I have some close friends that have drinking problems and what I learned from their experiences:

1. If you're an alcoholic and think you can handle a single drink, you're lying to yourself. 2. It's honestly not worth it. Life is better than being stuck in a multi day binger. The physically effects are taxing on the body. 3. You'll always have those urges and that feeling of wanting to drink isn't as bad as the act of actually drinking and the damage the follows.

If you have those urges, attend AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and refresh yourself on why you don't drink. I remember going out to dinner with a friend and the waiter knew my buddy. During the conversation he asked would I like something to drink. When I said no, he asked if I was a "friend of Bob". At first I had no clue what that meant and asked who was Bob. Later I found out he was referring to the founder of AA.

I personally don't drink around those that battle with drinking. I understand the struggle.

Stay sober. Reading about Tristan and it reminds me of all those people I lost as a child. I watched so many friends OD to heroin and other drugs.

It's a logical approach to repositioning alcohol as a poison that somehow 90% of our population embraces as normal.

https://cthreefoundation.org/resources

Once in a while he'll have dreams of drinking or the urge to drink. Whatever works to keep you sober and healthy, go for it!

Worth noting that #1 is AA dogma and is certainly not a medically proven thing. About 5% of people who go through AA eventually get sober, roughly the same as other treatment approaches (many of which skip the disease model of alcoholism entirely).

IMO, the AA notion that you are diseased for life unless you turn your life over to a higher power (which looks suspiciously like the personal god of Western Protestant Christianity) is poison.

a. The people I know attend AA are not religious and they don't enjoy that aspect of AA. b. They refuse to take medication like Disulfiram (Antabuse) and rather deal with their addiction by attending meetings. c. I'm not sure if you are an actual alcoholic, it sounds like you're not, but I would advise you to be cautious about what you're saying here. If you deal with Alcoholism, there's no "final" cure. You are aware of that right?

People who deal with Alcoholism don't view their addiction as being "diseased" and AA doesn't suggest that as well. You might want to read the Big Book which is available online. I read it to understand what my friends actually deal with.

I'm not even sure what you mean by "disease model of alcoholism". It sounds like your knowledge is not only superficial, but poorly researched.

This is precisely it. You fight it continuously and always assume you are going to mess things up even when you think you're 'finally' strong enough. Just being constantly paranoid about slipping back into old habits. It's no joke and there's no panacea.

AA has, according to one study, a 67% success rate. The study saw that, of people who regularly went to AA, 67% were sober 16 years later:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2220012/

Another study shows a 75% success rate, but it's behind a paywall:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10078980

In any case, it's not a bad starting point. If it doesn't work, I'm sure you'll find suggestions there for alternatives.

Keep safe folks

At its worst (at 6 days/week), I was keeping changes of clothes at work, closing the bar, fooling around with someone for a few hours and then going back to work.

At 26 my drinking started to trail off severely and I had sort of a breakdown...moved somewhere else for a few years.

I don't really know what motivated me to drink like that or to stop. Luckily, I can drink socially without issue and I maybe have 1 or 2. Any drinking (socially) I do is maybe once or twice a month now and I don't spend any time in bars.

I have seen a lot of other peoples' lives ruined by drinking though. I'm lucky that the worst I have to deal with is some extra weight and an aversion to going out to drink. Like the parent post says, please keep safe.

The worse you feel the next day after alcohol means the more significant damage you did to your body. If you feel fresh, it says that the damage was almost non-existent (besides liver, which, if you drink a lot of alcohol you should take care separately). Then drinking a lot of water before going to bed will help your body to clean from alcohol.

It's all about alcohol-drinking culture. In some countries drinking alcohol 2-4 times a week is normal (as long as you don't drink to get wasted). But I have seen places (for example Ireland), where drinking to get wasted is an ultimate goal 2-4 times a week. That's the problem imo. Better education and public awareness would help a lot.

Drinking water doesn't "clean" you, it stops your kidneys from failing altogether.

You should always pound down water after heavy drinking. It's the only physiological cure for hangovers.

So I disagree.

A good way to test it - do it yourself. You will see a noticeable difference. Go in the evening after the gym. Hydrate yourself through the day and you will see a huge difference in performance.

There is quite a lot of talk about it in sports/gym circles for many years.

This is demonstrably untrue, and trvial to prove to oneself. A more significant contributor is GABA adaptation and up-regulation by the CNS.

I'm not downplaying dehydration as a factor, but to say it's the ONLY thing is ridiculous.

There has been a lot of talk about it for years in many sport/gym related communities. Those people know how to observe their bodies and reaction.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-liquor/deaths-mount...

What do you think the lsd did to dampen the effects on opiate receptor to release endorphins? I have experimented with naltrexone and it works well to block my opiate receptors when drinking. It just scares me that I'm blocking all euphoria and how I'm messing with neuroplasticity and encoding long term memories... Thoughts?

i’m almost 30 now and i literally can’t drink a single beer without feeling hungover the next morning. if i drink 3 or more, i might as well call in sick. as a result, i just stopped completely. there’s other ways to have fun that don’t make me feel terrible.

It’s like the difference between self-medication with a friend’s Xanax vs having a diagnosis and a prescription from a doctor or psychiatrist. Only aside from some promising studies with psilocybin and MDMA, you can’t legslly have a psychedelic experience in that kind of context yet in America.

There are people who do it underground, trained therapists I mean, though I have no idea how one would find them.

(For the record, I do believe this class of substances can help a lot of people. Do your own research, know your own body, and think for yourself before making a decision that can have possible adverse effects)

And it's pretty unlikely that anyone is posting on HN from the international space station, so it's safe to say that LSD is definitely illicit regardless of their location.

Technically true, but it’s decriminalized in a handful of countries and thus “tolerated”.

> And it's pretty unlikely that anyone is posting on HN from the international space station

Wouldn’t matter, it’s illegal there (for US astronauts at least, can’t confirm for Russians, but I’d highly doubt it).

Can I interest you in some flax? https://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php

http://time.com/3399433/quit-smoking-psychedelic-drugs-acid-...

EDIT: I guess the poster who suggested LSD is conflating these two.

There’s the idea of “set” and “setting” for psychedelic use. A (mind)set of “party time!” and a setting of “party time!” is unlikely to be effective in the way that a set of “i want to quit smoking” and a setting of “quiet, safe surroundings” would be.

Intention and preparation matter with these drugs—though they’re apparently no guarantee either.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-link-found-bet...

Furthermore, this is more of a matter of opinion but I strongly feel it doesn’t dull your senses / decision making / cognition the way alcohol does.

On the other hand it can result in permanent personality changes / dissociative identity disorder.

LSD does cause permanent personality changes. That's what makes it such a beautiful compound. For me, it permanently altered my openness to experience, made me more intuitively empathetic, and improved my communication skills (the last two are two sides of the same coin). As a result, I am more well-adjusted, better able to communicate, more in tune with people's unspoken emotions and better at dropping into that unique state of vulnerability that we often call love. *

Your mileage may vary.

* Actually, psilocybin mushrooms were my first psychedelic so I credit them with that more than LSD per se. LSD was like the icing on top, really.

I find it difficult to call someone well adjusted when they are dependent on a hallucinogenic drug to cope with reality.

I’ve seen the damage that drug addiction can do, so I understand your caution. But they are nothing like addictive depressants or stimulants. The drugs are actually somewhat unpleasant while the effects take told, and you feel better from the after-effects when they wear off. You also get a lot of tolerance after a single dose. This means that the compulsive redosing behavior that leads to dependence simply doesn’t happen.

A relative of mine is a drug addict. It started with light pill abuse in his late teen years. Then turned into a serious opioid addiction a few years later. There is wide debate on susceptibility to addiction in terms of things like personality or genetics and so on. Whatever the case his personality certainly seems aggressively directed at being easily prone to substance/drug abuse and to seeking it out. Once he became a full-blown opioid addict, the ability to control his general problem with addiction of course went out the window, it pretty well destroyed his life.

His mother refuses to help him get treatment via for example Suboxone, because she says that's just a crutch that keeps you addicted (equivalent to your reference of replacing one substance with another). Meanwhile, instead, the out of control opioid addiction continues threatening his life. The core of this issue is that not all substances are created equal in their consequences. Suboxone may be a form of crutch, and crutches are often very useful when you have a broken leg.

I've known a few people with opioid addictions, the only ones I've ever seen able to control it had to use treatments like Suboxone. In that case, replacing one substance with another, means regaining control over your life (while you hopefully pursue long-term therapy to permanently kick the addiction) and being able to live mostly normally.

One of those people was a fairly close friend. She had a problem with addictions over many years. Alcohol, cocaine, lighter pain killers, and so on. She was always able to walk back the addictions, until opioids. Once she became an opioid addict, there was no walking that back, it took over every aspect of her life. All of her thinking shifted to short-term obsession to fill the craving. Her entire life became a fireball of destruction: thieving, lying, anything necessary to get the next fix. When you're consumed by that addiction, there is no long-term thinking, there's no next month or next year, there's only sating the drug addiction. When the doctors began cutting off her drug access one after another, she eventually even turned to getting various prescriptions for her dogs. Then buying opioids illegally on the black market. The person you used to know, no longer exists while this is going on, they're an addiction zombie that can hardly be reasoned with (they'll say anything at any time to avoid a discussion or intervention). That whirlwind went on for a year plus, until one day she took Suboxone. I'm sure it's not for everyone, I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone; in this case, it was like a miracle. One day she was an out of control drug addict, a week or two later she was back, normal, able to think long-term again, able to hold a job and reason normally. It was almost as though the prior year had never happened. It's wild to witness that transformation occur in such a short amount of time. So long as she took Suboxone on schedule, she was no longer an out of control opioid addict. She could then pursue a long-term strategy of opioid addiction therapy. Sometimes substituting one substance for another, is about managing addiction in the relative short-term through a better process, so you can work toward the long-term goal of ending the addiction.

Unfortunately, recreational drugs are a one-two punch. First, the activity of taking recreational drugs is highly stimulating in and of itself, due to its risk, which means that the simple act of taking something, anything, can become damn near irresistible. Second, the effects of many of these drugs actually do end up acting as a quasi-medication. Cocaine, for instance, is quite chemically similar to Ritalin; meth is an amphetamine like Adderall; opiates seem to act almost as stimulants for many with ADD (including me), and also help to deaden the hyperactivity a bit; alcohol mercifully slows down your thinking; and so on.

The irony then is that many drug addicts would significantly benefit from a prescription of Adderall or Ritalin, but unfortunately these medications are very difficult to have prescribed if you have a history of addiction. I understand why this is the case, but I can't help but feel sad for those who unfortunately may never get the treatment (or even the diagnosis) they need to rein in their lives.

http://time.com/3399433/quit-smoking-psychedelic-drugs-acid-...

The poster seemed to conflate the two.

Reminds me of antibiotics. Kill some over connected pathways vs Kill some bacteria.

https://cthreefoundation.org/resources

Just talking about it with other people going through the same thing helps a lot. It's almost always worked for me and I tend to get a hold of things before the spiral further out of control.

Best of luck mate. IWNDWYT

The only end is death when depending on bottles a week.

I have seen people who can keep drinking what I thought were literally diluted Alcohol. I guess your body takes damage without them knowing it.

R.I.P