The funniest thing for me was I usually felt fairly fresh and ok in the morning, got all the toxic reactions over with the previous evening! I assume I processed everything very quickly and my metabolism wouldn't wait for morning to get it's revenge.
But the effect of alcohol was never very attractive, that loss of control is horrible, and that's what really prevented me becoming an alcoholic, thankfully. I dread to think of what I'd have done to myself if I actually enjoyed and sought out being drunk. I always thought self-medicating with solvent abuse was not the finest moment of humankind!
Interesting that the safer recreational drugs tend to be illegal? And yet in England alone (not even the whole UK) it's reckoned the cost of alcohol abuse/mis-use is over £17 billion annually (2024 figures, Institute of Alcohol Studies:
£27.4 billion cost of alcohol harm in England every year - Institute of Alcohol Studies ).
"£4.91 billion cost to the NHS and healthcare in England - such as hospital admissions and ambulance call-outs. £14.58 billion cost to the criminal justice system, police, and wider crime and disorder. £5.06 billion cost to the wider economy due to lost productivity"
Obviously the fall-out goes beyond these figures but becomes harder to quantify in an accurate manner.
According to gov.uk we earned about £7.5 billion in duty in return for all that pain and expense, to provide an ever more powerful drinks industry with the huge profits required to effectively lobby against any further controls, or compensation for the damage it causes in return for those profits.
It's enough to drive one to drink!

