The A Word

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Recently, Arild and I have been discussing alcohol. He is completely alcohol abstinent and recently, I decided to give it up as well with only one exception being if we ever decide to visit France I must have a glass of wine. Keep in mind, he never asked me to do this, so not to get the wrong impression of him or anything, it was a personal decision for me and I decided it would only be respectful to him if I were to never drink around him, so I tossed around the idea of, "Why even drink at all?" and since I had already given up alcohol when I began dieting in 2011, it seemed like a simple enough decision. I have no problems with alcohol at all, at least when people use it in moderation and are sensible with it. I just made the decision to give it up.

We've done a bit of research concerning our countries and statistics on alcohol and drug use. Arild since I've met him has told me his alcohol abstinence is a bit of an issue for him. He avoids social gatherings that include a lot of drinking because he doesn't want to be around it and since alcohol use is so common he has mentioned to me that his lack of alcohol use is often pointed out. In USA, according to this link, 46% of Americans do not drink or have not drank within the past month. 46% Americans don't drink We also wondered if it partly depends on the area of USA one is from considering how likely you are to be exposed to alcohol. I personally would say it's just as common to drink alcohol as it is to not drink alcohol in Kentucky. I think a factor that may play in this is location. Kentucky is of course in the Bible Belt of the country and we do have a large population of Baptists, who for the most part are generally against alcohol use. That is a factor in my theory anyways. Alcohol use is higher in Norway than in USA, but drug use is of course higher in USA than in Norway, especially the use of narcotics. Norway has one of the lowest narcotic uses in all of Europe. Nearly 9% of the U.S. population are drug users according to this site. 8.7% of Americans use drugs 

We tried doing the same search on Norway, but found a lot of mixed results on drugs and alcohol, so I won't even post any links here, but overall, Europe is of course the drinking capital of the world and of what we found with mixed results Norway does have higher drinking rates than America. As far as drug abuse rates, of all mixed results we found from various sites drug abuse is lower in Norway than America and also from these mixed results a common statistic we found was Norway has the lowest narcotic abuse rate in all of Europe.

And here's a list of famous teetotalers Famous Teetotalers

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