The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, really likes to rain on the tippler’s parade.

A widely-publicized article in 2018 concluded that the only safe level of alcohol consumption is…zero. Although a later piece in 2021 disputed the precise methodology and conclusions, the weight of the medical literature is behind the view that alcohol has little or no health benefits. Alcohol harms your liver, and has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen. Forget the French paradox, drinking appears to be a net negative for our bodies.

A more recent Lancet piece, which also received a great deal of press, was slightly less depressing: it’s OK to have a drink or two, but only if you are over forty. Partly this is because alcohol may provide some slight protection from diseases that disproportionately effect that age group, like cardiovascular disease and diabetes. But the overall recommendation is based, in the end, on the health risk of alcohol in the context of “all-cause mortality,” which increases significantly after forty. By the time you’re forty, essentially, you’re already pretty much dead or well on your way to dying—a little alcoholic-induced damage thrown on top isn’t going to change things, statistically speaking. So cheers and bottoms up! For healthy younger people, however, avoiding putting any amount of this fermented poison in one’s body is to be strictly avoided.

Does this mean that we should all stop drinking? Not at all. There are at least two responses to dour neo-Prohibitionism that should be incorporated into any discussion of the pros and cons of alcohol consumption.

The first, and most common, is the hedonistic response. We would be safest if we left our homes as little as possible, except perhaps to get a medically-recommended quantity of sunlight and a bit of supervised, non-risky exercise. We should avoid driving, dangerous sports (i.e., pretty much all sports), sexual intercourse, and wild animals (and especially sexual intercourse with wild animals). We should cut our food with those crappy plastic knives they give you on planes, putting more effective but dangerously sharp steak knives away in a drawer.

The reason we generally do none of these things is because doing so would make life suck. Attempting to maximize the number of years one remains on the planet while simultaneously draining those years of any semblance of pleasure and joy seems a poor life strategy.

Hedonistic responses to the 2018 Lancet article—and to health-based concerns about alcohol consumption in general—are not hard to find (see, for instance, Stuart Walton’s wonderful Out of It or this response to the recent Lancet piece). In my recent book Drunk, however, I pursue a novel and potentially more potent argument against viewing the costs and benefits of alcohol solely from a public health perspective.

Alcohol increases both individual creativity and group innovation. It reduces stress. It helps people to trust strangers and bond more deeply with others. It has been a crucial cultural technology allowing otherwise deeply individualistic and narrow-minded primates to create astounding new technologies and cooperate on a scale, and with an intensity, that rivals social insects.

As long as we remain confined to a purely medicalized lens, the answer to the question of whether or not we should make a place for alcohol in our lives is—hedonism aside—generally going to be a firm “no.” This lens, however, is unhelpfully narrow: co-existing with the impact of ethanol on our bodies are a panoply of individual and social benefits that have kept a taste for alcohol in our genetic and cultural repertoire for tens of thousands of years.

From a scientific, anthropological and historical perspective, we are still mostly flying blind when it comes to deciding what the proper role of alcohol should be in our individual, social and institutional lives. We need to fix this. Even after understanding the positive benefits that counteract the obvious physiological costs of alcohol, and while also making adequate place for pleasure in our lives, we may still decide that we are better off abstaining from booze. But let’s make that decision wisely, with all of the relevant evidence at our disposal.

Edward Slingerland is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.