Factually! with Adam Conover - Your Wine and Beer are Deadlier than Fentanyl with Isabella Cueto and Lev Facher

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

Alcohol kills more Americans each year than all other drugs combined. So why aren't we treating it like the public health crisis that it is? Today I'm talking to health journalists Lev Facher and Isabella Cueto to unpack how it harms us, who benefits, and what we can do about it. National helpline for substance use concerns: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/helplines/national-helplineThe Deadliest Drug whole series is available here.SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. As I talked to some incredible experts about all the amazing shit that they know, that I don't know, and that you might not know, you know, we are really concerned with what we put in our bodies nowadays. It's not just vague worries about microplastics and toxins. The entire Maha movement is based on the fear that the things we were told were good for us,

whether that's ADHD medication, antidepressants, processed foods, or even vaccines could be doing us harm. And, you know, when liberal moms go to the grocery store, they obsess over what they're putting in their bodies and their kids' bodies and how it might affect their health as well. But, you know, despite all of these debates over the things we put in our bodies, we tend to gloss over or not even talk about a substance that kills more people every year than just about every infectious disease combined.

I'm talking about alcohol. And look, if you drink, please still listen to the... episode, okay? We're not going to tell you, you got to quit. We're not going to tell you you have a problem. You can, hey, you can sip a Mai Tai while you're listening to the episode for all I care, but, you know, at least be as educated about the substance as you are about anything else you put in your body, right? Alcohol kills nearly 180,000 people every year. That is an ongoing public health crisis, an epidemic. But it doesn't just affect people who drink so much that they die of it. Because research in recent years,

years has shown us that alcohol is worse for us than we thought, even if you're a so-called moderate drinker. Even small amounts of alcohol risk your heart health have been linked to certain forms of cancer, and having just one to two drinks a day can literally shrink your brain. Now, you probably know some of this to some degree, right? You've read some articles, you know, it's not good for you. But as a society, we've kind of accepted that there's nothing we can do about it, right? We tell ourselves that booze is so woven into our social interactions into human society that we can't do anything about it, that is just the way things are. But why would we think that's true? I mean, compare alcohol to smoking, because they're so similar, right? Smoking

was a part of human society for centuries, even millennia, an enormous capitalist system of companies convinced all of us that it was necessary to our daily lives, and not just that, but smooth and refreshing as well. But after realizing how bad smoking is for us, that is an addictive substance that is never good for you, no matter how little you use, well, we started public health campaigns that changed popular opinion in a way that saved lives over decades.

You still can't smoke as much as you want to in America, but we have taken basic measures that have made smoking less common and have, as a result, saved millions of lives. Yet for some reason with alcohol, we assumed that that would be impossible, that it wouldn't even be worth trying. And, you know, of course, there's a little matter of something called prohibition, right? The long period of American history where alcohol was illegal to sell and was a massive historical failure. But no one is asking for another return to prohibition. I'm certainly not.

We're just talking about basic health measures that we could put in place to, you know, cut back on the harms. Why can't we do that? Well, you know, alcohol is a hard problem, because unlike other dangerous and deadly drugs, it's been used by humanity ever since we first let a barrel of fruit ferment into a tasty, intoxicating concoction. Alcohol is an omnipresent part of society

in a way that other drugs aren't, and it's essential to religious rituals, it's there when we celebrate, and when we mourn. It has been our companion for millennia, but at the same time, its dominance is not some iron, law of humanity. And the way that we drink today has been shaped by capitalist corporations looking to exploit us for profit in a way that we can push back upon. But drinking is a public health problem that we can address. And when we deny that it is, we are giving in to the

capitalists, to the CEOs who want to make money off of human misery. So today on the show, we're going to be talking about alcohol. We're going to have a reasonable, rational discussion about a drug that kills more Americans every year than all other drugs combined, but yet is an indelible part of American society. We're going to discuss how it harms us, who benefits from it, and what we can actually do about it. Well, on the show today, I have two incredible guests who have just published a fantastic and authoritative eight-part series

on Alcohol in America at the great health and medicine outlet stat. Their names are Lev Fasher and Isabella Quito. They are two of the very best health and science. science journalists working today, and there are no two guests more on top of this story. I'm so excited to have them on. Please welcome, Leffasher and Isabella Quito. Levin Isabella, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having us.

I'm really thrilled to talk about this topic because I think we don't talk about it enough as a society at all. You guys have spent the year covering the effect that alcohol has on our society. Just how do you summarize it? you're at a cocktail party and you're trying to tell somebody what you've been doing all year over drinks, how do you summarize the effect of alcohol, you know, on American society? Well, isn't that right there so telling that we have such a thing as a cocktail party? And yet, per the title of our series, this is the deadliest drug in American society.

People talk so much about other drugs and dying from drug overdoses. Obviously, there is no such thing in kind of typical day-to-day society as a fentanyl party. But alcohol is the far deadlier substance. And we don't mean to make light of it. Obviously, people across our society have super, super different relationships with alcohol ranging from the innocuous to the very harmful. But in general, we have this one substance that causes an inordinate amount of death and disease. and we just take it as a given as a part of everyday society,

and that doesn't have to be the reality. Yeah, I usually just say alcohol kills more people than any other drug, and yet nobody really seems to care. Yeah, I kind of would compare it to traffic deaths, which are something we've talked about extensively on the show, which is an enormous amount of death and injury and destruction in American society every year that for most of my lifetime, we've just sort of considered, it just happens.

You can't really do anything about it. It's just, oh, that's the way of the world, you know? It's like heart attacks, except we actually spend more time and money trying to stop heart attacks than we do traffic deaths or alcohol deaths. And alcohol kills more people than traffic, I believe, right? Oh, and it also kills people in traffic deaths. So you can put a lot of the traffic deaths under alcohol, actually. So, but you say it's deadlier than fentanyl, but I would have to say many more Americans use alcohol than use fentanyl, right?

Alcohol is not a deadlier substance than fattenile, but the sum total of harm resulting from alcohol use is far greater than societal harm from fatnal use. And more, yes, more people use alcohol than fentanyl or tobacco. Yeah, and it's considered to be often, like, again, a problem that we can't do anything about. And in fact, it's such an endemic problem that we often, it seems like, spend more time talking about the positives of drinking than we do about the negative. I remember just 10 years ago, people were still saying, oh, a couple of drinks a day is good for your health.

I believed this for many years in my life. I read articles to that effect, written by, I don't know, some scientists somewhere, saying, oh, there's a beneficial effect on. overall mortality, et cetera. I assume this science doesn't hold up, or what do we know about that now? Well, I think there's a lot more scrutiny of that science now because, I know this is a topic you've covered before, the idea of moderate drinking. There's a lot of confounding factors, you know, just outside factors that would influence

someone's health when they're drinking moderately or a light amount. So the current evidence is that drinking is not good for you. There's no net health benefit from drinking. You know, there's nothing in wine like antioxidants or whatever that would outweigh the potential cancer risk or other health risks of it. There's nothing in the skin or the grape or whatever. Right, right, right. There was some chemical that was supposed to be in it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also that there's no difference between the types of alcohol you're consuming, really. I think that's been an idea that people hold in their minds that one type of alcohol is better or less harmful than another. But it's really the amount of pure ethanol you're consuming that matters. And yeah, there's no health benefit from that. But Adam, we also should be clear that, you know, we're not here to be scolds and tell people do not drink ever. But I think it's an interesting contrast between something like alcohol and processed meat.

You know, going to a Fourth of July barbecue and having a hot dog, that's not going to kill you. And on net, having a social life, being around other human beings, being out in the sun, these are all good things. Having an active, rich life surrounded by other people, that's good. And I think that often gets tied up with alcohol because our idea of alcohol is that it's essential to socializing and just being around other humans. So it's less don't ever drink, but much like people, you know, enjoy a steak in a restaurant or a hot dog at that barbecue, but are aware, at least vaguely in the back of their minds, okay, I can't have red meat every single meal. I can't have processed meat every single day. There's similarly a lack of awareness about alcohol and how drink by drink week by week over the course of a lifetime, even if you don't think you have a drinking problem, it can really add up in terms of its effects on your health. Yeah, I mean, let's get to drinking problems in a second because I have a lot of specific questions about that. But you mentioned steak. I would make a comparison to cigarettes, you know?

I spent many years of my life, maybe six or seven years of my life as a pretty heavy smoker in my 20s. But I was aware that it was very bad for me. Now I'm in my 40s. I'll still have a couple cigarettes a year when I'm out drinking. You know, like, just, you know, occasionally it'll be an occasional. I'm like, okay, you know what, let me bum one. I'll smoke half of the cigarette. But when I'm smoking it, I'm aware,

even this one cigarette is a little bit bad for me. And in fact, I'm going, the next morning I'm like, oh, yeah, I feel a little like my lungs don't feel great. Like, I'm experiencing all of this, right? And part of the reason I'm doing that is because there was a major public health effort by like basically every part of American society to inform people, hey, smoking is bad for you.

We all think it's essential to life. It is not. It is being pushed upon us by large corporations that are profiting from addiction. Every single cigarette is bad. And if you smoke a lot of cigarettes, you are very likely to die of it, right? And now we have, people can still smoke,

you can still buy cigarettes. A lot of people still do. It still kills millions of people, right? But we made a public health effort to raise awareness in all these ways that cut back on a lot of deaths while still allowing people to do the thing. And when I'm around someone who's smoking, I'm still like, hey, fucking go nuts. I'm not going to scold. You do what you want. Because you know, I assume that they know, right?

Right. But we have not done anything close to that with alcohol in our society at all. And even just half of that effort would save millions of lives over a very short number of years. So why is that? Why haven't we ever, why haven't we put the effort into it as a society? That's a really complicated question. I mean, I think, for one, the ghost of prohibition still looms very large when we try to have this conversation in the U.S. People say, well, we tried prohibition, it didn't work.

Or if there's any public health advocate that's saying we should increase. taxes on alcohol, for example, or change the labels on it, so it's more eye-catching. They are pretty quickly dismissed from, you know, the public debate around alcohol. And, of course, there are also a lot of big corporate forces at work here. The alcohol industry is enormous and very powerful, globally and within the U.S. It has tons of lobbyists in Washington advocating for its interests every single year. some years more than others. And so there's all these factors coming together, along with general ambivalence, where people think, oh, if we want to cut back on alcohol-related harms, we have to

take this really draconian approach, or we all need to give up our happy hours or things we enjoy. But that's not real. Like when you think of the tobacco example, that's a great parallel because there was a concerted effort, and yet it was still in society for those who wanted to partake. And as Isabella is saying, it's not sweeping changes that get beaten back by industry. It's very modest, very incremental proposals. And there are just tons of examples of this, even in recent decades, about 15 years ago, one of my favorites is that Massachusetts, as a state, decided we're going to apply our sales tax to alcohol. There was already an excise tax, but they're going to say, we're going to apply our modest sales tax to alcohol. And that will raise revenue. use that will in turn support addiction treatment efforts and public health efforts. And they were successful in doing this. And within one year, the alcohol industry had paid to gather enough signatures to put a referendum on the statewide ballot asking Massachusetts voters to repeal putting that sales tax, applying

that sales tax to alcohol and voters agreed with the industry essentially. So even in these little minute cases, a state just wants to do something small. We're going to tax alcohol some nominal amount. It doesn't work because industry is very powerful. And then there's just the base reality that Americans like drinking and are very sympathetic to the argument that we shouldn't do anything to curb it. Yeah, I mean, you're in Massachusetts. They're trying to take you Sam Adams, right? It's a very simple.

I mean, Sam Adams is considered to, I'm not fucking up, right? It's not Philly. No, that's right. Okay. Yeah. I got word for some. It's their water, yeah. I've been on the West Coast too long.

Yeah. I mean, if you want a great example of the power that, this to me always seem like an example the power the industry has. Nutrition labels are on the back of everything else you put in your body. They're not on the back of alcohol. And in fact, what made that clear to me is when you buy a non-alcohol, beer, they often do put the number of calories on. I don't know if that's because of the law or because they're just trying to advertise

it's healthier than other things you could drink because they are lower calorie than a lot of alcoholic beverages. But like I was looking at, you know, my athletic brewing company, non-alcoholic beer, and it was like 45 calories. And I was like, huh, why isn't that on a Budweiser? Like, it's, nutrition labels have been on what? For decades and decades. There, no one is complaining about it.

them. But for some reason, the alcohol industry, which is peddling the more dangerous product, is the only industry that doesn't have to do any kind of labeling whatsoever, apparently. Apart from, I guess, ABV is probably mandated in most places. And, Adam, this one might be a little bit of a stretch, but one label that you do see is a pregnancy warning that people who are pregnant shouldn't necessarily consume alcohol, and that can be harmful. But I almost think you could argue that that, that label makes everyone who is not pregnant, obviously the vast, vast majority of people think, I guess this is fine. Yeah. And in fact, if you want an example of how pervasive drinking is,

the fact that when a woman doesn't drink, when she doesn't have a drink one time, people assume that she's pregnant because that's the only reason she wouldn't be drinking. I mean, I think that sort of says it all right there. But, you know, we're at this moment where, there's a rising awareness of health. I mean, people are so obsessed with what they put in their bodies, right? And in fact, something I've talked about on this show before is we have this tendency

to treat food as medicine in this country that, like, if you have a problem in your body, it must be because you put the wrong thing in your mouth. Like, that is a way that we think too often about disease. And I think when you look at, you know, the Maha movement or, et cetera, there's like sort of an over-focus on food. often when there's many other problems that that might result more.

And certainly, like, you know, when you're going to the grocery store and really thinking about your health first and foremost, you know, you can lead to orthorexia and that kind of thing. And yet, despite that entire trend, nobody does this with alcohol. Like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not out there talking about, hey, we need to cut back on alcohol. You guys have in your series, you point out that, you know, Donald Trump, when he was announcing the administration's efforts to cut back on opioid addiction, said he cared about this issue because of the death of his brother from drinking, his actual brother.

And yet he has never done anything to cut back on drinking in America, or even just to do an educational campaign. Oh, and also two members of his cabinet are notorious drunks. I forgot about that piece. So, like, how is it possible that alcohol has culturally been exempted from our thinking about this? Well, I think you're right. It is, that's part of the reason why we decided to write this series is because

Maha has become such a thing, such a popular movement when it comes to food and nutrition. You see it's messaging all over the place, even among people who don't care about Robert of Kennedy Jr. And yet alcohol doesn't get compared to things like processed food, even though there are a lot of similarities there. Again, this gets back to some of the corporate influence. If you'll recall earlier this year, there were new dietary guidelines that were released. And for decades, those have given specific alcohol guidance saying men should not have more than two drinks per day. Women should have no more than one. They're reviewed every five years. It's had the same message. This year,

it was changed to just say consume less for better overall health. Because of that, now there are federal web pages, including at the alcohol addiction federal agency, that don't have information really on moderate drinking because they have to fall in line. And you get this messaging from people like Dr. Oz, who now leads Medicare and Medicaid in the U.S., talking about, you know, socializing is great, and they drink in the blue zones and all of this other stuff that really makes public health researchers cringe because they're like, that's not, that's not backed by science. It's not backed by evidence. So people are once again getting all this conflicting messaging.

They don't know how to define moderate drinking. Should I believe the science? Should I not? And so you put that against something you touched on earlier with the way that alcohol is regulated in the U.S. You know, the reason why there's no nutrition label is because there's all these different agencies that are overseeing alcohol. Right.

So a malt-based drink is at the Food and Drug Administration, but a different type of drink would be at the tax bureau. And so it's like this very weird landscape at the federal level. And that has really created quite the conundrum. There's actually a proposal right now to try and put some nutrition facts type of box on alcohol. And there are thousands of public comments on that. The alcohol industry is very opposed to it.

It's taking forever basically to be final. And so we really don't know if consumers will get that information, even though it does seem to perfectly align with the Maha agenda. Yeah, well, just another example. And hopefully this is the last time we'll bring up the administration. But you mentioned Dr. Oz. And he said when he rolled out those dietary guidelines, he summarized almost self-effacingly the alcohol guidelines as like, it's just saying don't have it for breakfast. Right. Like, ah, that's all.

Just like, don't go nuts. And he said don't have it for breakfast, as in don't go nuts. And he got so much pushback off of saying just that that the next day he clarified on X, brunch is different from breakfast because people were like, he's taking my mimosa's or whatever, I guess. I don't know. Or they're bloody mares if you really want to tie one on before noon. You know, when you hear about companies selling your data,

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first, start your first trial at Shopify.com slash factually today. You heard that right. Start your free trial today at Shopify.com slash factually. That's Shopify.com slash factually. Well, okay, let's, you know, we've talked about the cultural piece long enough.

Let's get into the actual data. You know, what are the hard numbers just, you know, to put in perspective, of how many deaths we see per year attributable to alcohol? Yeah, so the number is 178,000 deaths in the United States per year attributable to alcohol. And again, people talk about the opioid crisis and the drug overdose crisis. And I just want to emphasize at its peak, the overall overdose crisis. So that's deaths from opioids and cocaine and meth.

All these acute drug overdose deaths never totaled more than about 115,000. So that's at their maximum, two-thirds as many deaths as alcohol. Alcohol has always been bigger. Fetnal heroin, Coke, and meth combined are a little more than half of alcohol deaths. Correct. Wow. And like, what are we talking about? Are those purely overdose deaths or is that traffic deaths as well or like accidents,

injuries, things like that? That is everything. That is all deaths that are attributed to alcohol. That includes 20 or so thousand acute alcohol poisoning deaths. I think about 15,000 car crash, motor vehicle accidents. And then there are all these other deaths that are attributed to alcohol, but maybe societally, people don't view them in exactly that light. So heart disease and stroke, about 37,000 per year.

Liver disease, 31,000 per year. So there are all these deaths that to outsiders, to non-experts, might look like other things, even though they might not have happened or they might not have happened that year or they might have happened in a very different fashion over the course of much more time, if not for alcohol. Wow. So you said about 20-something thousand acute alcohol poisoning deaths, but about 60,000 heart disease and liver disease combined,

which are things that I'm imagining a lot of those people die and they're just like, oh, yeah, you know, dad was in his 60s and in not great health and he had a heart attack. Right? Like so many men in their, a lot of people's, you know, have that going through their families, heart attacks, etc. And it's, you know, sort of colloquially, you might not be like, oh, he died of drinking. But when we actually do like the public health data, like, that's how many of those heart attack deaths are attributable to alcohol specifically. That's wild. There's also, most people may know this now, but alcohol has been linked to about six or seven different types of cancer. And there's some data to suggest that if everybody who drinks had just one drink per day, that could avert like thousands of new cases. I think 17,000 new cases each year. That's if people cut back to one drink a day. To one drink, yeah.

Wait, okay, that makes me wonder. How many drinks on average are we having per day? Like, if the, you're like, if everybody who drinks cuts back to one per day, I'm like, so the average among people who drink must be more than one per day. Is that correct? I don't actually know what the average is across the board. I think it varies greatly geographically. Midwest is pretty high.

Uh-huh. Well, you know, there's not a lot else to do. So it's understandable. That's how. No disrespect, no shade to the Midwest. Oh, look. When I do stand up in Wisconsin where I love to do it, I'm like, that's the first thing I say. And people are like, woo, yeah, that's right.

You know, they all, everybody agrees. And how many Americans on average drink in general? I saw around half, something like that? The latest surveys, about half of people say that they drank in the past month. If you ask about the past year, it's higher. But the numbers have kind of been on a decline and are thought to be at a low. point historically, which is interesting because we're still seeing a lot of death and disease from alcohol, even though it's declined.

What's interesting on top of that, though, is of Americans who reported drinking in the past months, about half of those reported binge drinking in the past month. So about one in five overall American adults report drinking that meets the criteria for binge drinking. Wow. And I think it's really interesting that, you know, I, I think it's really interesting that, you know, I've seen more coverage in the popular press. I've heard more people around me talking about, oh, oh, yeah, it turns out alcohol is kind of bad for you.

And I think it's because of those cancer links. And that's what's really interesting is when you tell people something that's connected to cancer, they get really worried. But like, alcohol is killing, it's already killing 170,000 people here. Those are already cancer numbers. I don't know, cancer numbers off the top of my head. But, like, this is one of the biggest causes of death in America already before you even get to the cancer links, which we're only just finding out about. And I find that really interesting. It's suddenly, once you say it causes cancer, people sort of shunt it into a different part of their health calculus, right?

Which really, again, goes to show how much we forgive ourselves for drinking and not for eating processed food or all this other stuff, right? People are more worried about their hot dogs than they are about their alcohol. In terms of moderate drinkers, people who are having that one to two drinks a day, not binge drinking, right? You say any amount of drinking is bad for you. What do you mean by that? Are you talking about those cancer risks? Are there other health effects where, you know, you might not die of it, but it's deleterious to your life in some way? Yeah, definitely the cancer links.

breast cancer in particular, the risk starts to increase at any level of drinking, which I think is something that a lot of people may not know. And then there's also liver disease issues. One of the pieces in the series is about the combination of metabolic disease like obesity or diabetes and drinking and how that causes double the inflammation for your liver and is leading to more young people getting liver disease and needing transplants. And that's, that's really concerning to like liver specialists because there's no symptoms for that until you have severe liver disease. But there's, you know, there's blood pressure concerns. There's, there's all kinds of health issues that are linked to alcohol. It's just a matter of like,

okay, are you actually cutting back? Like with cancer, if you cut back, it reduces your cancer risk in accordance with that cutback. So long term, what are your patterns? What are your behaviors? That all can affect your trajectory, along with your family history and genes and all that other stuff, that's kind of unknowable. Yeah, and it just really strikes me. There's other things that we do where we're like, I can do it a little bit, but I know that any amount is bad for me. And we're just, most people are not thinking of drinking that way.

You mentioned young people. There's been a lot of talk about Gen Z drinking less. This is, I don't know if this is an avocado toast thing or what. Like, is this a real phenomenon? or not? In a nutshell, it's broadly true that Gen Z is drinking less. It's probably not true quite to the degree that people think it is. The alcohol industry is worried about it, but actually reassured by some of the more recent trends that they've seen.

They're not thinking that they've, oh, no, we've lost Gen Z as a consumer block. They are still going to be able to sell alcohol to Gen Z. They might market it differently. It might be, you know, in like prefab cocktails in a can. and those brightly colored high AVV drinks you see. But the real issue there is that there is overall less drinking in society, but that has not really translated to fewer harms stemming from drinking. Obviously, the question at the end of the day is how many people are being harmed by this?

And despite increased awareness of alcohol's harms, despite lower drinking rates overall, and especially in that demographic, overall alcohol-related harms are still quite high. And we're talking about, you know, over five million emergency room visits per year. When you think about the strain that puts on hospitals, the health system overall, and that's the tip of the iceberg when you consider all the other harms we've been discussing. And when you look at 20-24 numbers, there were 5 million underage people who drank. And over half of 12 to 20-year-olds engaged in binge drinking, which is four or more drinks in a sitting for a woman, five or more for a man.

And so these numbers are pretty flat. You should say over half of 12 to 20 year olds? Over half of 12 to 20 year olds. Engage in binge drinking despite the drinking age being 21. And I'm not, I'm not your mom or whatever, but like that is higher than I expected. It's pretty much unchanged over time, even though there's been some decrease in like the 18 to 25 age bracket. It depends how you bracket it. right. But yeah, it hasn't dropped off as some people might expect. And as people get older,

they do tend to increase their consumption a bit. So yeah. And also it's worth remembering that women used to be an underperforming group for the alcohol industry. And then they developed all these kinds of canned cocktails and wine spritzers and things. And women's drinking basically caught up to men's and outpaced their male peers. And that's still happening. So marketing has a big effect on this. And Adam, obviously you're reacting to the 12 to 20 in that statistic. Also the 20, but yeah. Sure, but, you know, of course that heavy drinking is going to be more concentrated

toward the 20 than the 12. But if you ask public health experts and people who think about addiction medicine for a living, you know, when they can actually have an impact, the single thing they'll I'll tell you is that the more you can delay initial exposure to a substance and experimentation with a substance, the more you are able to avert over the course of an entire lifetime, these really severe harms we're talking about. So even if, you know, a 14-year-old is trying alcohol without necessarily binge drinking, their outcomes are going to be a lot better if they wait till 16 to try a drink and a lot better

than that if they wait until 18 or even to 20. Well, and you mentioned the marketing because there's all of these new, you know, canned and bottled drinks that did not exist 20 years ago. I mean, the first time I got drunk, it was on Zima, okay? My friend was like, if you drink four Zimas, you'll get drunk. We were in the woods on Long Island.

I was like 18 years old. And when I threw up, it was like a waterfall of clear liquid. It was like, it was just water coming out of me. It was bizarre. But, you know, at the time, Zima was like a punchline, right? And it ceased to exist a couple years later.

You know, I remember being told in a health class about watch out for wine cooling. but these were a niche product, right? But now, if you go look at what a 22-year-old is drinking, I don't know what the stats are about beer versus other things, but you look at white claws, cut water, buzz balls, like these products are all over the place. There's an incredible amount of innovation in the alcohol space

with the drinks that are being made and how they're being marketed, with the clear intention of selling more to different types of people who wouldn't have drank before, right? Like, I mean, White Claws hit the L.A. comedy writer scene like a nuclear bomb. People were suddenly, oh, a white, it's a celtzer. It's just like a La Croy. See my La Croy right here? I just got a little bit of booze in it.

And suddenly, oh, by the pool, yeah, I wouldn't have a beer, but I'll have a White Claw. Like, it widens the amount of situations and the number of people. who will start drinking, right? And you mentioned, actually, wait, before I move on to my next question, do you have any comments on that specifically? No, you're right. I mean, the people who study this for a living

have been extremely concerned about so-called alco-pops and how they might appeal to younger people or bring people into the drinking fold. There was a study from a researcher that asked people about the first time they blacked out. This was a few years back, but, you know, For Loco and those types of really high ABV drinks that you can get for cheap are our main target, obviously, because young people don't have a lot of money and are trying to get drunk. But there's been some regulation of For Loco, mostly for the caffeine content, but there's still a lot of, like, widely available super high alcohol products out there on the market.

My version of your first drinking incident, Adam, was with four. Loco and I became exposed to alcohol right around the time that the caffeine in it was banned. And for whatever reason, that was a huge part of the allure. Oh, you can drink this giant can of booze. And it also kind of gets you jacked up in a caffeine way in addition to getting you very, very drunk. And I don't know why, but as a teenager, there was just something that, you know, you tell a teenager not to do something.

And the first thing it will do is try to do it. And there was something really, really true in four loco specifically. And yeah, as Isabella is saying, that's even more true today with these essentially custom marketed drinks for young people. You know, these buzz balls are, they're bright green, they're extremely eye-catching. You're not going to see, you know, someone ordering them at a professional happy hour, but clearly they exist. There's a market for them for a reason. Yeah, it's funny. I see them for sale in like the, you know, nice L.A. supermarket for old people that I go to because it's the closest one to me.

and they're like in there next to the wine they got the buzz balls and I'm like we're not at a gas station off the side of the highway like I can't believe they're selling this stuff and I also remember that moment that For Loco when they banned the caffeine content because younger people around me

I was already too old to drink that shit at that point but younger people around me were like oh four Locos is different now it's not as good as it used to be because they took the caffeine people were sad about it now we got to go back to Red Bull and vodka and mix them Fuck. Well, you mentioned, you know, people starting early.

Again, that reminds me of cigarettes. It reminds me of, you know, I grew up around Joe Camel is designed to hook children early to an addictive substance. And, you know, again, people can still smoke, but we were like, let's get that fucking away from the kids. And we, like, did a big societal effort about that because we knew that it's an addictive drug. Alcohol, we haven't mentioned yet, is also addictive. And if I can monologue for just a second, I know I've been doing that quite a lot, but I do have opinions about this.

I quit drinking for six years a number of years ago. About a year ago, I started again a little bit. I have one every now and again. But the reason I quit drinking was I was not what anybody ever would have described as an alcoholic. I was not blacking out. Nobody in my life thought I was a problem drinker. I just realized, oh, I've had like two to three drinks a night, like every night for the past like 12 years.

And I'm free-pouring bullet into a rocks glass. So I'm not having two. I'm having four, right? And I just read an article by some personal essay by someone who quit drinking. And they described themselves as addicted. And I was like, I experienced this too, what this person is writing about. I think I am addicted. And to me, I realized it felt very much like when I quit smoking.

where I literally went, there's a book by Alan Carr called The Easy Way to Quit to Quit that I read and quit. I went and read his same book about alcohol. And it worked just as well. And I quit for six years and everything in my life got better. When I started sleeping better immediately, thought I needed to sleep, I didn't, etc. And what that really underlined for me was literally like I had quit smoking. I had quit taking amphetamines in the form of Adderall.

I felt addicted to both of those things. And then I went another decade or so before realizing I was addicted to alcohol in this low-grade way. I've never been to AA, you know, again, but I was physically addicted. And now I phase it back in. I have a drink every now and again.

In the same way, I have a cigarette every now and again. But I'm not doing, I'm like making sure I don't reach that same point, right? All of this is to say, what I felt after that experience was looking around American society, I'm like a lot more people

are addicted to alcohol than think that they are. You know? Like our conversation about alcoholism in this country is the joke that I used to do on stage was you know, we have two categories. If you're an alcoholic, oh, you're a poor soul.

You've got to go sit in that basement under the church and drink coffee from the tiny cup and you can never have a drink again for the rest of your life. But if you're a moderate, drinker, that's everybody else, and you can have as much as you want. If you're a moderate drinker, there's no rules. So what have you guys found, now monologue over, about like drinking

addiction or dependence in American society that might surprise folks? Strongly agree with the monologue, Adam. As a country, we tend to believe in this binary where you either have a problem or you don't. And if you don't, you don't. And let's not worry about it. The concept of addiction in this space is interesting because, you know, it's a psychological and psychiatric diagnosis. And the working definition is essentially, it's not about having a dependence physiologically on a substance. Addiction is when that substance and its role in your life starts to have negative consequences in other parts of your life, when it starts affecting your work and your relationships and your family, that is when it progresses into the

territory of addiction. And I think one thing, though, that's so interesting about this whole conversation and part of the reason that we pursued this series is that you don't have to meet criteria for an addiction for alcohol to severely harm your life and harm your health. And your experience, Adam, is a minority one where essentially you decide that even if no one considers you, quote, an alcoholic, you want to reshape your relationship with alcohol. You want to cut it out for a while, in your case for years. And then you can return in moderation. No, I mean, people are really led to believe in many cases. If you want to stop drinking, that's it. You're never going to consume a drop of alcohol again in your life. A big part of that is alcoholics anonymous. We can

talk more about that. But, you know, there is not really tiered, nuanced intervention for people who want to reshape their relationship with alcohol. There tends to be a point of reckoning where you decide you have a problem and vow to never drink again, which really doesn't work for a lot of people, or you proceed as you were. And the fact that there's no gray area, I think really is harmful to a lot of people who aren't ready to quit forever, but really could benefit from how having two drinks a night instead of eight. Just to give some numbers here, the estimates are that about 10% of teens and adults in the U.S.

meet the criteria for an alcohol use disorder, so for actual alcohol addiction. And the majority of people with a diagnosable alcohol use disorder don't receive treatment. That makes sense when you think about going to the doctor and the kind of conversation you have about your alcohol use and how a lot of people lie or don't really take that conversation seriously. their provider doesn't really follow up when they say two to four or whatever.

So we're really missing a lot of the people in between who could use some help to think critically about their alcohol use but are scared of being lumped into, you know, the category of a problem. Yeah, the lack of tears in sort of all phases of it in our just daily conversation medically. that's the issue is that we don't have any framework for having a little bit of a dependence. I mean, the moment for me that I realized was I framed it for myself as, oh, I'm afraid of going a day without having a drink. Like, I have a fear of that day. And I have a fear of like that I won't enjoy my life anymore if I were to go one day without drinking. and because I had quit smoking and I had the same feeling

I was like oh it's the same fucking thing it tricked me into thinking that's what life is all about and I have to have it and even though I'm not like killing myself with it it's you know it's I have been fooled by the substance and a lot of that was because

that's the same way my parents drank oh just one or two a night just a nightcap have a nightcap don't worry about have a nice scotch what's wrong with that and like my whole family as a result of me doing that. You know, we started to have a conversation about it. My parents cut back as well.

And now our whole family's in the same boat. Now we have a lot less than we used to, but nobody's a detoteler, right? And now I think there's a lot of people for whom teetotal is the only option, right? If I have one, I have 20. I know people like that in my life who, like, I'm like, please God, I will, you know, if I see a beer in your hand, I'm going to be like, dude, what the fuck? Because I know, I know what your history is. But it's the lack of conversation for anybody below that that is so odd.

Why do you guys think that is? I mean, apart from, you know, corporate pressure and blah, blah, blah. Well, I'll give what I think is an interesting example of this. There's a medication naltrexone, which has a lot of applications, some in eating disorders, some in opioid addiction. I would argue its most impactful use is treating alcohol use disorder and helping people reduce their drinking. You would think, knowing that there's a medication that is common and cheap and generic and really anyone can get it, any doctor can prescribe it, you would think that it was

very commonly used to help people cut back on their drinking. And it's not. And one of the reasons it's not is there has been a lot of resistance to the idea that people who need help with their drinking should cut back as opposed to cutting it out entirely. So for a long, time, particularly in Alcoholics Anonymous circles, someone who said, hey, I view myself as this success story because I was having eight or ten drinks a night and then I started taking altrexone. It helped me first get down to four and now down to two and then one. And there's some days I don't drink at all. You would think, you know, from a public health perspective, that's really, that's an achievement. That's something worth celebrating. That person is at far lower risk

from a variety of harms. But I don't want to paint with too broad a brush. Every meeting is different. Alcoholics Anonymous has really evolved a lot recently, but for a long time, that person was not viewed as a success. That person was viewed as someone who is not yet sober. And also when you think about our failure overall to have good conversations about addiction, it makes sense. I mean, a lot of medical providers of all kinds are not really trained in addiction medicine. I think that's changed over time as we've seen things like the opioid epidemic. And they realize, oh, this is coming into my office every single day. But still, there's not this acknowledgement, especially with something like alcohol, that it is impacting

patients' health, that it's going to affect their long-term trajectory, their medication adherence, their ability to, like, eat healthfully and exercise and all these other things, hold down a job. And so historically, people were screened once it was very serious. Once they had been hospitalized, they've gotten into a car accident. and whatever, it was meant to catch those severe, quote-unquote, alcoholics. Now it shifted more toward just screening the general population and trying to detect those who are at greater risk, but it's still very patchy. The comfort the physicians have talking to their patients is not even across the board.

A lot of them are scared of coming across as patronizing or being, you know, too much in their patient's business or whatever. you know, they get a bad rap for talking about a lot of things. I think about BMI being one of those. They're quicker to call you fat than tell you that you should cut back on a drink or two a night, right? It's touchy, yeah. And so I think it's a lot of those things combined as well as the consumer awareness, not really being there. Yeah, I wonder if part of it is that legacy of Alcoholics Anonymous and then going back to the temperance movie.

where, you know, we really see alcohol addiction as this kind of moral stain that is like a moral failing or a poor soul sort of thing. Oh, oh, I'd hate to be you. Like, oh, you got to go, you got to go stay at the mission house or whatever because you've got this problem that you can't be taken care of. And, you know, the temperance movement, I think, is a really interesting. I'd love to do an episode on it, actually, because I'm a lot. I think it's a story that we often don't tell fully because it really was a good faith attempt

by a lot of women to be like, hey, you know, the men are getting drunk and they're like murdering us a lot. You know, it might be good if they did that less. And that was a real issue. But it was also a religious movement, right? It was bound up and all that. And Alcoholics Anonymous, the criticism that you hear most often is that it is a religious group that you do have to profess belief in some sort of higher power, which, you know, you can be loosey-goosey depending on how progressive you want to be, but it's still, you know,

it's still in the book, right? And so, and I think it's really interesting when you compare it to, like, the anti-drug 80s, where using an illegal drug at all was considered to be the bad thing. Like, oh, if you do heroin, then you're a drug user. If you take a little painkiller that your doctor prescribed you, you're not, right? It's the type. with alcohol, it's like the quantity. And so it's sort of if you tell someone, hey, you might want to cut back a little bit,

you're accusing them of being an alcoholic, which is putting them in a category that is very extreme and has a moral dimension to it. Does that seem like part of the problem here? Yeah, you implicate yourself, right? If you are a moderate drinker and you suggest to someone else who doesn't quite feel, fit the criteria of being an alcoholic, of having a problem. If you suggest that they should cut back on their drinking, then all of a sudden, you and everyone else who exist in that gray area are up for scrutiny, and that's very uncomfortable. And I think that's a lot of what drives this binary,

that we really don't want to consider ourselves as all being on this spectrum of drinking and then experiencing alcohol-related harms. We want to think about it as I don't, but they do. And therefore they have a problem and they need to work on that, it really implicates us in an uncomfortable way if we open up the conversation to moderate drinking, being harmful. Live shopping on WhatNot is exploding. According to What Not, the number of sellers making over $1 million on What Not has doubled in the last year. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, full time or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge. You're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in your door. Well, Whatnot flips that.

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All good. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, and we host a show, what's our podcast here on Headgum? This podcast is brought to you by Square Spang. Squarespace is the all-on-one website platform designed to help you stand out and make you look like a, kick-ass person online. Like you're skateboarding through the internet. Or you're surfing through the web.

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do I need another type of website to like find the right pictures or like another type of website to upload the like... It's all in one place. The video or the audio or like... No, I want, it makes it easy on me, please. Yes, and you can do all those things, photos, videos, changing fonts. Isn't that I mean, the designs are amazing? They're catering to all your different needs.

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I don't mean to cast aspersions at all on it. But I think that's what people imagine it to be. And therefore, to admit one has a problem is to, like, admit something horrible about oneself. Or to admit that one should cut back at all. And to, you actually just reminded me of a story where a number of years ago, I talked about my own, you know, moderate drinking and quitting. And I told that joke that I mentioned earlier. I used to do it as part of my act in stand-up. I never recorded it, but I did that for about a year and a half.

And I was performing, I think this was in Boston, actually. I was doing that part of the show, and a guy starts shouting from the back. He starts going, are you Kerry Nation? Are you Carrie Nation? Which the whole crowd was like, what the fuck is going on? Carrie Nation, if you remember, is the prohibitionist who, like, you know, was one of the most famous temperance movement activists who was, like, you know, attacking barrels of booze with axes or what. whatever. And the guy, the security had to take him out. And, and like, I was literally just sharing

my story. I didn't tell anybody what they should do, right? I was just like telling my story and saying, hey, maybe think about it a little bit or whatever. And he had this really violent reaction to me bringing, as the only time I've ever, I've talked about a lot of weird stuff on stage, the only time I've ever gotten a reaction like that. So people really, like, can take offense to the idea that, hey, maybe just a little bit less would be good for you. Yeah, it's very emotional and very fraught for many of us. I mean, I've had friends who were like, I hate that you publish this series because I'm going to have to read it as your friend, but I don't want to know this information.

And so I get it. And I think it's also worth acknowledging a few things, one of which is AA has helped many, many, many people. And so it does work for many folks. and we are not saying throw this out, we're just pointing out that AA is not actual treatment. It is peer support and the treatment aspect is lacking in the U.S. Another thing worth pointing out is that when we're comparing alcohol to other substances like opioids, it's not apples to apples because of the way that we consume it, right?

And so alcohol consumption is often sort of the decision is made in, in the moment, in this sort of knee-jerk way, it's available everywhere. Your friends are doing it with you. You're not really sitting. You're not having to like really conspire that much to acquire it most of the time. And so the amount of thought and time that goes into the whole process from like having the thought, I want to have a drink to actually doing it is very abbreviated. It's literally harder to not drink in America.

Like if you want to not drink at all, you are saying no to people a half a dozen times a day. and it's uncomfortable most of those times. It's much easier simply, yeah, well, yeah, sure, give me one, thank you. People are just putting it in your hand. You walk down the street almost, and someone puts a glass of wine in your hand, right? Yeah, and so the amount of forethought is very different, and that's important to remember. As well as the potential risks, as we talked about a lot when we're reporting this, usually people are not alive one moment and dead the next from drinking,

but that does happen with substances like fentanyl, and that is really important and urgent and should be addressed. But we also think the long-term gradual risk from alcohol is important to talk about, too. So talk to me a little bit more about, you said AA is all support. I think that's a really interesting distinction versus actual treatment. You know, what would a, you know, what would more treatment look like in our country, either on the individual level or as a public health response? Yeah, I want to second Issa in adding nuance to the conversation

about AA because it has helped genuinely millions of people. There are millions of people who credit AA with essentially saving their lives. And also to give credit word due, that movement has really evolved recently. And you can go to a lot of meetings where there is a lot of nuance in conversations about moderation and reduced drinking. And maybe it's not their favorite thing. But, you know, of course, there's more of a recognition than there used to be that one drink or two drinks is better than five drinks or 10 drinks.

But yeah, real alcohol treatment, real treatment for alcohol use disorder or addiction is pretty hard to come by. If you're actually talking to a physician who you're asking to prescribe you a medication or some type of licensed therapist or even just peer support specialist who's working with you in a more structured way in a more professional way. So the lack of genuine treatment infrastructure is a problem across the board for substance use in the U.S. But I think especially so in the alcohol realm. And Adam, maybe one thing we should talk about actually is GLP1s because people think of those as weight loss medications. But that's something that as we speak is really transforming the alcohol addiction treatment landscape. Yeah, tell me more about how they're doing that. Well, essentially there's a lot that remains unknown about these medications and the specific mechanisms through which they work.

But one thing that is very, very clear is that they are totally rewiring people's brains in the way we experience pleasure and our reward circuitry. That applies, of course, to food and people's desire to eat junk food or large portions or frankly just eat at all. people are just eating so much less when they take these medications. And, you know, that is in a sense, that is the point. But it's also clearly true for alcohol. And there are various companies that have GLP-1s in various stages of clinical trials that they want to market specifically for alcohol use disorder. But if you go, for instance, to the American Society of Addiction Medicines Annual Conference, all of those doctors pretty much, much are already prescribing GLP1s or at the very least know that if they did, it would be effective for their patients whose problem is not a metabolic disease like obesity or diabetes, but in fact, an addiction, a substance use disorder, it is very clear that GLP1s are helpful in reducing people's desire to drink. And, you know, in the words of a physician I talk to a lot, obliterate cravings. Wow. I mean, that's really fascinating.

and we did an episode a year or maybe a year and a half back with Drew F color about, you know, the potential of these medications that we're just finding out about. But the lack of, like, a clear place to go, I think is really clear. Like, I know that if I, if a friend of mine was like, hey, I'm hooked on heroin and I really want to get off, I'd be like, isn't there something called a methadone clinic you can go to? And there's like a, someone will give it. I've at least heard of this. I don't know what they do there, but, you know,

so there'll be some medical supervision and you'll get some help. And I have some idea of that as being a medical thing, right? That there's a place to go. I wouldn't know what that is for alcohol, right? Even though, like, even before GLP ones, there were medications that could help, right? Naltrexone? I'm saying it wrong, but... No, you got it.

Okay, great. Oh, wow. And that's what I like to do on the show is I like to mispronounce. something and then get approval from the guest. Just to boost my ego. We should go through all the pharmaceutical names and just run through them. Okay. Imagine that you were, you know, running the Maha agenda or, you know, Robert F. Kennedy,

Jr., you know, imagine you went and, you know, picked up a diseased deer with him on the side of the road and he remembered you a couple decades later and you went on the right podcasts and you found yourself somehow in charge of the... substance abuse, one of the agencies in America, right? What would you put into place on a public health level, right, that we could be doing as a nation that we're not doing? That wouldn't stop people from drinking altogether, would take an actual evidence-based approach to.

We're just trying to, you know, do harm reduction here and save lives, you know, progressively more and more year over year. Well, I will say that we are, we're reporters, we're not advocacy. get so I'll tell you what the people who work in this realm, who are the real experts told us. Great. One of which is you could really just use the bully pulpit, use the platform you have to speak clearly about alcohol and its risks. So that is step number one. We have a whole Surgeon General's office that in the Biden administration released a report on alcohol and cancer, which really raised the profile of this headline. That's why we started seeing it everywhere

a couple years ago, you could use that same mechanism as well as the other federal health agencies to do all kinds of public messaging campaigns, billboards, et cetera. This summer, actually, the New York City Public Health Department did a $1 million campaign about the cancer risks from alcohol and it got like tens of millions of views on the subways and everything else. That kind of stuff is really powerful because we are constantly flooded with messaging from the alcohol companies. brands. If you watch the World Cup, it's completely, you know, wall to wall. And so even just

countering that messaging somewhat can be really effective. Taxes, raising taxes on alcohol, making it more expensive to drink is like one of the top recommendations shown to be effective to reduce population levels of drinking, as well as improving that labeling. So you know, if I'm having this beer or that beer, this is exactly how many calories I'm consuming. This is the EBV. this is, you know, you have a better calculation of what's actually going into your body. And then we get into the actual, like, public health side of this. We have all these systems that we built to monitor for things like suicide risk or opioid overdoses. That was a result of President Trump declaring a public health emergency for the

opioid crisis where all this money got unleashed. And they built all these data systems where they can say there's a cluster of drug overdoses happening in this neighborhood. And we need to send public health workers there and talk to people and distribute Narcan. You can do something similar for alcohol, where if there are people who are in the emergency room, for example, for an alcohol-related cause, can you follow up with them a few days later and tell them, do you want some treatment? Do you want an ultrexone?

Do you feel like you have a problem? Like, what's going on? And so you can leverage that sort of stuff to have a more robust public health response. But I talked to a bunch of, you know, county public health leaders, and city public health leaders, and they're like, overdoses are the main thing. It's like that is the whackamol that keeps coming up. That's what we're told to focus on. It's what we have dedicated money for. There are people dying on the sidewalks. I need to do something about that. Alcohol is kind of a far-off concern. So that's where like

prioritizing it on the national level is really, really important where you say you need to work on this as a city, a state, whatever, we'll give you money to work on this. So those are a few ideas we heard. Love, I think you should share a little bit from your side covering addiction. There are also people dying on the sidewalks of alcohol, quite literally, but we just treat those as normal. And the top, the leader of the, you know, the biggest like drug administration in the U.S. told me that. She's like, if we actually address alcohol, it would really help with all of the drug overdose problems we have in the U.S. because oftentimes, in many cases, people have both fentanyl and alcohol in their system,

or cocaine and alcohol. And so you can kind of chip away from the other angle as well. Right. Lev, please. Adam, you use the phrase harm reduction, and I think that's really critical. There is a way to communicate to people that you can reduce harm and risk from alcohol without telling them that you're judging them for their drinking and that you expect them to just stop. There are a few examples of this in the U.S.

that most of the good examples are from other countries, but Vermont's public health department, for instance, has a campaign called One Less. And it kind of is as simple as it sounds. If you're going to have seven, try to have six. If you're going to have three, try to have two. No matter how many drinks you're going to end up having that night, find a point at which you can encourage yourself to just have one less.

And I think that type of messaging, I think that type of information about reducing harm, and reducing risk without being prescriptive, without telling people stop drinking alcohol now and absolutely and forever, can be really effective and would really go a long way. In terms of all these outcomes, we're talking about, you know, acute alcohol deaths, but then also the cardiovascular stuff and the metabolic stuff, and all of these other impacts that sometimes take years or decades to emerge.

But eventually we would see the results. So what you're telling me is a tip that I tell people sometimes that I first heard from John August, podcaster and screenwriter, was have a club soda in between booze, right? In between alcoholic drinks, have a club soda. Like, just you can still keep drinking. Just have a club soda, too. Space it out.

Like, even something that simple would have, like, a noticeable public health. Hey, drink water in between. Would be a pretty good public health ad campaign, maybe. It could be anything, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, now researchers call that zebra striping. So you can do with that information what you will. Wait, is that good or bad that is called zebra striping?

Well, it's just a term that they use for alcoholic drink, non-alcoholic drink, alcoholic drink, not alcohol. Okay. There's a science term for it now. I want to hear the tone of voice they have when they say it, because maybe it's not the best strategy. I don't know. I think you make a good point that like because it's not always an acute

problem like fentanyl is, for instance, that means that it's invisible, but it more often, but it also means, hey, a progressive change, like cutting back by a fifth means cutting back deaths by a fifth or whatever, which is, that's sort of good news. I guess my last question is, you know, we often think of alcohol as having this sort of like special place in human society, you know. First, it's probably the only drug that like every civilization probably discovered independently, right? Because you leave some fruit out to rot and it's going to turn into booze. You know, like, you're just going to figure it, sugar becomes alcohol when left in the sun or whatever.

Don't leave it in the sun. You know what I'm saying. Fermentation creates alcohol. And so we almost have this idea that like it's just part of what our species does, you know, on this deep level. But it's also, you know, something that is pushed on us by a massive, you know, capitalization. system of a couple of worldwide conglomerates pushing their product on us so they can make more money. So how can we adjust like the conversation that we have with each other societally about alcohol in order to, you know, improve our relationship with it? Yeah, there are all sorts of things we

do that are maybe good socially, but not optimal for us in terms of our physical health, the health of our bodies. And I think alcohol is maybe one of those things. I'm, I mean, actually fairly sympathetic to the argument that, you know, humans are kind of bumbling awkward creatures and to have a glass of wine on a first date is, you know, going to help the conversation flow a lot better. There is a way that people use alcohol to form social connections that I am on a personal level, not inherently opposed to. I think it's really just about arming people with information and getting to a point where, as a society, we view alcohol the way we view junk food, or per your example, cigarettes.

This is something that can be an indulgence. This is something that we don't have to excise entirely from our society. But also, we're going to be aware of its really, really negative health effects. And we have to bear that in mind in deciding how big of a role we want it to plan our lives. One of the things that reporting this has done for, I think, both of us, is just changed the way that we look at our surroundings. Like just being aware of how much alcohol there is, how much it is central to our lives, our economies. You know, there's so many think pieces recently about bars, you know, mom and pop bars dying because people are drinking less.

It's like it's just interesting to think about why we built all these systems where alcohol is like the main way that we drive profit in those local businesses is like one of the main ways we celebrate or relax or whatever. Like all of these things that we just take for granted. as part of the landscape, I think are deserving of scrutiny and deserving of just having deeper conversations about them. And then people can make more informed choices about what they want to do. Well, thank you guys so much for starting that conversation or continuing it with your work. Tell us where people can find the series. Statnews.com. It's called the deadliest drug. Thank you so much for having us, Adam. Isabella and Lev, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks so much, Adam. We appreciate it. Well, thank you once again to Isabella Quito and Lev Fasher for coming on the show. Head to stat news.com to check out their series, and we will, of course, link it in the show notes and in the description of the YouTube video. If you want to support this show directly and all the fantastic week conversations we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Con, over five bucks a month. Get you every episode of this show ad-free. We are also doing bonus podcast episodes, really fun interviews with creators that I'm excited to talk to. We're doing a lot of cool other stuff.

We've got an online community. We'd love to have you join Patreon.com slash Adam Conover. For 15 bucks a month, I will read your name in the credits of this very show. Let me pull up my little list here. This week, I want to thank Dakota Tevis, Virginia Beckenbauer, Rebecca Chompah, Christina Karanta, Sarar, Troy Stifler, and Fakriton, Ibrahimov. If you would like me to read your name or still the username at the end of the show, once again, patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

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