Dry January

People have started bragging how virtuous they are by having a ‘dry January’. Virtuous, my arse!

It gets on my sodding tits. It is all part of the neo-prohibitionist, anti-alcohol lobby’s never-welcome attempt to denormalise alcohol. They’re trying make us and our children think it is some special and dangerous substance that is being forced upon us by ‘Big Alcohol’ and we must take every break possible from it so we don’t spontaneously combust.

That it is dangerous for the overwhelming majority of us is bollocks for a start. It has been shown in study after study, controlling for every factor and confounding problem that moderate drinking actually extends one’s lifespan.

It’s purest horseshit to say that “There is no safe level of alcohol intake.” Utter crap. A few units a day and you’ll live for years longer. It also protects against dementia in later life. Indeed there’s a long list of benefits one can have from moderate drinking. So if anyone virtue-signals to you that they are having a dry January, either ask them, in all seriousness, whether they have considered the negative effects this will have on their health or point at them and laugh uncontrollably.

The scorecard

Even if moderate drinking were not as healthy as it is, taking a month off the sauce would not make a blind bit of difference if you then go on to drink two bottles of wine a night and pass out on the toilet as soon as February comes along. People who say they are having a dry January ‘for the good of their health’ are hypocrites and liars who are only bending to the will of the fun police who would confiscate everyone’s cellars full of wine given half a chance.

If you are a moderate drinker, good for you! You’ll live a longer, happier, more enjoyable life and your friends will find you less tiresome when you go out for the night – if you would rather irk your friends I think becoming a vegan would be more appropriate than stopping drinking for a single month of the year! A dry January will just mean you are missing out on the benefits that moderate drinking confers for 1/12 of the year. I trained at Oxford University to be an epidemiologist, you won’t catch me stopping drinking once a year so I could lose some desperately needed health benefits all so that I could feel repulsively pleased with myself and (counter-intuitively) superior to moderate drinkers who are going to live for longer.

You will note that all through this rant over referred to moderate drinking. It is undoubtedly true that excessive drinking is not good for you. This is where the fun police show they don’t really care about saving, or even simply improving, people’s lives – all they want to be are meddlesome-ratbags.

Problem drinkers have a multitude of reasons they drink to excess, their work and home lives are usually packed with problems. Solving such an array of difficulties, and so actually targeting problem drinking is difficult and expensive (although this strategy has been tried and it works with great success). The sanctimonious shits who lie and and say your two glasses of wine with dinner is ‘hazardous drinking’ don’t want to get their hands dirty and solve the myriad problems that problem drinkers have. They do the cheap and easy ‘method’ of denormalising alcohol for most healthy drinkers with no alcohol problem at all.

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