This sort of thought is alien to me. I kind of envy you.
Most people probably start drinking alcohol with wine, or possibly beer. Wine is delicious. The alcohol gives it a little edge, like the bitterness of dark chocolate does, or like mint or pepper. As for coffee, well, some people like it and others don’t. But i have always loved the smell, since long before i was allowed to drink it. These days i sometimes drink bad coffee to get the caffeine, but i still live the flavor of good coffee, and have some very low caffeine decaf around that i treat myself to when i want something tasty in the afternoon.
Which makes sense. If you don’t like to drink, you will tend to avoid situations or friends who drink excessively. Same for any drug for that matter.
My point is simply that from my POV, it seems like people have to try really hard to go out of their way to avoid alcohol. Like they feel like the minority because everyone else is out partying on pontoon boats on the weekend.
It’s not deliberate avoidance of being in its very presence. It’s choosing not to consume. We are all capable of being in a bar and only drinking lemon squash.
You should get out more. 
Next weekend I’m invited to party on a boat. The only psychoactive drug that will be offered is caffeine. Weather permitting, I’m hosting a party on my backyard tomorrow. I’m expecting about a dozen people, maybe 16. There won’t be any drugs on offer.
I think kayaker is right that people tend to hang out with other people who have similar interests.
Exactly. I meet up with my friends, they drink, I don’t. (Usually.) In my experience, not many people care if you drink or not.
I go to two or three live music shows a week. Of course there is lots of drinking especially in the smaller clubs. I’m a rare non drinker surrounded by drunk people. I’m very well known in the local music scene. Most don’t notice. To the extent that anyone cares, they consider it a virtue.
That’s what people say, and one of my tastings was just such a wine. Tasted like grape juice (which I love) that had gone bad. Just nope.
Wine is nasty. I live in wine country. I’ve been to France and Italy. I’ve tried cheap wine and very expensive wine of every variety. I’ve been to many wine tastings. Some is much less nasty than others but there isn’t a single one I have liked.
To this day I’ll take a little sip of any alcoholic beverage that I haven’t tried before. I’ll take a tiny sip of something if a group is doing a toast. It’s not going to kill me.
Oddly enough, the alcoholic beverages that are the least gross to me are lager for a beer, expensive tequila for a liquor and no wine at all.
Tastes vary. I can’t stand the taste of peppers. Bell pepper, hot pepper, it’s just nasty. It’s so nasty that i refused to eat my mom’s tomato sauce as a kid, because it tasted bad. (And this seemed weird even to kid-me, because i liked raw tomato and i liked my dad’s tomato soup. When i married a man who loves tomato sauce we worked out that it’s the pepper i dislike.) So nasty that i find it hard to eat anything at all if I’m sitting next to someone eating a stuffed pepper. So nasty that i won’t eat a stew that has even a little pepper in it.
And yet, many people love that flavor.
I’m going to stand by “wine is delicious” with an addendum, “to a lot of people”. I’m sure some people learned to drink alcohol only to get drunk, but i think a lot of kids started by drinking some wine with their parents and found the whole experience pleasant.
I don’t like green bell pepper but I like the red and yellow ones. (They are not the same varietal. They all start green but the green ones stay green and the other ones change color as they ripen).
Like you, I hate the taste of coffee but I like the smell.
My weird one is cucumber. It has an odd horrible taste to me. That goes for cucumber water. If you put a little slice of cucumber in water for a minute and then remove it. I can easily pass a taste test between a pure glass of water and one that had the cucumber slice.
I’m not advising anyone to take mind altering substances, but this sort of sentiment makes me wonder what people think these drugs actually do:
I’ve done lots of drugs and drinking. I’ve rarely been out of control. In fact, my wife has told me “You know, smoking weed doesn’t change how you act at all. You behave exactly the same way whether you’ve been smoking it or not.” My response is “It changes how I feel about how I behave.” Now, I’m not sure whether she means I act sober when I’m high, or that I’m a total nitwit all the time whether sober or not. However, I hope she wouldn’t have married me if it is the latter.
That drugs make me out of control is straight up propaganda from 70s anti-drug PSAs. Certainly people who drink way too much or whatever are out of control and a very small minority lose control on any random thing but it’s not generally the case.
As I’ve said numerous times, I don’t drink but I’m not smug about it. I always gently shut down people who praise me for it.
Actually, i like fresh raw green pepper okay. But when it gets old it starts developing the flavor i hate. Red and yellow peppers can be picked and eaten green (my father used to grow them, and sometimes we did) and they taste like green peppers. The ones grown to be eaten green are no doubt different varieties, but they aren’t very different. They just taste different because they are riper. I don’t like yellow and red peppers even raw. But i can pick raw peppers out of food. It’s when any of them get cooked that they really contaminate a dish.
As for coffee, i like the flavor of good coffee. And the smell. But there is also bad coffee out there that i drink just for the caffeine.
Yep. I was a hard drinker until it landed me in detox and rehab two and a half years ago. Nobody in my hard drinking crew cared if there were lighter or non-drinkers among us. And now as a non-drinker, I still have fun hanging out with the drinkers. Nobody gives a damn. Nobody tempts me to drink, and we never teased non-drinkers or tried to push alcohol on them, as there’s myriad reasons someone might not want to drink.
Yeah, even the times i got so drunk that the world spun around me, i wasn’t out of control. Well, i guess it depends what kind of control. My control over moving my body precisely was definitely impaired. But i didn’t do or say anything i regretted.
Very interesting, because the green peppers have a much sharper taste that is usually off-putting to people who don’t like peppers. Red and yellow peppers are much mellower and slightly sweeter, so it must really be the taste of peppers you hate.
As for alcohol and wine, I’ve imbibed a lot in my time, but not so much now that I’m old. But for me a meal with coordinated wine pairings is a transcendant experience…one I like to have at least once a year. But I don’t really hate anything. Someone asked me recently what food I hated to eat, and I had to think really hard, and it couldn’t come up with anything I hated. Some things I’m not crazy about and some things cause unpleasant reactions, but I don’t hate them.
ETA: If I’m going to overindulge, I’d always prefer pot to alcohol. Gets me mellower, and I’ve never had a nasty hangover, which I can’t say about booze.
I was only talking about myself and gave exclusively personal alcohol examples. I wasn’t thinking this was a thread about the effects of any drug under discussion on the average user (and neither of us may be average).
It’s not hard to find studies showing a correlation between gambling and the now, or previously, illegal psychoactive drug of your choice. And, obviously, to me anyway, as a non-gambler, gambling is a voluntary decision to lose personal control. But it would take a bunch of jumps to show desire for reduced control to be an underlying cause for the behaviors.
There is a drug I take that I believe increases my control – caffeine. At least in small doses, I find it to have the opposite effect of alcohol. I would fear this last was a thread hijack, except that there have been occassional caffeine bans in the world of sport, and this:
My mom was an alcoholic. I’ve never had a drink.
Cigarettes killed my parents. I’ve never smoked.
As far as drugs, I did try marijuana once at college. It just made me sleepy, so I thought, “Forget about it:”
Interesting. My alcohol consumption has increased over time.