The authors of the new paper are careful to note that even if drinking is associated with longer life, it can be dangerous: it can impair your memory severely and it can lead to nonlethal falls and other mishaps (like, say, cheating on your spouse in a drunken haze) that can screw up your life. There’s also the dependency issue: if you become addicted to alcohol, you may spend a long time trying to get off the bottle.

via Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers, Study Finds – Yahoo! News.

It seems hard to believe, and one should not leap to conclusions based on a single study (how thorough and rigorous was the methodology of research? Was it properly and carefully controlled for other influences?), but it’s an interesting conclusion nonetheless. Alcohol is a potent drug—its inhibition inhibiting powers are certainly behind many a personal mishap and even death—but it seems that a little poison really can do some good over time.

I suspect that we’ll see something to the contrary in a few years, though; medical studies tend to bounce back and forth all the time (coffee is bad for you; coffee is good for you! Butter is bad for you; butter is a lot better than margarine! And so on).