Alcohol is the most harmful substance on Earth. Every year it kills more people than terrorism, wars, homicides and car accidents combined. It injures tens of millions in accidents, violence and crime; while keeping hundreds of millions trapped in disease.
If it didn’t exist already, inventing it today would be unthinkable. And yet, more than 2 billion people drink. Most of us can't imagine a barbecue without beer, a wedding without wine or a fancy soirée without champagne.
We have a drink at the weekend because it's the weekend. But also after work. When we are stressed and when we are relaxed.
Sad and happy. At home and outside. Alcohol is kind of a paradox.
Why do we cling so much to the thing that harms us the most? You After One Drnk Alcohol is a biological weapon that yeast produces during fermentation to wipe out its competition. In alcoholic drinks it’s mixed with water and flavored with everything from fruits to caramel.
With just one sip, sextillions of alcohol molecules flood your stomach and small intestine. From there they head to your liver – your primary detox center, and to other organs like the brain. But your liver can only process about one sip of beer every 5 minutes.
So unless you drink really slowly, it will become overwhelmed while an ever-growing swarm floods your brain. Here’s where the chaos begins. The legion of intruders fills your brain and starts messing with neurotransmitters and receptors.
Their sabotage is so complex that scientists aren’t fully sure yet about all their mechanisms. But we know that alcohol numbs your neurons, making them slower and disrupts their communication. This has several effects.
It sedates you, melting away tension and stress. It stuns your prefrontal cortex, your center for decision-making and self-control, making you more disinhibited and prone to say or do things that you normally wouldn’t. And it releases endorphins – “feel good” molecules deeply tied to human connection.
The chemicals that we produce when we laugh, sing or dance with others, and which help us turn fleeting moments into shared memories. So after a drink or three, the world doesn’t only feel lighter. It feels lighter with others.
The invisible walls of insecurity around us begin to soften and you find yourself becoming a little more… you. Less afraid to talk, laugh, sing or share joys and sorrows. Conversations flow easier, smiles last a little longer, and strangers can become friends or lovers more easily.
So for a while, it feels like the weight of being human isn’t yours to carry alone. Alcohol sits at a sweet spot of gentle relaxation, mild courage and friendly companionship that makes it the perfect social lubricant. One that comes with quite a few costs.
Your Body on Regular Drnking For billions, these rounds become more frequent over time. The occasional drink becomes a weekly habit, then a ritual every other day, catching up with friends or unwinding. And there's always this buddy who drinks way more and has a perfectly normal life.
But as the rounds add up over years, the damage builds up. The alcohol molecule can dissolve in water and fat, which allows it to invade almost every cell and tissue. And when your body breaks it down, it transforms into acetaldehyde – a chemical that is even more toxic than alcohol itself and that wreaks havoc on your tissues, cells and DNA.
In your brain, this shrinks your neurons and severs their connections, making it harder for different parts of the brain to communicate. As your brain withers, your memories fade, your thinking slows down and your risk of dementia increases. When and how you drink matters – the younger you are, the wider the damage; and the more you drink in one go, the worse you’ll make it.
The human brain isn’t fully wired until your mid 20s, so drinking before that age is like smashing wet cement before it has set. In 20-year-olds, blackout drinking episodes have been found to cause mental problems for up to a year – forgetting why you entered a room or having difficulty learning new things. Binge drinking in late adolescence is also one of the highest risk factors for early-onset dementia.
Then there is cancer. Just as smoking hits your lungs, alcohol causes 8 types of cancer – basically everywhere from mouth to bowel, plus breast cancer in women. Here risks start at an average consumption of less than 1 glass of wine per day.
Beyond that, risks increase. Worldwide, alcohol causes around 740,000 new cancer cases per year, leading to 400,000 deaths. Another victim is your liver.
Alcohol disrupts fat metabolism, causing fat to build up in your liver cells. But this often has no symptoms, so you may go on drinking as your liver slowly turns to fat, swells with inflammation and starts to fail. The final stage is cirrhosis – your liver is full of scars and barely functioning.
This might take over 10 years, but once it appears it's largely irreversible. Every year, 600,000 people die because they have a liver destroyed by alcohol. Drnking also weakens your heart, raises blood pressure and increases the risk of stroke and thrombosis – leading to another 500,000 deaths from cardiovascular diseases every year.
In terms of looks too, alcohol damages cells around your body, including your skin which looks older, sooner. And not only does alcohol contain a lot of calories itself, it also makes many people very hungry. Drnking is a huge source of weight gain and increases the risk of obesity, opening the door to a cascade of other health problems.
When scientists crunch these numbers, they see that health problems can start at about 1 beer a day, and that the chances of premature death start rising significantly at around 3 beers a day for men, and less than 2 for women. If this sounds like a lot to you, maybe look around. In the EU, the average man drinks the equivalent of almost 3 beers a day.
The average woman, almost 1. Similar figures apply to much of the world, especially the West. There is no other drug we consume that gets so close to the edge of harm.
It Isn’t Only Your Body Alcohol is unique for another reason: its unmatched ability to destroy others. Alcohol causes a staggering amount of accidents. The numbness and disinhibition of a few drinks can morph you into a clumsy critter eager to take really stupid risks – on a balcony, at sea, or on the road.
Every year, alcohol-fueled accidents kill 500,000 people; 300,000 of them in car accidents. But more than half of the people who died in those crashes didn't drink. They just died because someone else did.
Alcohol is also one of the major causes of violence, from fights at the pub to domestic abuse, other brutal assaults and murder. Figures differ by country, but essentially 50% of all violent crime and sexual assault is committed by drunk offenders. Each year, alcohol-fueled crime kills about 100,000 people.
That's a city like Pisa being massacred every year by a drunk mob. And then you have all the non-lethal victims. In England alone, 500,000 adults are injured every year in accidents caused by drunk people.
Another 800,000 get hurt in violent attacks by drunk offenders. Zoomed out to the rest of the drinking world, this means that, every year, dozens of millions are physically harmed by someone else's drinking. The most innocent bystanders are the 600,000 babies born every year with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, a devastating lifelong condition caused by drinking during pregnancy.
Alcohol is nothing short of a global catastrophe. The Final Toll – The Hijacking of 400 Million Lives When your drinking escalates to a point that it causes real harm to yourself or others, you’ve crossed the invisible line to alcoholism. An estimated 400 million people, 1 in 14 adults, are in this territory.
The line is very fuzzy and varies from person to person. But if you consistently drink 8 beers per week as a woman, 15 as a man, or 5 on the same day, you’ve either crossed the line or are dangerously walking towards it. Of those 400 million, more than half have fallen into an even deeper trap – dependence.
When alcohol has become something that you physically or psychologically need. In Europe and the Americas, 1 in 20 adults are caught in this web. The stereotype of alcoholism is one of extremes.
A homeless person clutching a bottle or an always-drunk father shouting at his kids. But it can be far more silent. A US study found that up to 50% of all alcoholics may fly under the radar.
They come in two main groups: unproblematic young adults, and middle-aged professionals with successful careers and families. As one of them you’ll show no antisocial behavior. You’ll fulfill your obligations.
You’ll probably have no diagnosed health conditions. But on average you’ll be having 4 beers a day and will get drunk every week. And neither you nor your family may notice.
No one questions a drink at dinner, after work, or at a party. But it is exactly that that makes alcohol so dangerous. No other drug is so widely accepted, casually consumed and easily ignored.
So OK – How did we come to this? A Pact With the Devil We made a pact with alcohol to help us solve one of the greatest challenges of being human. Human interaction is messy.
We long for closeness. But we are also anxious, awkward, and wary of each other. “Am I talking too much?
” “Do they actually like me? ” “What if I say something stupid? ” There are many ways to navigate this, alcohol is not “the” solution, but it is definitely one of them.
It is a real and effortless solution to the problem of connecting with others. Studies confirm what we have known for millennia. Modest quantities of alcohol help strangers bond.
And individuals who drink moderately and socially tend to have more friends, closer friendships, and higher levels of trust in others. So if we want to step away from alcohol, we need to be honest about what we gain from it. For millennia we’ve been giving it our health and years of our lives.
And in return, alcohol gave us confidence, connection, and celebration. But right now this is changing rapidly. Younger generations and especially Gen Z are drinking far less than their parents did.
In the US, the share of 18-year-olds who have ever tried alcohol has dropped by 25% in the last decades. Binge drinking in adolescents has plummeted by 50%. And even in countries like Germany or France, where beer and wine have always been part of the cultural DNA, alcohol consumption is falling.
And that’s a victory. Fewer accidents. Fewer hospital beds filled.
Fewer lives quietly derailed. But at the same time, other things have been falling too. The share of young people who see their friends almost every day has plummeted by 50%.
Attendance at parties has fallen by 30%. Dating and casual sex have fallen by a similar amount. All while loneliness and mental health issues have skyrocketed.
There are many different reasons for this, from covid to social media. But the shift in which drugs we consume is probably not totally unrelated either. Drgs like weed have gained ground massively and in contrast to drinking, smoking weed tends to make many people less energetic and likely to do things, more socially awkward and especially if you use a lot of it, more lonely.
Alcohol has been a powerful and influential tool for sharing, celebrating and enjoying life with others for thousands of years. If the West is on the path to drinking less, we might also be on the path to something completely new. A future where we connect and rejoice without a poisonous chemical crutch, or at least without this specific one.
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