- The economy

I don't think anyone's making anything into a wedge issue in this discussion, except perhaps you.

Alcohol poisoning is a thing. I have yet to hear of a case of canabanoid poisoning. Canabanoids also don't lower your inhibition, which is why DUIs went down in states that legalized. The difference in risk could not be more stark.

That's a pretty big claim. Alcohol's harm to major organs like the liver is pretty well known. What kind of harm does THC/CBD cause when consumed orally?

Sorry, but what way do you think I feel about pot? I was just providing anecdotal examples to explain the reasoning of why pot being legal could have an impact on demand for wine. It’s just a demand curve relationship, not my personal opinions on the legality of pot.

For the pot smokers who care about legality, it does matter for folks who have to take drug tests for their jobs. Several of my good friends stopped using it when that was a concern.

I don’t know what GP is smoking. Most people do not maintain a relationship with a drug dealer. Legal access available from a convenient store front unlocks plenty of users who did not want the legal risk or hassle.

The biggest case you can follow is Canada. Even wine-drinking elderly sometimes switch to cannabis, due to lessened hangovers. Also, removing the friction is a huge boost to basically any industry.

I happily smoke pot while illegal if it happens to be around and someone else provided it and I don't have to drive that day or do anything the next day. I chipped in or did favors not to be a mooch but never bought it directly myself, nor posessed any. None in my car, my house etc.

So that means very infrequently. Depends how many and what kinds of parties I found myself at that year.

I totally like it, will not hesitate if conditions are right, and the only reason I stayed away not doing any more than that was it wasn't worth the risk.

Even today I don't risk it because sometimes I drive across many state lines and I don't want to worry about keeping track of where I might possibly get in trouble if I piss off a cop at a traffic stop, which I am likely to do.

I don't think it's so crazy that there are pot smokers that can take it or leave it. Merely, you would probably never have realized I was a pot smoker, because I don't talk about it all the time for no reason, or even think about it. We'd have to be not merely aquaintances, but we'd have to sometime be at the same party at the same time with the other conditions met. You can't count these people that you have no way to know to count.

Edibles/beverages are widely available now. Previously you'd have to purchase flower on the black market then use your home kitchen (which could be shared with your parents) to decarb and infuse it.

Maybe don't just think about pot smokers.

Before it was legalized people went down to the 7-11 to buy beer/wine all legal, maybe a bum to steer around.

They didn't want to get to know scuzzy dudes selling pot or driving to areas of town where at night they have street takeovers to score some pot.

Now those scaredy cats have legal dispensaries from which to obtain their MJ legally. So they might opt for pot these days.

There are definitely people who prefer it instead of alcohol

Consider that these people may not want to break the law or didn't know what their preference until they were legally able to try it.

There absolutely is a contingent of "wine mom" types who used to enjoy a glass of wine in the evenings but have transitioned to gummies or other edibles before bed.

I know several people who started drinking less and used pot more back when they were able to get their medical marijuana card. Now that it's legal here, I expect more people have done the same.

Not everyone is a hardcore binge drinker or an all-day-every-day pothead. There are lots of occasional-to-moderate users of both, and legalization of weed has increased availability for the casual user. There are many casual users nowadays who have never interacted with the illegal side of things, and never had a relationship with a dealer.

Weed is not a direct replacement for alcohol, but it can be a preferred alternative sometimes, for some people, and legalization has made that more attractive.

Question: what is the ratio of US wine imported into the EU vs US wine imported into Canada, by dollar value?

Question: what is the percentage increase in tariff amounts on wine between the pre- and post-USMCA state of play between the US and Canada?

Sometimes seeing why something has happened requires considering wider context, which is why it's usually good for a nation to ensure primary education includes solid economics, history, media literacy, etc curricula.

I’m in the US, and won’t buy booze from red states. I’m really getting to know our local (and also Scottish / Irish) distilleries.

I don’t imagine I’d buy any American imports if I was overseas.

This graph isn't adjusted for inflation.

- Tariffs so less international demand for US wine > - Canadian boycots of US products due to tariff wars

The tariff wars and "boycott US wine" goes way beyond Canada. I (in Europe) completely stopped buying US wine during this admin. Polls support this.

Yes! I don't drink alcohol but have gone wine tasting with friends and one vineyard had grape juice from some of their grapes and it was interesting and yummy.

An interesting variety of grape juices would be very cool.

It's gonna be quite a lot of additional surplus, and, they already do this. Surplus wine grapes get sold to concentrate makers, however, it pays less than it costs to grow them because concentrate is basically a commodity sweetener competing with sugar, corn syrup, and apple concentrate. Bottled grape juice is a small and shrinking market, and in that market, most people expect Concord flavour (these aren't that), plus a lot of bottled juice is reconstituted from that same commodity concentrate anyway.

NA grape soda made from wine varietals is a niche product you can find in some wine producing regions here in the US and usually fairly expensive for a soda. All of the ones I've tried are pretty tasty, tough!

I guess I am an outlier, I did not have any grapes until September, when Ontario grapes became available.

It did not feel right to buy murican grapes at full price in the middle of the summer.

Wine grapes are rather nice to eat (at least the ones I've tried), but they're typically smaller than American table grapes I've experienced, but hey, sell them as heirloom varieties at Portland farmers markets maybe?

Only one so far, I'm willing to take more but not a lot on offer. Maybe I'm talking to the wrong suppliers. There's a right price for everything, but I am looking for fire sale|"going out of business" prices. Replies with leads welcome!

Large-format bottles are criminally underappreciated this side of the Atlantic.

You allowed to do that? You'd at least have to tip the box on its side if storing for a long time now? I'm no sommelier but I hear the cork needs to stay wet or they'll spoil.

'a lot' depends on how much you had to begin with.

I spent a month in Italy and drank many fine wines. The most expensive sold at supermarket was 15 euo. Most were like 6.

Have you bought wine at Trader Joe's? It used to be famous for its "2 buck chuck" aka Charles Shaw. And many other well-regarded wines for under $10.

It is incredibly difficult to sustainably run a winery in California. The margins are often negative without operating at a large scale, which is part of why the industry has consolidated heavily over the past few decades.

Often times, wealthy people buy wineries as a hobby to dabble in, but end up selling and calling it a day before it drains their cash. If you want to buy wine for cheap that is made in California, buy mass-market wine.

Smaller brands are generally expensive because that price is necessary to sustain operations, but most of the time that fails, and the owners end up selling.

...and less variety. Growers are not going to stay in business by lowering their prices.

I haven't noticed any retail wine prices stabilizing or decreasing, at least in the Bay Area. Napa wines are still exorbitantly priced, and imports are way the fuck more expensive due to tariffs.

On a pure price-performance basis it is difficult to justify buying US domestic wine over French imports. The quality of the latter is consistently higher at reasonable price points. California wines haven’t justified their price tag for a long time on average.

Wasn't SGMA always the big long term problem for them anyway? I recall reading some time ago many are looking to pivot to solar farms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Groundwater_Manage...

Ah, gotcha. I presume there's then substitution effects on both sides of the pond, but the US loses more on net from the Canadian shift from American to other wines.

Tariffs have reduced exports, particularly to Canada, which was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

And it links to a Feb 2025 article titled "Canada Tariffs Paused, but California Wineries Fear a Trade Dispute Would Be Crushing"

https://www.kqed.org/news/12025404/canada-tariffs-paused-cal...

You aren't going to escape the association with President Donald John Trump. He is the present and future of the Republican party.

these farmers voted for Trump despite him tilting against their best interest

There is a good amount of research that suggests people do not vote using reason, or necessarily consider their own best interests. Rather, it is suggested that most people who vote affiliate themselves with a political party that appeals to their interpretation of morality; and then they vote on tribal lines.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120865/

His 2020 loss was all about turnout among the opposition. He got more votes than in 2016.

(and have been sorely mistaken)

It's a little hard to feel bad for these people when they already saw how Trump didn't actually push their interests during his first term, and yet they voted for him again.

Meanwhile, the Project 2025 handbook was there for everyone to read, and Trump's rhetoric was based on cracking down on immigration (bye-bye, seasonal labor), beating up our trade partners (need to import farm tools? pay more!), and slashing federal government spending (haphazard and largely a failure to actually save money or tackle deficits or debt).

The 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was a fine preview for more of the same in 2025, so I'm not sure what these voters were looking for when it comes to tax policy.

Land use is generally a state-level concern, so I'm not sure what they think Trump would be doing for them there.

Same as UK farmers voting for Brexit whilst being beneficiaries of EU subsidies for farming.

You didn’t point out “important facts”; you’ve raised vague associations and extrapolated them in a way that seems damning. There’s no evidence I can find that this man or his family members support this federal administration or its policies. Most of them haven’t been public representatives for over a decade. The last one left office in 2018. And all of that still has absolutely nothing to do with the macro forces affecting demand and prices for wine grapes throughout the world.

Should I have worded it in a different way?

You shouldn’t have raised it at all. It’s a weak, tangential point, almost completely substance-free, and is in clear breach of the guidelines. HN is only a place where people want to participate because most people try to make solid points, and avoid posting junk like this.

While I enjoy a glass of wine every now and then, I'm not going to lament the decline of an industry producing alcoholic products; it's inarguably good that younger generations are drinking less. Sorry to the farmers, but profiting off of increasing public health risk maybe should be a precarious business. I'm not gonna get upset about tobacco farms shutting down or having to switch crops, and alcohol is just another addictive and harmful substance (I've known more people who died due to alcohol than any other substance, one in a drunk driving accident, one due to liver failure, two were alcoholics who died by suicide...can't be certain it was the alcohol, but addiction certainly didn't help their situation).

But, also, the income of younger generations has been crushed so much, the ones that do still drink can't afford expensive luxury booze. Decent wine is an expensive way to drink alcohol.

The decrease in consumption predates the current trade issues. Peak domestic wine consumption was in 2021 and has been falling rapidly ever since. There hasn't been a decrease in demand of this magnitude or duration since the 80s. Despite several years of declining consumption, per capita consumption remains over 50 percent above historical baseline. Combined with demographic changes that will decrease avid wine consumers as a fraction of the population, it's quite clear that the 2010s bubble was the short term abnormality.

And do what with it?

People generally do find that the hardest thing to do is ... the hardest thing. You might say that this is a tautology.

I've eaten wine grapes and while they taste... winey? I also quite like them

They taste so different than the grapes in the grocery store they might as well be a different fruit entirely imo. So much better. Sweeter. Berry or stone fruit like. Almost floral. The vintners are seriously holding out on us. Yes there are seeds, but that is the price you pay for the finest grape you will ever feast upon. You go back to a store bought "red seedless" it taste like a sad old cantaloupe in comparison.

Labrusca makes terrible wine, it's too foxy. There are some hybrid varieties that make okay wine.

Vinifera makes a perfectly fine table grape and grape juice, depending on the varietal.

For example, Thompson Seedless, an incredibly common table grape, is vinifera.

The varieties used for win are generally not good for eating and vice versa. Not universally so but generally.

If you have to argue about nomenclature then your argument is probably not worthwhile.

While technically incorrect, tree is informally used to describe grape vines in some regions. Similar to “tomato plants” which is a more common example.

Grand-post doesn't specify what kind of fruit the region their parents live in specializes in, and plenty of fruit grows on trees (citrus, stone fruit and apples leap immediately to mind).

And I know that some Washington apple packing and Florida citrus packing companies have declared bankruptcy in the past year, so those would be my guesses.

Yes, fruit grows on trees. Did you assume the comment was necessarily about grapes?

Wait for climate change to really get started.

Possibly you know this but there are pruning techniques to get a good yield of also good tasting apples

Sounds like a good idea.

Of course you don't replace everything old with new.

But when the specific varietal always sucked, that's a good reason to replace it.

Espaliers and different pruning techniques can have you up and producing fruit in 3-5 years. Totally popping under 10.

I have no idea what you are talking about. The honeycrisp revolution made me like apples again. Maybe your taste buds have changed?

i don't think one necessarily needs the best of the best... probably cheap is enough for a bunch of people

i'll start by having my OLED smartphone dying after many years and the one i got used LCD. much worse and it felt like plastic. colors, brightness, even if my screen now refreshes twice as fast as the previous - fast forward 2 years i don't think i ever thought about the difference, nor saw it after 1 or 2 weeks with my phone

totally valid critique on durable products and better substances for cleaning although

Blood stains are easy. Wash cold, and they come right out.

I can’t remember the last time I had curry stains on anything, and I lived in central India for a year. I just used the typical local detergent and did my own laundry. Always cold though, well as cold as it would ever get - 80F was typical.

Ok so I have a soy sauce, or so I think it is, stain that I can't remove on a shirt. Is it still possible to clean it? Nothing I've tried seems to get rid of it.

No one wants to wrangle a cord or locate a plug evidently. I don't mind it but people have made their choice.

The enzyme stuff is funny to me. DNAse, no purpose there. Why not RNAse too? People can't articulate why they even want a DNA degrading enzyme. Lipase to degrade lipids seems good, but then again, that is already the function of soap.

I knew a number of people whose home had central vacs but funny enough, none of them worked anymore. It was a sort of "what's that weird plug thing" conversation that lead to that somewhat underwhelming finding. I get the sense it is one of those things where if you want it fixed, you'd have to call a technician who will probably give you a quote you don't want to hear. Then you just forget about ever getting it fixed.

I've read that Honeycrisp is difficult to grow, that's probably why.

Cosmic Crisp is much easier to grow, at least in the climate it was developed for/in. Those 2 varieties are somewhat similar, although I find Honeycrisp a bit more subtle in flavor and enjoyable, while Cosmic Crisp has just a strong sweet/tart flavor.

I've enjoyed listening to dozens of talks by Alan Watts, who is a pretty chill guy until he comes across the subject of red delicious apples. Never heard him curse about any other subject.

In my family they’ve always been known as “those apples that look pretty on the shelf at the supermarket but taste like cardboard and aren’t even good for cooking”. We’ll all opt for just about any other cultivar if given the choice.

Red Delicious is not a pure clone of the original. Random genetic mutations have happens over the years and those were cloned. Normal breeding has more genetic variation but clones get some

Normal Apple trees will have wildly different flavors on even individual branches.

Specific varietals are from cloning specific branches widely, but at some point it often gets ‘lost’ due to natural imperfect cloning.

I am somehow in the "I like Red Delicious" camp. Perhaps because I was used to Kashmiri apples, that apparently share the cultivar roots of red delicious. Never liked the more acidic varieties. Actually like the "mealy" texture - (it feels grainy to me)

https://applerankings.com/red-delicious-apple-review/

No. They kept trying to push it over here.

It was always grim, bitter, but "oh so pretty".

I remember Red Delicious being kinda gross in the early 90s. Bitter and cardboardy.

However, it seems there are multiple things with that name. I've had one that looked different and tasted... less bad.

While the red delicious are a good usually-large American apple that ships easily the newer varieties are much tastier.

My wife and I used to drive around aimlessly when I was in grad school and she was just starting her career as a doctor. We found that it was a good way to relax, and we sometimes discovered fun local gems when we did this.

One weekend we stumbled on a local apple orchard doing a cider making demonstration. We were the only people there so the orchardist (he called himself a “pomoculturist”) personally showed us around, picking an occasional apple, telling us about it, and then encouraging us to take a bite.

At one point he picked a deeply dark purple, almost black, apple and handed it to me. “Black Oxford” The flavor was intense: acidic, sweet, floral. Then another, dark red and fragrant. “Winesap” Then “Belle de Boskoop”. And on and on.

None of these apples are sold commercially except at small scale directly from orchards. The flavors, appearances, and aromas of apples is truly astonishing. So I think that’s why Red Delicious gets all the hate. The world of apples is amazing and huge.

I prefer to see Red Delicious as yet another miracle of apple genetics, just one that I don’t personally care for. But if you have the opportunity to visit an heirloom orchard, please do.

For me, it was a life-changing event: I now have a small heirloom orchard of my own.

Cosmic Crisp was marketed to growers as a replacement for Red Delicious with a similar shipping toughness and a long shelf life.

Nobody in any major apple growing region (Washington) is growing Red Delicious as their main apple variety for consumers, not even close. They're all growing various club apples (e.g. Envy, Cosmic Crisp), and there's massive competition to be the next honeycrisp (btw, honeycrisp quality is seasonal due to packaging, out of season they're significantly worse because they've been in storage for a long time, Apples are harvested only once a year)

See this as a list of merely the most popular varieties you can find at stores: https://waapple.org/varieties/all/

Was one of them Del Monte? They made a bad bet about consumption patterns from COVID persisting, but canned fruit demand didn't stay high, if I understand correctly.

I’d imagine many of them are immigrants that either fled, were deported, or decided not to return for the picking seasons.

https://www.kuow.org/governing/2026-03-23/between-ice-and-a-...

Not all farm workers are immigrants, legal or otherwise. There are many temporary, seasonal workers that make poverty wages, but it's more than they would make in Mexico or wherever else. The farms provide basic necessities and pay the workers as little as possible.

Depends on the staffing issue, but many cant be solved by raising wages without going out of business.

Not every industry has tech level profits.

Higher wages means higher prices. At a certain point your price is uncompetitive with imports. You can use tariffs to protect a local product against an imported one, but that would require a competent leader who doesn't get emotional and declare a war (bomb-based or trade-based) when his feelings are hurt

Technically yes, but it still isn't a quick fix. Seasonal and temporary workers still need other seasonal work or jobs that let them leave for seasonal work and need the capital investment to be able to travel for work and live at different farms. A single seasonal job paying good won't by itself get someone to invest into van-life, its maybe 2 months out of 12 and not entirely predictable work/profit just from yield variability. And most modern jobs don't let someone leave for weeks at a time to work elsewhere, atleast not any that are near the price range of basic physical labor.

You also lose a significant amount of productivity from first-timers in any process, and other full-time jobs taking away your expe

Good. Let this nasty industry and its parasites die.

I was told if we kill people in the streets and create concentration camps to put everyone suspected of being an immigrant in (even if they have legal papers, bc hey those can be fake who knows when your Prez thinks voting is fake) and send every immigrant back then Americans would be wealthy and prosperous and you're saying that's not the case in a country that's had extremely low unemployment for almost 15 straight years (excepting COVID)?

not just the trade war

I just got back from Italy where I bought several cases and large formats of wine that, even after shipping, cost less than the non-plutocratic greats from California. Wildly, I got charged zero duties. Not even MVN. (I suspect it’s because I’m in a red state.)

Given how much of American farming went hard MAGA, it’s really difficult to feel compassionate for their struggles. Maybe after bankruptcy the new owners will be better.

Yeah, maybe if a bottle of crappy wine is less than $30, people will buy it.

There are taste difference, brand prestige and story differences, and scarcity. The most extreme examples of this would be in burgundy where laws from a few hundred years ago ranked the value of very small and fractured plots of land and it’s been memed into the best wine in the world so you have the prestige of this ancient law, the scarcity of these small plots built in, and a region that is good but not my favorite selling the most expensive wine in the world.

The fact that US wine declines more than other wine isn't a theory it's a fact. The reason could have several theories. One is that people are simply boycotting. This is supported by polls etc. But another would be if prices drift apart and a strong dollar makes US wine less attractive relative to (say) French and Italian wines.

As usual the reason overall wine sales would be down e.g. 10% and US wine sales down 20% in a country will be a combination of multiple factors. My pet theory though is that at least for some countries, the boycott factor is the big one.

The same thing is happening in Marlborough, NZ - the center of the wine industry in New Zealand. (And probably elsewhere in NZ, but Marlborough is where I grew up). All my life, every year has seen more and more vineyards throughout the valley, until a few years ago it began to slow and recently they've actually pulled some out, which is totally unheard of.

Even if it ends up back on the shelves the damage is done. Many will avoid American products until the day they die, and endeavour to teach their children to do the same.

America doesn't need anything from the rest of the world, or so is claimed, so the rest of the world should not burden itself with purchasing American exports.

If so its been going on for a long time. I remember seeing UK TV ads in the 70's/80's for Paul Mason's Californian Carafes - cheap/mainstream wine. Now I'd say most American wines for sale in Europe are higher end and more expensive.

If you want a cheap bottle of wine it would be New Zealand, Chilean or Spanish

The article mentions this - Canada was the largest foreign buyer of American wine.

I suspect wine is extremely susceptible to this effect too. It’s basically always stocked alongside produce from many other countries, the origin is most of the marketing, and there aren’t really any stand out brands. I’ve probably had a Californian wine before but couldn’t name a single one.

If you own a venue or store and decide to stop stocking American alcohol, someone will probably notice you don’t have Jack Daniel’s but not that you’ve stopped selling Californian wine.

I think that is the point parent is making

That's a very slippery slope. What are you going to ban next, extreme sports? Running too fast? Eating french fries?

Yes but not nearly in the way alcohol is.

Alcohol used to be safer than water to drink for a period in time.

People have been drinking wine for 8000 years. Grapes ferment in the 10% abv range.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1714728114

Some Roman wines were drunk undiluted in the 14% range

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/wine/vint...

Your numbers are completely made up.

Extract a sugary liquid from fruit or malted grain, expose it to the pervasive and random yeast in the air around us and if it doesn't mold over first you'll probably get something in the 8% ABV range before the alcohol waste product inhibits the yeasts' metabolism. With some deliberate cultivation, which humans thousands of years ago figured out, you can selectively breed the yeast slurry in your vessels up to a 11-14% alcohol tolerance. They didn't know the science but they knew the process.

Leave it exposed and you'll eventually get a random acetobacter infection and ta-da, now you have a vat of vinegar. Which would still have utility, but is much less fun.

The 1-2% alcohol drinks were called "small beers" and were the second runnings off the grain that was used to make full-strength beers or barleywines. Humans liked variety.

And people drank water, not just alcoholic small beers, there are depictions of water filters dating back at least 3500 years, and a long history of water purification techniques, and a ton of ancient wells which were dug.

I don't think we will give it up in the next 20 centuries.

Alcohol is consistently more dangerous statistically than most other things, I doubt lowering consumption is the driving factor behind the patterns you're mentioning.

What is “active marijuana?”

Smoking kills several times more people per year than alcohol use. The CDC attributes 480k to smoking vs 178k from alcohol. People smoking cannibis likely smoke less than those smoking tobacco but it’s not safe. Maybe try edibles instead?

https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/tobacco/data_statistics/...

https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/index.html

I’m in the same age group and I agree but I feel frustrated that our grandparents went with “marijuana is the gateway to hell” as the social message.

I don’t know if there is responsible weed or psychedelic use (not my area) but I’m confident that responsible alcohol consumption exists.

Though I doubt any of it is a net benefit to society.

Potency is an interesting subject because in theory one should have consume less amounts over the same time period for the same effect. In other words, smoking one potent joint, while carrying its own risks, is probably healthier than smoking n > 1 joints to get a similar effect.

Cannabis, the literal plant, is strong than the 70s, but it's not like humans haven't been making concentrates (hash, resins, etc.) for 1000s of years.

I think their argument is that while it's stronger (and it is), it's also more predictable and has safer and more predictable delivery mechanisms.

Also, there are high grade derived products that do exactly what's on the label.

For an example of reasonable use: if you want to lower anxiety a bit, which is a primary driver of alcohol use, you can now reliably get a high CBT strain, or CBT gummies, or CBT vapes, and they are generally less dangerous and less addictive than other chemical solutions.

This would also hold for decriminalising party drugs. Most of the fentanyl deaths for instance are in people that didn't even know they're having fentanyl.

It's still inconsistent as fuck. There's no real industry standards and analysis. The same gummies from the same pack bought at a dispensary can vary wildly in my experience. Pens are a bit more consistent. But yeah not as variable as the bathtub gravity bong rips of random weed that people got from who knows where.

Yes I find this a big difference in modern weed culture and alcohol culture. At my age most of my friends know their tolerance for weed quite well and we usually keep low dosage edibles around just to offer for friends who consume weed a couple times a year.

While I don't drink that much anymore, when I do I just kinda have a murky mental binder of how strong a drink is at a given venue I've visited before but even then it's very unsophisticated.

Idk, when I was young I was drinking heavily, today I drink some beers and smoke weed and I feel I’m much better for it. It doesn’t ruin the next day and I can do more things. But you can definitely overdo it. Psychedelics definitely can mess with your head, though, if not careful.

All recreational drugs, legal or otherwise, are mind-altering.

This is an argument I have had on both sides. One side demonized it, the other said it could do no wrong.

No, weed is not a one way path to a death sentence as you become a raving Satanist! But it also isn't harmless and there are things to keep an eye on, just because it doesn't kill you doesn't mean it gets the all clear.

If you want to do it, go for it, but please be aware of the potential issues.

They are significant but so are those of alcohol. Most data indicates weed is safer. (This study puts it at about half in terms of harm to the user: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285843262_Drug_harm... . Alcohol ranks the highest in terms of harms to others but that is also a function of how widely it is used)

Ketamine is also normally given to humans. It is used in hospitals as a sedative/anesthetic, and also in depression treatment.

Used responsibly it's perfectly safe. Much less harmful than alcohol. I don't know why people assume that something is unsafe just because we give it to horses. Do you think people want to harm their horses?

i replied to wrong person my fault

In the real world telling people to make the hard choice you support (such as abstinence only stances) makes a large majority dismiss you completely. It’s mostly self-serving sort of advice that might apply to individuals, but we already know you can’t enforce it on a society.

You really. Really really. Need to research the temperance movement and the utter disaster that it was.

You’re regurgitation of propaganda here is so laughably missing the point.

Downvote me if you want but look it up. The temperance movement and prohibition that followed was run by wealthy women who filled their time judging the lower classes and factory owners who wanted to end labor union meetings and continue to underpay workers in horrid conditions while blaming alcohol as the problem.

Easily one of americas worst decisions and propaganda people like you still believe to this day.

Stop saying accident when you really mean crash. Especially in the context of drunk driving.

Drunk driving is a conscious decision, not an accident.

But that is also because it has been used much more often than other drugs. Don't get me wrong, I agree that alcohol has some very bad effects. But if you ban (or decrease consumption of) alcohol, but that gets compensated by an increase in the usage of other drugs (which I am not saying is inevitable), you might be trading a bad situation for something far worse.

A personal anecdote. My extended family has a long history of substance abuse and addiction. Of course, historically the substance so abused has mostly been alcohol (and tobacco, but that is less harmful in this kind of sense), and I saw [both first-hand and second-hand] a lot of direct and indirect effects of it that were very harmful and destructive. But recently, with another family member, I also saw first-hand the effects of addiction to another drug, methamphetamine, with induced psychosis, and I would choose dealing with an alcohol addict over this a thousand times. At least an alcohol addict is unlikely to suddenly decide to murder you, or to jump out of window, or any such mad move, just because some demons tell them or they suddenly realize that you have been an alien or a reptilian all along, or any similar crazy thing [which is actually pretty horrific when you face it in a real life from a close person]. A drunk person is also much more easily defeated physically than somebody who is high on meth and has some psychotic episode. [Though I am aware that alcohol caused or catalyzed many violent attack and murders too, I am not trying to trivialize that.]

alcohol's main mechanism is through depleting oxygen in the blood

Blood oxygen is quickly and cheaply measured with a pulse oximeter, which shows this to be false. The primary mechanism of action of ethanol is increasing the sensitivity of some GABA receptors (similar to benzodiazepines and barbiturates). But ethanol has very complex pharmacology, which a huge number of other targets. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacology_of_ethanol

It's a tiny bit "healthier" (high people are much less dangerous than drunk people), but it's still not particularly responsible.

But it is much cheaper. And Gen Z by necessity is more price sensitive than other generations.

It's a nice claim to say

kinda implies the claim was said

Tbf I don't know many young people who'd pound screwdrivers. Like IDK how different things were in the past but back when I was in university (right up until covid) the drink of choice was straight liquor plus a chaser. Many a party were had around handles of whiskey, vodka, or rum with limited "mixing in".

It was just outright more cost effective and as college students we just didn't have money for the alternative so most of the time it was hard liquor and maybe once a week we'd go out to drink and then it was mostly rail liquor mixed drinks or outright shots and shooters.

One or more shots mixed with a small quantity of orange juice, typically served at between two and four times the alcohol concentration of beer and consumed at equivalent speed. What the hell do you think a Screwdriver is?

Sure, I read your second paragraph, but as I pointed out in my own post, you might as well express skepticism that people harm themselves faster with beer than with shandy whilst treating not mixing beer with four parts water as edge case irresponsibility rather than how people actually drink it...

Probably, yeah. N=1 and Europe, but that's what I remember from my university years. Wines were for dating; cheap beers and vodka with cola or juices was for general socializing. Cost was a factor for everyone; cheaper means more people could participate more often.

This generation doesn't know about how to be a proper wino. Go and take a look at the $7.99 1.5L jug bottles of carlo rossi next time you are in the grocery store. You will notice they are covered in dust. The charles shaw at trader joes still moves though. It's up to 4 buck chuck now.

But lower teen drinking can lead to lower lifelong drinking. Habits formed during those years have inertia.

Eh, 21 limit was in place for all millennials and most of Gen X. And millennials drink like fish.

It might be policy but it’s not that new. Millennial here, we had no trouble getting alcohol under 21.

When they introduced the higher alcohol tax here in Australia back in 2006(ish), all it did was push us to find ways to make it ourselves. Went from cheap to unbelievably cheap but completely unregulated. Who knows what the alcohol content of some of that stuff was. There are some vague fuzzy nights from that period.

You see the same trend in countries without a crashing economy. The economy is not the main reason.

Doing a job that can't be automated sounds like the exact opposite of "monetized by tech" to me.

The number of these jobs is constantly shrinking, and a lot of jobs actually have people training AI models to replace them.

Sure, but we see traditions that have lasted for centuries die out, too.

I've read several threads about how cigarettes are making a comeback because it's perceived as more natural or less chemical than vapes. If you care about facts at all you will find it completely wrong and intensely stupid, of course, but you just never know how people will react and then counter-react.

It's still illegal federally in the US! It's illegal in many European countries and the UK. The places which have legalized it exist in a fragile state that could very easily be washed away with a moral panic again.

I would be more willing to bet on someone trying Prohibition 2.0 again.

This is a shoot from the hip idea. Speaking to younger folks, it seems to be much more cultural/social change rather than anything to do with health.

This might be an odd fluctuation to do with the first primarily social media generation? Don't know but that is just how I have seen it.

You are probably right about banning weed/vapes. They don't have anywhere near the same indoctrination into the structures of commerce and power that alcohol has.

You're right, but the idea that "Oh I'm not drinking it's just not healthy" is more common among younger people I've noticed than it was around people who were older when I was very young. I meet many young people whose main two activities are overworking and overly gymming/fitness activities. Such people drink a lot less than normal.

It does feel like young people are more likely to go to a coffee shop than a pub if they want to socialise.

There could be a link there. I've known people with eating disorders who only drink spirits because of the calorie content.

This I think is the key here. The traits I would associate with Millennials and Gen Z are all related to reacting to being watched all the time. And while alcohol can help a bit with anxiety, zero tolerance for just being a kid breeds a culture where doing anything that can be clipped is a bad idea. Basically, they are boring kids because anything at all that can be used against them is. I really feel sorry for them. If time machines existed and they could see how kids behaved in the past, I think they would destroy all their phones and computers immediately.

Yes, beer drinking is also on the decline.

Yes, beer is down too, and these are global trends.

In Germany beer is down 20% in a decade, and 33% since 2000.

https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4628/umfrage/...

Wine is also sweet and sweetness is unhealthy.

Scrunching up my face trying to figure out how to respond to this...

I think you are right that a lot of the wine which people consume, the mega industrial mass volume stuff sold in supermarkets, is a bit sweet, although often not by a lot--Josh and Bota Box, two of the biggest brands, have like 5-10 g/L of sugar. Stuff like La Marca Prosecco and Barefoot Pink Moscato is noticeably sweeter.

However, in general, I don't think it's fair to say "wine is sweet". Wine in general is not sweet outside of certain styles that are intended to be so. If you grow grapes, crush them, and ferment them, the fermentation will generally run until the yeast run out of sugar, leaving only trace amounts behind.

I've noticed that a lot of people who don't have that much experience with wine will tend to mis-identify things as sweetness when they're really noticing some other aspect of the wine.

Some would argue those are all connected.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

I dunno. I don't drink, but I do put time and effort to socialize.

It's just not related to drug consuming acts and more about sports, poker, board games, etc.

I believe that drug-related communications are flawed and closer to animal level than to actually joyful ones. It's better to have a maturity and social skills to communicate, joke and maintain a conversation with interesting people without stimulators.

I'm not from the US though so it's not about the US social scene which is mainly discussed here.

I and virtually everyone in my generation have been constantly lectured throughout almost entire education about the dangers of smoking and drinking. As a result, while we smoke and drink heavily, it's not even close to our parents. So it makes perfect sense that the next generation, who were not only lectured their whole life but also didn't grow up surrounded by people smoking everywhere and drinking all the time, overwhelmingly avoided picking up these habits at all.

I would agree with his opinion. You can see it with the increase of non-alcoholic wine and beer.

Alcohol is one of the worst recreational drugs. Internet natives grew up with more access to information and less draconian drug laws than their predecessors.

In the 90s, MDMA got senators’ panties in a twist. Now, there are multiple 100k+ MDMA-focused events in the western USA annually.

I could see it being a mix of both factors. Cash-strapped antisocial members staying at home, and the more outgoing career-focused gen-z members going out but trying to protect their sleep quality. feel like i know a decent amount of people in both of these buckets

I mean, i am about to marry in about 2 months and have no one to invite as i never was able to socialize with anyone outside of school (and since then 5 years passed) and if they mostly have a unhealty relation to alcohol so i don't want to do something with them. I have like 1-2 friends that i can smoke with and also only know them because of that, we game in out free time and only meet to hand over some herbs. I would love to go out and meet new peers but i cannot without drinking and after spending like 60-70% on rent there is not enough to spend 6-8€ on a WATER.

they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.

Not surprising, sweetness literally mutes palate sensitivity. Genzers are the most sugar addicted generation, from a very young age. It would not surprise me to see research in some future that this massive early life sugar exposure comes with muted development of taste.

GP seem to imply it was the other chemicals

I didn't draw any conclusions or make a link, you assumed the link.

Let's look at some evidence instead. There are very high levels of TFA in wine:

https://www.pan-europe.info/press-releases/2025/04/study-rev...

It'll be decades before we know the true effects of the chemicals other than alcohol that are evidently present in wine, but TFA is known to pose serious health risks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifluoroacetic_acid

I find there's a lot of cognitive dissonance in people who are partial to a bottle or two, they tend to hang on to the myths that it's good for them.

Do they? Or does it just seem like it?

It's harmful as it tastes awful. At least compared to a good traditional wine.

I’d say the burden of proof is on you though, can you supply epidemiological evidence that wine isn’t harmful to health, if you’re going to advocate for the alcohol industry

I do not think anyone would argue that alcohol consumption is good for your health, regardless of what kind of alcohol.

I'm not really making any strong claims except that people should look into the chemicals in wine. It's a complicated story. Unfortunately many of the USDA links are dead so this is the best evidence I have for the difference in wine standards in Europe vs the US.

https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-di...

They're making a far stronger counter claim:

there are plenty people who drink a bottle of white, red and/or rose for lunch here their entire lives to old age.

Not the parent, but I have heard of this as well.[0] The advice in the article is to try to drink wine that is 2010 or older.

But I do raise my eyebrow at the suggestion that US wine is somehow in a better situation and am not inclined to believe it unless someone provides sources.

[0] "Alarming’ increase in levels of forever chemical TFA found in European wines"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/23/alarming...

I told an anecdote for illustrative purposes and made no explicit links. Others have assumed the link however.

My purpose was to draw people's attention to some lesser known aspects of the wine industry which I think are consequential, and I was illustrating I have some insignts into this that people that haven't worked in the industry probbaly don't.

That's true of organic food in general.

You can't generalise from one wineyard in one country, but you know that. And France is hardly an organic wine leader.

Copper sulphate is a fungicide used for centuries and is pretty safe (so safe that my chemical engineer father was willing to use it in his otherwise completely sans-chemicals garden). Organic wine not only does not use (other) fungicides and herbicides; it also does not use other chemicals and processes in later stages of winemaking.

There's untold levels of chemicals in wine.

Such as dihydrogen monoxide?

I guess this is why most wine carry a sulphate allergy label these days.

Partly. There is some natural level of sulfites present in wines - very dependent on the terroir, and then the rest comes during the manufacturing process; some sulfites may be added directly so the wine does not spoil.

There are wines that do not contain any added sulfites and even then may cause trouble to the sensitive persons if the sulfur content of soil is naturally high. Some manufacturers therefore also add info about total measured sulfite content to the label.

And nowadays, not only demijohns or wooden barrels are used to hold wine; of course stainless steel vessels, but also concrete vessels and even things like the Georgian qvevri underground clay vessels or amphorae are having a comeback.

You are correct of course.

You could also have just glanced at the rest of the thread where I've given far more specific evidence.

I'm rather glad I've drawn people's attention to the issue, despite having to endure extremely patronising comments like yours.

Second, I clearly have skin-in-the-game here because you did read the first comment, so everyone that thinks it's OK to make jokes like the dihydrongen monoxide one (well done that was clever in 2015) can go forth and multiply.

Is there an independent source for this story? The guy is not exactly a reliable narrator.

There was no police involved. The police state attitude verbiage used by the OP refers to the constant monitoring of children and teens, by parents or other guardians, using things such as Apple FindMy to the point where teens can’t be mischievous to the degree they were able to in the past.

There’s also the implication that the repercussions are worse.

Apparently until recently there was no rule about skinning bears in the dorms at Cornell. Kids at college can still be kids, at least until the administration catches wind of it

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/cornell-university-stud...

My observation is that the young people who do drink aren't going for beers and wines, which are tastes that can take time to acquire, they're going for sweet liquors and premix cans of fizz.

Born in 1999, I qualify as GenZ. All my peers drink beer, which is unsurprising given the strong cultural presence. But more and more people have been moving to alcohol free beer, which is becoming more and more widespread. Loads of breweries reacted and started with alcohol free beers, even the ones you would have never expected, like Augustiner Bräu in Munich.

Pretty much all surveying data for my home country for the last few years suggests that GenZ is just drinking less alcohol overall. While there probably are some shifts within the consuming population, that does not fully explain the shift away from the alcoholic staples.

[always_has_been.jpg]

Before 2004 Germany had a %vol limit for selling alcohol to 16 year olds. In 2004 they changed the law such that it is not based on percentage, but whether it contains distilled alcohol to prevent under 18 year olds from drinking sweet alcopops, which apparently was a big thing back then.

There is a good annual survey on substance use that essentially confirms your observations- the monitoring the future survey (https://monitoringthefuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/m...)

It's a common meme. You can disagree with the validity of the meme but not with the existence of it.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1663497-hello-human-resource...

Selective editing can achieve very impressive effects, add some lying to it and you can have utterly misleading video with very limited effort.

If you like reading sci-fi, I’d really recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) to get some perspective on the extreme of a life where everything you do is potentially visible to any and everyone around you.

Frankly, I am waaay past this bullshit argument. No, awkward does not come across as creepy on itself. Yes, it is possible for an awkward guy to be creepy, harasser or abuser.

It is never ending cycle of "they do not understand social", "you are infantilizing them by explaining them social explicitly" while the same guys are perfectly charismatic to anyone with actual power or friends.

what i've derived from my north american anecdata is that any kind of flirtation or even just talking to a stranger about a neutral topic is increasingly automatically graded as creepy. I'd say the social fabric has simply degraded to the point that people have forgotten how to talk to one another, social atrophy i guess. In my northern europe experience women deflect attention with much less fearfulness, and I'd say people just have much higher trust towards one another.

I'm too old, and my kids too young, so the current landscape is foreign to me.

As an outside observer, could it be that manosphere influence has an undue effect on young mens behavior, which (if true) would indeed be creepy for a lot of (most?) women, regardless if the execution is awkward or not.

I was certainly awkward in my teens/young adulthood, but in my singular experience, the maturity and confidence didn't come from acting cocky or showing off, but just treating anyone I had an interest in as a person first and foremost, and being comfortable and even open about my awkwardness and shortcomings.

That did wonders. Also accepting that a rejection doesn't mean a personal slight to you, nor a failure in appreciation of you from her, but merely a lack of mutual interest, which is also fine.

One big problem is a camera in everyone’s pocket together with a culture of posting everything online.

In an environment like that getting drunk just isn’t very good for your life/career. Even something as small as going to the dance floor when you are not really good at it takes a lot more from you when there is 5 cameras recording you the moment you look stupid/funny dancing.