How Your Alcohol Use Could be Influencing You
and Affecting Your Impact on Others
This is for your personal reflection about how your alcohol use could be influencing you and affecting your impact on others. It isn’t about how alcohol use affects society.
While some of the items below might not apply at all, please consider if your alcohol use could be influecing you and/or your impact on others in the direction of some of them.
- Slower reflexes / reduced skill increasing the risk of injury to yourself and others if driving, etc.
- Risk of underestimating the impact your level of alcohol consumption could have, including on your ability to drive well.
- Harmful interaction of alcohol with some medications (which you might not know or remember).
- Influencing habits of drinking that can persist and be difficult to overcome including when driving is anticipated, if pregnant, and/or if taking medication that could harmfully interact with alcohol.
- If/when an unexpected need for transportation arises, inconvenience/expense (forgoing needed transportation and/or the delay and expense of a taxi) or creating the risk of injury to yourself and others if you drive.
- Somewhat impaired decision making, increasing the likelihood of making harmful decisions (including to drive, to continue drinking, to be less respectful, and others).
- After taking your first drink, sometimes, often, or always continued drinking and drunkenness.
- The risk of it later leading to occasions of heavy drinking and/or regular heavy drinking – with all its influences including those on families and children.
- Influencing other people to drink, some of whom might be driving, pregnant, under legal age, taking medication with harmful interaction with alcohol, disrespectful under the influence of alcohol, in a situation in which even slightly compromised decision making could be harmful to them/others, prone to eventually having occasions of heavy drinking and/or regular heavy drinking, or currently prone to continued drinking till drunkenness after taking their first drink.
- Becoming dependent on alcohol as a way to relax or have fun making it harder to relax or have fun without it.
- Risk of a child drinking alcohol if alcohol is present in the home.
- Influencing an alcohol culture that is somewhat harmful to many and devastating to some (directly or indirectly).
- Wasting money.
- Diverting society’s resources into alcohol production and distribution away from other possible uses.
- Possibly modeling to an extent something that some people could apply to taking street drugs (taking a substance to make one feel better for a short time, to fit in with a group, etc.).
Regarding some studies that might indicate that people who drink in moderation have, on average, better heart health than people who don't drink at all, depending on the details of the study, it might be possible one or more of the following is the reason / part of the reason for the results:
- Due to social/culture related reasons people with laid-back personalities might on average be more likely to drink moderately than to be non-drinkers, with it being the laid-back personality that influences both good hearth health and, in the current culture, moderate alcohol consumption.
- In the current alcohol culture some people could tend to drink alcohol while “kicking back and relaxing” and/or socializing (having a beer at a BBQ). It could be “kicking back and relaxing” and socializing (the BBQ, not the beer) that influences good heart health.
- Due to social/culture related reasons construction workers might on average be more likely to drink moderately than to be non-drinkers. Construction workers get a lot of exercise from their occupations influencing good heart health.
- Other possibilities related to details of the study / how it was done
There are many harmful effects of moderate alcohol consumption of the types listed above. To emphasize one of them, moderate alcohol consumption can influence other people to drink, some of whom might be driving, pregnant, under legal age, taking medication with harmful interaction with alcohol, disrespectful under the influence of alcohol, in a situation in which even slightly compromised decision making could be harmful to them/others, prone to eventually having occasions of heavy drinking and/or regular heavy drinking, or currently prone to continued drinking till drunkenness after taking their first drink – contributing to thousands of traffic deaths/disabilities/injuries, thousands of children affected by alcohol before birth, thousands of children who lost a parent in an alcohol related traffic accident, thousands of families and children affected by the heavy drinking of a family member, thousands of deaths and health problems caused by heavy drinking, thousands of crimes in which alcohol is involved, and others.
To conclude that it is best not to drink alcohol one does not need to conclude that drinking alcohol is terrible in any given situation; all one needs to conclude is that all considered, it is best not to drink alcohol. Then consider implications in the context of your value decisions.