[Barrin92]

>What percentage of people who drink alcohol are alcoholics?

In the US about ~7% or 14 million people depending on how you define alcoholism. Globally about 3 million people die every year of consequences related to drinking, or put differently, 5% of global deaths are attributable to alcohol consumption.[1].

That is about as many people as covid seems to have killed last year. You're actually right in drawing a comparison between social media and drinking, but I think you're wrong about thinking that means we should take social media less seriously, rather we should take drinking much more seriously. Certainly very few people would argue we should take a pandemic less seriously that costs hundreds of billions per year and kills millions, and that is what alcoholism does as well.

As a society we are extremely negligent of threats that cause enormous social harm in the aggregate simply because they don't harm everyone they come into contact with.

[1]https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

[WastingMyTime89]

> In the US about ~7% or 14 million people depending on how you define alcoholism. Globally about 3 million people die every year of consequences related to drinking, or put differently, 5% of global deaths are attributable to alcohol consumption.[1].

That's the statistics for Alcohol Use Disorder (or AUD) not alcoholism. AUD is definitely not what people think when they speak of alcoholism. That would be alcohol addiction.

In typical American fashion, AUD has an extremely broad definition. For example if twice during the past year you went out with friends longer than you expected, had more beer than you were planning to, ended hangover the day after and thought "I should really stop drinking" you have mild AUD.

[dionidium]

> AUD is definitely not what people think when they speak of alcoholism.

That's true, but what people think of when they think of alcoholism is pretty silly and it's not how any addiction specialists think of addiction today. There's an enormous gulf between what experts think about addiction and what laypeople picture when they think of an "alcoholic."

> For example if twice during the past year you went out with friends longer than you expected, had more beer than you were planning to, ended hangover the day after and thought "I should really stop drinking" you have mild AUD.

And why not? If you took a drug that resulted in adverse consequences and your response to that is that it's no big deal and you'll probably do it again, then that suggests something that's at least mildly problematic.

[lelandfe]

https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

WastingMyTime89 is likely referring to the DSM-5 definition of AUD here. It is rather broad, though a bit more narrow than they've outlined. Worth a look. I certainly have friends who would qualify.

You can also access the DSM-5 text directly through the Internet Archive, though it is sometimes unavailable depending on usage: https://archive.org/details/diagnosticstatis0005unse/page/49...

[WastingMyTime89]

That's the definition used to calculate the percentage cited by the person I was replying to. Don't get me wrong I don't doubt it's a useful diagnostic tool in the hand of professional. It's just that the threshold for mild symptoms make it somewhat useless for a statical point of view from my point of view.

As far as I know, self-reporting is considered a poor tool to study addiction anyway because addicts are the least likely to agree to answer questions about their consumption or tend to lie.

[dnissley]

> As a society we are extremely negligent of threats that cause enormous social harm in the aggregate simply because they don't harm everyone they come into contact with.

Probably. But see also the harm of overly stringent regulation of said threats, with the obvious example being prohibition of alcohol in the US.

So as a society we take reasonable measures to prevent the worst outcomes. In the case of alcohol we have ratcheted up the consequences of drunk driving, limited the drinking age to 21+, etc.

[vcmanlp]

According to those definitions at least 30% of the people in the UK would be alcoholics. I hear that in Japan one is expected to drink, and the life expectancy is higher.