Have you considered the UK, where on occasions one can easily feel like the only one in the pub not drinking Jägerbombs, and drinking to massive excess generally is a proud national pastime.
If you don't start drinking at 5pm on a Friday, puke up twice, consume your body weight in kebab meat and then go for a greasy fry-up in the morning, you're basically a boring sod.
For the benefit of foreigners, i will note that this is actually optional for most people. My experience, living in London and working at a few different tech companies, is that you might go out for a "quick beer after work" one to three times a week (and almost never on fridays), stay out for one to three hours (you're rarely still there for closing time), and over the course of the evening, drink two to four pints of pretty nice beer (you can usually find either a craft beer place or a normal pub with a good selection).
You will probably get some food at the pub, maybe only some bowls of chips to share, or maybe something a bit more substantial. If you do make a habit of getting a kebab, you will eventually manage to find the one place in your territory that is actually pretty good (Best Mangal for the Old Street posse, Damascu Bite for the Spitalfields massive, etc).
In my case, i'll also go out for cocktails a couple of times a month, but that's a similar experience - the cocktails i like are so bitter and so expensive that you drink pretty slowly!
Yes, drinking culture in the UK is stupid and everyone knows it's a problem. The cost to the health service means that it's not really something that should be tolerated in the long term.
If a national health service is an excuse to tell people how to live, I've pretty happy Obama fucked it all up here and just institutionalized health insurers.
How about the people who engage in that big killer - sedentary lifestyles? If you want to sit in front of a computer all, day, why should everyone else pay for your lifestyle choice? /s
Obama and his advisor Cass Sunstein are ostensibly pursuing "libertarian paternalism", as is Cameron in the UK.
I'm guessing you like the sound of "libertarian".
Alcohol consumption is one clear case of people harming themselves. There are a lot of other areas in which the government in fact doesn't know what's best, so I don't think you can generalize about liberties either way.
No it's not !!! I don't drink much! Because I don't drink during the week. I start drinking really late on Fridays (about 7pm) and finish early (about 3am), and only repeat that again Saturday nights, so really 5 whole days without alcohol is like really good. Kebab is meat and meat is healthy. Anyway what would we do if not drink?
Actually, in the UK, it is illegal to serve pre-mixed caffeine and alcohol, but it's rarely enforced. This is why many bars will pour the shot in a highball, and hand you a can of red bull, so what you then do is your responsibility, not theirs.
How odd. I've never had the urge to drink Red Bull or Jagermeister, separately or together. But Irish Coffee has been around for ages. The people I would see drinking it always seemed to manage to walk out of the bar under their own power,
Are you sure? I can't find anything online that supports that. Many bars serve other drinks (vodka and orange, gin and tonic, etc) unmixed, so you can mix it to taste.
Buckfast is still sold, and that contains caffeine. Kahlúa too.
Ah, think you're right - this might just be Scotland where it's actually the law, but was certainly the common practice when I was working bars up north.
There were discussions here about legislating against alcoholic drinks with caffeine levels above a certain level but I don't think anything actually became law:
I suspect you are right that this is only the law in Scotland. At a fairly respectable bar in Cambridge, I've set up 20-drink long "Jagertrains" [1] with the Bar Manager on more than one occasion, and he never mentioned that it was illegal to do so.
Maybe the bar staff are just trying to save you from yourself ;)
Redbull and its siblings do contain a lot of caffeine which allows people to get drunker and still be physically active. One of my colleagues was convinced that all the caffeine drunk with alcohol these days is the cause of the rise in drunken violence.
