[commandar]

>After dinner, his father (a Doctor, along with 80% of the family) shared his views about alcohol, predicting that in one generation alcohol will be socially rejected the way tobacco is today because of how utterly destructive alcohol is to the human body.

I think this has a likelihood approaching nil.

The consumption of alcohol is literally as old as human civilization; humans first stumbled upon fermenting grains into ale around the time humans first began farming.

There would have to be some sort of ground breaking discovery to attach the same sort of health stigma to alcohol as tobacco. Right now, the research is extremely mixed. The continual debate over possible health benefits of wine would be one indicator. The fact that data indicates that complete abstainers generally live shorter lives than those who drink would be another.[1]

>Remember! Just 50 years ago, the majority of the United States had no problem with cigarettes.

Remember! Less than 100 years ago, the anti-alcohol movement in the United States was strong enough to put Prohibition into place.

And what's interesting about that is that it illuminates another key place where I think the idea that alcohol will suddenly become socially unacceptable is completely off the mark. We've consumed alcohol for thousands of years, and we've been fairly aware of its destructive effects for nearly as long because alcohol is more immediately destructive than tobacco.

One of the biggest drivers of the temperance movement in the late 19th and early 20th century were women. In the time predating modern social safety nets and women's liberation movements, a woman with a drunk for a husband would end up with mouths to feed and very few options for making an income.

Yet prohibition was a disaster on a grand scale because society at large rejected it. It would take a major sea change for things to be any different today or in 50 years.

[1]http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2017200,00....

[nostrademons]

Alcohol's been around for millenia because for millenia, humans could not reliably find safe water sources. All sorts of microbes like to grow in water; if it weren't for the cellular poison known as ethanol, you'd probably be drinking giardia, cholera, E.coli, and all sorts of other microbes along with your water.

It was only the development of municipal water chlorination that made alcohol unnecessary. That didn't start getting widespread adoption until the 1930s (two generations ago), and wasn't legislated until 1972 (one generation ago). So it's certainly conceivable that within one generation, alcohol will go the way of tobacco.

[randomdata]

Prohibition was rejected because it was forced upon people, but I could see people start to "naturally" reject alcohol as they have tobacco. Drinking and driving used to be the normal thing to do, now you are an evil, evil person for even considering it. The straight up consumption of alcohol could easily go the same way.

[commandar]

The difference is that we have clear evidence that tobacco is vastly harmful to your health in the long term. Alcohol? Not so much.

Pretty much everyone agrees that it's bad to be an alcoholic. Most people get annoyed with people that routinely get sloppy, out of control drunk. That's already socially unacceptable.

The general consumption of alcohol becoming an outright social faux pas, though? I just don't see it happening any time in our lifetimes.

[randomdata]

A couple of cigarettes each year is not going to increase your chances of health problems any more than a couple of drinks. Yet, we look down upon the people who even try a cigarette just once.

And what about drinking and driving? One drink is legally okay in most jurisdictions, and generally considered to still be safe, but it is often taboo to even do that these days. Zero tolerance is a strong meme in that area.

And those attitudes are not necessarily bad, but it takes what does cause harm in excess and applies the same logic to moderation. I'm just not certain alcohol is immune to those same social pressures.

I guess only time will tell...

[brazzy]

Slavery, Torture as a judical tool and blood feuds are also literally as old as human civilization and yet have recently fallen out of favor.

As for mixed research results - no surprise when there's a huge industry and status quo bias funding one side of it.

[commandar]

>Slavery, Torture as a judical tool and blood feuds are also literally as old as human civilization and yet have recently fallen out of favor.

Those things all fell out of favor because they inflict direct harm upon others, not because of their long-term health effects to the individual.

And as I noted, the temperance movement was largely driven by the harm inflicted upon by alcoholics on their families, which resulted in impoverishing women (largely because women weren't viewed as fully autonomous at the time, something else that's socially fallen out of favor).

>As for mixed research results - no surprise when there's a huge industry and status quo bias funding one side of it.

Ah, yes. Occam would clearly dictate that conflicting scientific data is best explained by vast, shadowy conspiracy.

[brazzy]

It's neither shadowy nor really a conspiracy - but do you really want to deny that the results of research are often biased in favor of the organization funding it, and that the various alcohol-producing and -distributing industries have a lot of PR money between them?

"conflicting scientific data" does not by itself mean there isn't overwhelming evidence for one position - although that's of course exactly what those whose livelihood depends on that evidence being ignored want people to believe, in so many areas - be it the effects of alcohol, the existence of global warming, or the efficacy of homeopathy.

What counts is the quality of the actual science, size and rigor of studies, etc. And yes, I'm too lazy to go into that level of detail here.