Sadly, found out my niece has been getting blacked out drunk in college repeatedly. In one of the videos she showed me, she probably consumed more alcohol in a 5-second clip than I have in 2 years. Just a bottle of Tito’s, and she just chugged it.
Older Millennial here, they are right, too bad people my age didn’t get the memo. Never understood, even back in school, why getting plastered is celebrated.
Because… well… points around in multiple directions
That’s not going to make anything better though. You’ll just go down a path of addiction and self-destruction. Plus it’s expensive.
Thing is- it’s the boomers that pushed things like the 21 to drink laws and the absurdly strict enforcement of them (like sending a parent to jail if their kid has a party).
You guys spent a few decades decrying teenage drinking, making it hard for teens to drink. And now you all are shocked when kids do something else.
Don’t forget- nicotine is 18+ not 21+. So chances are every high schooler has a friend or a sibling that can get them vapes.
Vapes are small. Many don’t look like anything in particular to someone who doesn’t know what they are. And they are easy to hide, easy to conceal, easy to transport, AND easy to use throughout the day.
So for a substance for kids to get into, it’s got a lot of advantages over alcohol.Plus which vaping is much more common to do alone. Kids are spending far less time on in-person social interactions now (probably because boomers flipped out over stranger danger).
Millennial here, been drinking heavy for 20+ years. Young generation missing out. But at the same time I respect the decision
Vaping isn’t a great alternative. Pick your poison. Fapping on the other hand… don’t sleep on edible cannabis either
The main reason I’ve decided to abstain from alcohol is because I’ve seen first-hand what alcoholism does to a person. I’ve don’t want to end like my dad.
Same! I’m Gen-X and promised myself at age 4 when I witnessed my dad was always stumbling into the house drunk & ill & scary, I have no desire to put any poison into my body. Still never have and never will.
If alcohol guarantees death at 60 like my alcoholic narcissistic pos dad, I think I’ll just keep drinking. Other drugs too because I’m not a fucking square like he was :). If you have someone (even if it’s just you) to protect from yourself, I completely understand. edit: shit, if you have another good reason, that’s cool too. I’m drunk.
Yeah. I’m not a Boomer I’m GenX, but as I get older I come to realize - poisoning myself with alcohol is becoming more & more appealing. Life sucks.
We found better poisons.
Tide pods?
Too awful tasting.
Well… you would know
Sleep aids work but suck if you fail. That’s what I tried doing.
we must know different people
This is all part of the puritanical shift that’s happening in some Gen Z circles, this post can’t be talking about millennials. I saw an article a few months ago that stated millennials were the drunkest generation and that while Gen Z as a whole drink less there has been a strong uptick in their consumption recently. Can’t imagine why they might have started drinking more, well besides you know the everything happening in the world
If weed is legal drinking goes down.
I wonder if it’s people living in weed “dry” states that are the current outliers.
Well here in the Netherlands it was Covid that did in the student drinking culture and apparently it just never bounced back.
Its most probably also inflation. Now i spend 2-3x more
This is exactly it. South Carolina is full of sloppy alcoholics and the alcohol lobby spends a lot of money to keep it that way. They’ll be the last in the country to legalize.
Texas is always in a race for last place too
That’s absolutely part of it. Here in Wisconsin the Tavern League has outsized influence and we still don’t have legal weed and we lead the country in drinking. Although I’ve been seeing more and more of those THC drinks. I’m not sure what kind of loophole those slip through, but they seem popular.
Weed drinks and gummies, largely. I can pick them up at woodmans in the liquor section, though come November I may need to stock up
The hemp loophole
Brought to you by a senate who didnt read their own bill in 2018
man do i miss woodmans
Damn y’all don’t even have medical, always thought you guys would follow us here in Michigan relatively quickly as our states have very similar politics but I didn’t think about big beer lobbying.
Is there a line of dispensaries on the border in illinois then like we have here for all the ohio and indiana people coming to buy weed?
We’re surrounded by legal states too. We buy their weed and they buy our fireworks.
Yeah, at least there’s one set up in South Beloit. It’s more expensive than Michigan though and has a much stricter limit on what you can buy as a non resident. We went that route before, but the grey area stuff I can get at the grocery store is much more convenient. I’d do Michigan but it’s a bit farther of a drive than Illinois. Maybe I’ll grab stuff next time I head to pictured rocks
Why don’t we have it? Wisconsin got gerrymandered to hell for a decade. The Supreme Court is now left leaning and is breaking the gerrymander, so hopefully we can get legalization of some sort soon
They’re derived from hemp, which became federally legal a few years back. It’s the same chemical (d9-THC) that’s found in cannabis indica and sativa, but it’s present in such low quantities in hemp that it takes wayyyyyy more plant matter to extract enough.
You’d think it would be the active ingredient that is regulated, not the actual plant.
It is! THC is the regulated chemical. delta-9 is a different molecule which was made federally legal as a result of allowing hemp farming
If delta-9 is a different molecule but still an active ingredient, then not all the active ingredients are regulated. And these “thc” drinks are lying.
It’s possible they’ve only recently started earning enough to be able to afford booze.
A chunk of them still aren’t old enough to buy alcohol. Of course the stats will go up as they become old enough to buy it.
In this economy?
Moonshine is about to make a glorious comeback
Lol I remember that being a thing with millennials 10 years ago
I never understood why
But then I remembered millenials (and I am one who probably leaned toward a hipster when I was young) love old timey weird stuff
drives away on his penny farthing
I made it in college because I was broke as fuck.
Fair enough
Gen Z is lost to the manosphere and homesteading. Those are used to push right wing puritanical propaganda. I really hope they snap out of it.
…homesteading?
There’s a massive uptic in what is functionally decentralized religious cult homesteading
Homesteading on its own sounds good. But when you look into why it’s catching on right now. It’s basically just religious indoctrination, manospehere, paranoia, racism, sexism, and conspiracy theories.
The “crunchy life style” is a big source of this.
It’s basically living off grid, eating what you raise. It mainly draws in women by pushing traditional gender roles propaganda.
Acting a fool in public today means high chance someone records a video of you at your worst.
I would doubt that fact about millennials without a source to back it up. It just doesn’t track with experience, but I could definitely be wrong.
Agreed, the only people I know who drink regularly are boomers and I as a millennial only ever drink when I’m around those boomers.
You know what else we also didn’t poison ourselves with at anywhere NEARLY as high a level as boomers did? Lead.
Now we just consume lead trough plant based protein supplements
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/16/nx-s1-5576294/protein-powder-lead-consumer-reports
But that’s mostly because the US supplements industry is an unregulated disaster.
“trough”? That’s a new one to add to this thing:
English is a tough language. It can be mastered through thorough thought though, while you sit next to a trough.
will do. starting… now
They will take pills in their 30s to fight depression anyway
Laughs in British.
By the time Americans are trying alcohol for the first time, some of us are straight up alcoholics and have been trying to quit for several years.
I would say a majority of Americans drink long before they turn 21. I have friends who experienced exactly what you’re talking about
Yeah, we’re going to let you have this one
IDK, with the amount of drunk driving in the US I’ve always wondered if we shouldn’t flip the two so that people have experience with how alcohol affects them before they have the ability to get behind the wheel of a car.
Weird flex.
You can recover by telling us we’re dumb for building houses out of wood, or calling us fat.
Americans don’t even build houses out of wood anymore, we build houses out of plastic and sawdust.
Ooh! Ooh! Make a school shooter joke! Those are always a hit!
Well yes, there are several other policies and mannerisms of yours besides the 21-year-old MLDA that are quite frankly inscrutable to me.
I see a lot of ridiculouness tv show every day. The american culture like opening cans with their teeth on the side of the can and throwing themselves onto tables and from roofs is completely insane. Nobody even bats an eye.
Is our wooden house situation old-hat now? It seems like the problem is just going to get worse as time goes on
Nah dude we should be building heavy stone houses despite one of our coasts being highly prone to earthquakes, the entire middle of our country prone to tornadoes and only a small section of the east coast being suitable for heavy stone houses! We should be willing to be crushed to death in an earthquake or take a fat rock to the head during a tornado so they can’t talk about this anymore!!
Woah wooden houses are totally resistant to all those situations and even more! I’m certain that’s why we build so many and leave them empty across every biome in the country.
!!! Fuck I forgot to add all these. Just sprinkle em in as you please
Denmark that has been topping the drinking charts among 15-16 year olds almost every year this century:
Its so expensive how can this be?
We got a solution for that: Drink until you forget how much you paid.
It’s not hard to get liquor as a teen in the US and it’s underground. I was drinking too vomiting just about every weekend throughout highschool. I doubt that’s going on as much with a 5% lager in a pub, and I don’t see clubs tolerating it that much.
I’d be interested in seeing numbers on which produce more alcoholics. Coming from the latter, the former would have been much safer and better overall🤷♂️.
Some on the continent have been legally drinking since 16, and illegally since earlier than that
Majority is teens; but frankly, there are instances where children drink. At least hard liquor isnt as popular as relatively-low alcohol drinks.
Sadly, this doesn’t apply to Wisconsin.
The piper is coming. No I’m not defending alcohol, but the level of drug addiction among our young people is shocking. The amount of digital addiction is shocking. I work in youth crisis so I am not talking on my ass, most young people are addicts now. So it’s all fun to talk down about boomers who drank but holy fuck is this generation ever screwed.
While what you seen is definitely real, it may not be as bad as what you see as you work in the field of youth crisis. You see it so often as that is your job and it can skew your findings to be more to the negative side as people that are not having those issues likely aren’t going to a youth crisis center and therefore are not around you. Again, it is very much a thing, but you do have some unintended bias as that is what you do for a living.
You are assuming that my experience is limited to youth crisis.
I have 11 years of experience working in addiction,… My response to your cynicism is this… You can only truly understand the scope of the greater issues on all levels … And with all generations, once you’ve worked in the field. And it helps to have lived experience.
Edit: oh yeah I know, I’ll up vote the uninformed opinion, and I’ll downvote the person who works in the field and is an educated and trained and expert /s
If it helps, I gave you both updoots because the discussion was enlightening and mostly productive. :)
Go to your settings > scroll down to “Show Scores” > uncheck all that shit. You don’t need it. It’s a vestigial dark pattern from commercial social media design to keep you checking how well your comments are “scoring” as if that made any sense.
It should never have been surfaced to frontend of Lemmy.
Having a coping mechanism because we are not hopeful about the future is standard from my experience
Truth.
And that’s why it’s really not a contest, and we must forgive our parents’ generation and a few going back from there.
Not all of them are even old enough to buy it yet.
I’m honestly so concerned by the amount of energy drinks zoomers drink, plus the vaping. They’re less into downers, but fuck me they love those stimulants.
The vaping is depressing because it feels like all the gains made by anti-smoking have been eroded with more people smoking than ever before.
At least with Vaping there’s no second hand smoke iirc, so while it’s still bad for you it doesn’t damage the people around you too thus it’s more of a personal choice
I personally don’t mind vaping, since many smokers switched to vaping and people who vape don’t emit a passive aura of stench.
I’ve binned off both but personally it’s the cigarettes I miss, especially straights. Vaping just tastes cloying as fuck to me now, it’s so strongly flavoured if you’re vaping a lot you become totally nose-blind to it.
Thing is, the vaping is so much worse for heavy metals, so were going to have to dedicate a huge amount of resources treating people for that since it is actually so unchecked
I personally don’t care whether vaping is worse for the person doing it than smoking. The thing I do care about is that vaping affects other people much less than smoking does.
Right, but how are you measuring that? Vaping is far less addressed than tobacco cigarettes are and whatever health effects there may be could be broad enough in the coming decades to stress healthcare systems, and it has facilitated an entire industry of disposable coils and batteries used to power the things, which then just get chucked wherever. It’s maybe less harmful in terms of second hand smoke, though I haven’t read any study to confirm that, but that isn’t the only way harm is caused.
No it’s not. The articles on that study severely misrepresented the results. Everything was under OSHA levels, significantly lower than what’s in cigarettes, and a few were lower than atmospheric levels.
The formaldehyde study and the glycerin break down study had methodologies so far outside of regular usage that they were designed to produce harmful products.
The popcorn lung scare was full of shit too. Diacetyl and acetyl proponol were only used in tiny amounts in recipes that needed a buttery flavor. Despite the levels being orders of magnitude higher in cigarettes, and the only recorded cases being industrial workers and a guy with a microwave popcorn huffing fetish, the industry dropped it.
The EVALI bullshit was black market THC carts cut with Vitamin E acetate.
The amount of false propaganda against vaping is staggering. It was cutting into tobacco tax revenue, so the FDA killed the industry that was focused on harm reduction.
Oh awesome, do you have any sources on that then?
Edit: I was seriously asking.
Ngl I have a problem with energy drinks… been trying to ditch them in favour of coffee
I was a heavy coffee drinker until they found my heart defect.
Now I have no caffeine, doctor’s orders, for 22 ish years now.
Sometimes I’ll sneak a sip of coffee if I have a migraine, it helps. But God help me I won’t sleep that night.
You don’t realize how much of a tolerance to and a dependence on caffeine that you build up, until you’re off of it for awhile, and try some again.
It really has a powerful effect on you, even if you don’t realize it right now.
If I drank an energy drink right now, after being dry for so long, my heart would definitely race and I doubt I’d sleep for two days.
I don’t miss caffeine though, honestly. I don’t wake up tired anymore, I just, wake up. And drink some water 🤷♂️ then go to work, feeling fine. Not amazingly energized, but not dragging either… Just… Normal 🤷♂️
Caffeine is a drug like anything else. If you can get off the stuff for awhile, say 6 months? I bet you’ll be amazed at how you feel, and you won’t go back.
The difference is incredible! I am not and never was a caffeine addict. I just drink from time to time and I enjoy the taste. But that “from time to time” is like once in 3 months. Or at least when I need energy and my sleep was short that night.
The difference is insane! It keeps me glued and moving the whole day. I come off work and I do things non stop. I can’t shut up. It doesn’t let me fall asleep quicker than usual (10-15min). It feels that it is a some sort of an enhancement drug.
I hope I will never require it most of the days so I won’t build tolerance. And I do not want to get addicted to energy drinks. If coffee is a mild enhancement drug, energy drink is a straight up poison mixed with cocaine.
I have ADHD and dont take the meds and im pretty sure without caffeine id just fall apart.
Is there a reason you don’t take the meds, like cost or something?
If not, you should definitely prioritize the meds, you’re going to build up a resilience to Caffeine faster and it’s like, so bad for you. I get it though, weed and caffeine are super common and effective forms of self-medication fot ADHD.
I can only get generic concerta on the NHS which does NOT work at all, sideeffects are not worth the impact it has. If I want to be in a medicated state I generally just obtain high quality speed paste and dose it at a theraputic level.
Jesus christ, and I thought Canadian healthcare was a shit show. From what I understand, lisdexafetamine (Vyanse) should also be covered by the NHS, though I’m not sure about what the requirements for generic brands are there. It’s much, much easier on you than something like concerts.
I want Vyvanse but cannot get it due to shortages, I know for a fact that amphetamines work well for me even mentioned it to my doctor that I’d tried them but alas. NHS is seemingly in a constant state of meltdown.
Also ADHD here, but perhaps a different blend? At any rate, I function 🤷♂️
Yeah I just about function, failed university and got kicked out but am able to hold down a job and pay rent thank fuck.