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RSS icon Comments on Cheap Beer Leads to Violence

1

I am often frightened by drunks and junkies, but potheads are very mellow. The few cases where someone who was stoned murdered someone, they would have done it stoned or not.

Posted by elswinger | April 10, 2007 2:29 PM
2

My mom told me that she'd rather have me and my brother smoking pot in the basement than getting drunk somewhere, because at least then she'd know where we were. And also that we wouldn't be doing anything dangerous.

Of course, she comes to visit me mainly when Gov't Mule is in town.

Posted by Abby | April 10, 2007 2:33 PM
3

Damn how I can use my econ PHD to become a professor of Obvious Studies,

Posted by Andrew | April 10, 2007 2:44 PM
4

Only dumbfucks drink cheap beer. Only dumbfucks get into fights. Therefore there is a subset of Dumbfucks who drink cheap beer and get into fights.

Posted by DOUG. | April 10, 2007 2:45 PM
5

Pot is a gateway drug that leads to excessive snacking, obsessive video-gaming, questionable music-listening, and Judith Regan's head exploding.

Posted by flamingbanjo | April 10, 2007 2:46 PM
6

@4
I just happily moved back to the US after a 3-year stint working at Cardiff University in the UK. I can definitively say that Cardiff is 97% Dumbfucks. I'm talking about the capital-D Dumbfucks in your Venn-diagram description in that middle ground. If you're ever in Cardiff (the one in the UK) don't be near the clubs on St. Mary's St. when they empty.

Why did I leave? Because I was trying to do real scientific research in a place that was too busy doing studies like the "cheap beer" study. Sorry, time to go.

Posted by ex-pat reunited | April 10, 2007 2:52 PM
7

Drinking verses smoking pot is a false choice. The well rounded individual practices both.

Posted by Sean | April 10, 2007 2:52 PM
8

Agreed, Sean.

Posted by Dan Savage | April 10, 2007 2:58 PM
9

This may go without saying, but I can only assume that the correlation between beer price and violence has more to do with the socio-economic status of those with a pre-disposition towards violence rather than any direct causal relationship between beatings and Budweiser. It's not like these people would have been peaceful had they only picked up a micro-brew instead.

Still, the point about pot rings true. You hear about angry drunks all the time, but potheads are at worst useless and annoying (unless you are also drunk/high, in which case they are funny). Who ever heard of an angry stoner?

Posted by Dave | April 10, 2007 2:59 PM
10

"Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution amoung them." --Queen Victoria.

Posted by treacle | April 10, 2007 3:00 PM
11

Amen Sean. The secret is to drink quality brew. Miller, rolling-rock , pabst are the culprits. Quality ales, stouts and Pilsners dont cause fools to go off. Chep beer does. The only reason I stay in Seattle is cuz the Elysian has the best brew in the nation and the abundance of quality high end chronic is mos def a plus.

Posted by SeMe | April 10, 2007 3:01 PM
12

If only they would make a pot beer. mmmmmm, peer....

Posted by monkey | April 10, 2007 3:05 PM
13

Isn't it possible that when the beer is cheaper, people drink more of it? More bang for your buck, as it were.

Posted by Cori | April 10, 2007 3:09 PM
14

I tried a hemp beer in London. It was absolutely atrocious.

Posted by Abby | April 10, 2007 3:09 PM
15

Nah Cori, the alcohol content is low in those lagers. You drink a strong pint of belgian ale is like drinking a 6 pack of coronas or a 12 pack of bud.

Posted by SeMe | April 10, 2007 3:12 PM
16

If you look at the Hooligans in London they drink cheap lager by the galon.

Though I gotta say the degos in Italy and the Sapaniards drink wine and a lot of them can be just as violent as the limeys during football matches. You wanna see violence- go to a Napoli-Lazio(Rome) match. North American Football games( our most violent) here are like disneyland compared to Europe's football matches.

I think the key is to drink and smoke weed to mellow you out. Where does one sign up for these studies? U dub should be leading this research.

Posted by SeMe | April 10, 2007 3:20 PM
17

Dan, did the price of any other items increase during that time? Was the area at all gentrified? Did the hospital just change it's admissions standards or get more stringent?

C'mon, Dan, you're not THIS shallow or stupid. We've been over the dubious nature of studies that measure the correlation of X occurence to Y loosely related event. They're stupid and only serve to give huckster social scientists an excuse to collect grant money.

Posted by Gomez | April 10, 2007 3:36 PM
18

A homebrewing buddy of mine and I made a fantastic Jamaican Pale Ale a few years back. The secret is in soaking/rinsing your leaves and whatnot really well before adding them to the brew. I think we did about a day of soaking, with maybe four water changes.

It basically tasted like any NW-style Pale, but there was an extra flavor -- much like hops, but not quite. The THC effect was mild but definite, red eyes all around.

Posted by High Brew | April 10, 2007 3:40 PM
19

The cheap lager that British hooligans drink is high-test, though; Tennant's Super or Carlsberg Extra Brew are something like 8%.

The thing that makes me uncomfortable about pot is that it makes you stupid, in a more lasting way than booze. Booze is gone the next day; the pot haze lasts for a long time.

Posted by Fnarf | April 10, 2007 3:40 PM
20

@19 -

Alcohol doesn't vanish without doing damage. Ever hear of cirrhosis of the liver? And there can be damage to the nervous system also... I worked in a nursing home where the alcoholics were indistinguishable from advanced Alzheimer patients.

Posted by liver disease | April 10, 2007 3:46 PM
21

According to the blokes down under, kind bud isn't for miss manners either. Check out their new anti-pot slogan: "Pot. It mightn't kill you, but it could turn you into a dickhead."

Posted by Dominic Holden | April 10, 2007 3:47 PM
22

When I visited Prague the beer was extremely cheap (about a dollar for a very, very tall glass) and extremely plentiful (shop-keepers would be sipping while working) but it didn't seem to me an especially violent culture. So it seems to me that while, yes, you can find a casual link between the price of beer and violence, it's probably also cultural as Dave @ 9 suggested. I mean no one's talking about how the introduction of Two Buck Chuck resulted in a lot more trips to the ER.

Posted by arduous | April 10, 2007 3:56 PM
23

Someone was going to have to mention DAS EFX in this thread.

"Kid I swing a dome-buster like Bone Crusher Smith / Bust up your lip then puff up a spliff".

Posted by Lloyd Clydesdale | April 10, 2007 4:00 PM
24

Fnarf: Spoken like a drunk who's never smoked weed. :)

I'm a light-weight when it comes to alcohol, so even a beer or two will give me a hangover the next day. But I can smoke bowl after bowl of weed and feel chipper the next day and be perfectly ready to work.

With weed, there is a point where, no matter how much you smoke in one sitting, there comes a point where you are not going to get any more stoned than you are "right now." People have died of alcohol poisoning, but there has never been a case of someone dying because they had too much THC in their system.

Posted by elswinger | April 10, 2007 4:30 PM
25

i dare you to drink 6 guiness. you'll be so full you won't want to fight.

louts want to fight because they are louts, be they murkan thugs or british shavs.

i get so nasty after smoking some types of pot that i could easily provoke a fight - and get my ass beat bcuz my reflexes are so slow.

Posted by Max Solomon | April 10, 2007 4:33 PM
26

@19

"Booze is gone the next day; the pot haze lasts for a long time."

That's not what the literature suggests. Even extreme use (10+ joints per day for 10+ years) doesn't produce measurable cognitive deficits.

Pot is notorious in that mind-set/expectations factor greatly into the experience reported by users. The reality is that experienced pot smokers can't even tell whether they've smoked pot or placebo (pot with the cannabanoids removed) with any accuracy. Long story short, if you expect to have a pot hangover, you probably will.

Posted by NerdoScientist | April 10, 2007 4:37 PM
27

Pot - it's less addictive.

Posted by Will in Seattle | April 10, 2007 4:40 PM
28

That's because troglodyte neanderthals drink piss, and refined people drink decent beer.

This is all duh.

Posted by K | April 10, 2007 5:17 PM
29
"With weed, there is a point where, no matter how much you smoke in one sitting, there comes a point where you are not going to get any more stoned..."

But you might forget where you are in your sentence. Those subordinate clauses can be a bitch when you've baked away your short term memory.

I kid, I keed.

I've never smoked pot (or tobacco either) but as far as I can tell nobody has smoked a lot of pot and then gone home and beat up his wife, or gotten baked and abused his kids, or lit up a bunch of bowls and then picked a fight with the cops. I've never seen an aggressive stoner, but there are lots of mean, ugly drunks.

Here's a little gedanken experiment: suppose no one on earth had any experience whatsoever with alcohol, tobacco, or marijuana. Then, on the same day, all three are presented with full, accurate, and unbiased descriptions of their short- and long-term effects, with the proviso that only two of them will be made legal (with restrictions for age, etc). In that scenario, do you think marijuana would be the one that was banned?

Posted by Joe | April 11, 2007 1:58 AM
30

The cheap alcohol = violence meme is total horseshit, at least from a statistical standpoint. Seems like they've got their causation all bollixed up with their correlation. Sadly, many well-intentioned Seattle liberal types did the same thing in the debate around Alcohol Impact Areas and bans on potent and inexpensive brew and wine.

Are people violent because they are drunk, drunk because they are prone to be violent, a little of both, or is it something else related to where and how they live and where and under what circumstances they were brought up?

Rich violent people drink single malt scotch, boutique vodka, cognac, microbrews, fine wine, and god knows what. Middle class types swill down Redhook, mid-level wines, and (if they just got paid) Maker's Mark. Both of the preceding groups are treated more leniently by law enforcement in the case of minor to mid-level infractions, and have the resources to navigate the criminal justice system in the case of more serious ones.

Most of the people who drink cheaper beer, wine, and liquor aren't bums or criminals - they're poor working stiffs who can't afford to spend two hours pay on a night's buzz. Unfortunately, they have been conflated with a very small population of hard-core winos who consume similar products.

I've hung out in European party neighborhoods like the Reeperbahn, Soho, and Berlin, (among other places), and I can assure you that Euro yobs get plenty violent on traditional quality brews too - although I would concede that they may be a bit less hung over the next day than a typical Bud drinker who's been also pounding Cuervo shots.

That said, pot is clearly a more benign intoxicant with far fewer implications for the general social order. Oh, wait, that's right. Big Pharma doesn't own it and we can grow our own, and our ability to grow and use our own theraputic substances would threaten the current big money structure of lobbying and congressional politics as we now know it, revolutionize governance, and change the world for the better.

Um, forget I wrote that last paragraph.

(Oh, and to respond to Joe's excellent question - of course not! But, that said, banning anything never works, and usually leads to worse things...)


Posted by Mr. X | April 11, 2007 3:16 AM
31

This violence/cheap alcohol relationship largely depends of the culture of the country. Best example: Denmark. Never seen people drink so much beer, never seen a less violent society. They get stupid, they sometimes pass out, but they don't get very violent. Whereas in France, where I live, drunks do get violent.They rather do on cheap than on good beer, but that's just because when you want to get drunk and indulge your violent instincts you don't care about quality.

Posted by Alice | April 11, 2007 4:51 AM
32

The entire basis of this study is a fallacy; correlation does not determine causation. Sure, it might be that beer prices are affecting violence but this is hardly a scientific study...

Posted by WTF | April 11, 2007 10:53 AM
33

Yeah, the Danes aren't violent -- other than when their motorcycle gangs are firing machine guns and rockets at each other. Sometimes you just gotta let out your inner Viking, I guess.

Posted by Joe | April 11, 2007 11:44 AM
34

Well, what about the soccer brawls in Europe? Beer is generally cheaper in Europe, and the soccer hooligans are generally pretty full of beer when they fight.

As much as many of us bitch about the behavior of American sports fans, I've rarely heard of American sports brawls on the scale of European sports brawls.

I've been to the UK/Ireland four times over the last few years and was (the first time anyway) amazed by the number of young men with black eyes, split knuckles and missing front teeth.

Posted by Laurie D. T. Mann | April 11, 2007 12:07 PM
35

And not only the UK, though the matches between Celtic and Rangers in Scotland are among the most violent in the world ( though I had a blast). The Italian games are full of violence,racism and mayhem as well and like I said earlier, theyre drunk on WINE, not beer. Can you imagine what would happen here if 3 cops were killed here like they were in Palermo during a football match? You will never see the kind of racism, violence and mayhem here as you do in football matches in Europe, you will never hear the monkey chants that Europeans make when black players have the ball, u will never see black players being hung, nazi salutes and bananas being thrown on the field as the "civilized" Europeans do. and dont get me started in Serbia and Red Star.

Posted by SeMe | April 11, 2007 1:13 PM
36

This study was criticized in detail (some may say "debunked") in today's Freakonomics.

Posted by Sister Y | April 11, 2007 3:11 PM

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