[lostlogin]

> The number of people dying in car accidents or due to drug overdoses is absolutely staggering and is a fairly recent phenomenon.

If you don’t call alcohol poisoning a drug overdose, the stats get skewed to make the past look better.

[Retric]

Alcohol poisoning was and is quite rare. Plenty of long term health issues from drinking and smoking, but we don’t consider diseases from shared needles as an overdose either.

~140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, only ~2,000 of those are alcohol poisoning.

[Snow_Falls]

Always seemed strange to me how we've decided alcohol is different somehow.

[hilbert42]

Logically you're right alcohol ought to be treated the same but culturally it's very different in that it's been a part of partaking of food—eating and drinking since before the beginning of recorded time.

Alcohol is intrinsically ingrained in many if not most cultures.