

   https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/Publication/813120