They still have a point. Alcohol use is intertwined with human history for thousands of years at least. People have been drinking for a while, and we generally seem to handle it just fine.

You don't know any alcoholics? The ones in my life seem set out to spoil not only theirs, but anyone who dares care for them.

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"

What other things with a 90% success rate do you avoid?

It is perfectly valid to say “I’ve seen bad stuff with alcohol and chosen to not partake”, and it is also kind of deeply weird to say “I don’t engage in anything with a <90% success rate” and then not give any other examples.

Yes, a fallacy is a reason to dismiss an argument, not necessarily the conclusion; it is a very good reason to doubt a conclusion though.

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.

It also makes an implicit assumption that living for a long time is both necessary and sufficient to describe a healthy person.

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

Survivors that drink: Not valid, biased, should not be counted

Survivors that do not drink: Valid, unbiased, should be counted

Here's what I don't see: survivors that have a particular interest in "healthy" lifestyle.

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.

Yep. I once met a guy that was somehow just as proud of his two pack per day cigarette habit as he was his decades of sobriety because “at least it’s not heroin”. Dude had severe COPD and died from something lung-related a year later in his mid-50s.

People that declare themselves immune to death because they avoid [x substance] can have some insane ideas about diet, exercise, sleep, stress and [y substance]. Believing that the world is simple and controllable is a dangerous intoxicant.