How Sober Should a Writer Be?

And no you shouldn't be surprised, mixing two harmful things is often worse than the sum of doing each alone and that should be the base assumption.

The primary "risk" with polydrug abuse (especially uppers + downers) is that you end up taking much more than you would normally, and once the upper wears off, the downer depressed your breathing, pote being fatal.

But with coke + alcohol, even a "normal" quantity of both when combined is far worse. It's a bunch of heart signalling stuff that affects blood pressure and a few other things, in ways that really aren't good. Which is honestly pretty impressive because coke alone is an excellent way to fuck up your heart (credits, Rohin Francis/Medlife crisis, a cardiac surgeon on YouTube who posts way too less because presumably the stress of working for NHS isn't good for a doctor's health either.)

(Iirc alcohol and Tramadol are 2 things to typically never mix with other drugs; there's a matrix chart about drug interactions and these 2 are counter indicated with most other drugs. Weed, funnily and unsurprisingly, has one of the least interactions with other drugs.)

Btw there are also the 6 peaks in the Balmer Series, which is another reference if anyone wants to get into it

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmer_series/)

A doctor told me that ~10% of people who drink become alcoholics.

That's too prevalent to say we " generally seem to handle it just fine"

My parent's formulation can be used with other drugs in cases that are still reasonable. For example:

  1. Many smokers I know have lived to old age.
  2. Therefore "I'm not particularly interested in theories about how my heath demands" not smoking cigarettes.

Alcohol abuse is can have a negative impact quality of life as well as the length of the life (this comes from mental and physical health effects). So you could live a very long life with alcohol induced depression/anxiety/diabetes etc.

The last part definitely applies as well to your own statement that we generally seem to handle it just fine. It's interesting to see what happens to communities who don't have thousands of years of history with alcohol when it's introduced. For example the Native American population, or the coloured population of south africa.

Europeans and other groups who have had much longer exposure to alcohol do seem to handle it better, but possibly just because the people who couldn't handle it were selected out of our respective gene pools. But, even then, not really. There's a very good documentary about drinking in the UK called Drinkers Like Me, that really shows the hidden cost of alcohol on the health of people in the UK [0].

There are many other things we've done okay with for long periods of time, like lead plumbing (which we used for about 2 thousand years!), which definitely had long term negative effects on us.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8SvnmNo48A

Like the survivors weren't the kinds of people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, were drunk most nights in their 40s, nor weighed 350 pounds for a majority of their lives... so they weren't doing the obviously very unhealthy things.

But at the same time they weren't health fad people.