In the future of Syntehol, is there underage drinking?
- Thread starter Unnamed Caitian
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Reminds me of the old joke about the first person ever to get high. They probably thought, "this can't be it!" 
It became a nuisance as people would hang around it and light leaves on fire to get "high." Police got tired of it.
yeah, like nuking banana skins in the microwave, scraping off the gunk, and smoking it. I'm fairly sure that didn't work either.
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Synthehol gets you the pleasant buzz without the impairment.
By ‘Real beer’ do you mean in the sense that includes or excludes adjunct lagers? Because ‘Real beer’ is delicious but crap like Budweiser is garbage.
I hate any and all beer. I don't even know what makes a "lager" different from other beers.
Can't be that bad, considering the number of people who drink it.
A lager is simply a beer made under cool or refrigerated conditions. The traditional Budweiser is a pale lager, but there are some dark lagers that can put people under the table as well.
All beer goes well with a restaurant-made pizza, IMO...
The 'adjunct' part is the part that makes it not real beer, not the lager part. Or rather, the entire process. They use rice and corn adjuncts to save money, chemically remove the body then force recarbonate it. It doesn't even taste like beer, more like grain soda.
It's not that it's bad. Just mediocre and bland. People can only stomach it because they get used to it in their college years. Comparing adjunct lagers to beer is like comparing McDonalds hamburgers to a good steak.
What's the point of an alcoholic drink without the alcohol?
May as well drink grape juice.
Na. The stuff I had was real Alcohol.
And yes there is a real life Chateaux Picard.
Ultimately, I think this is the conundrum with alcohol, and the root of this conversation. If we were to 100% get rid of it's intoxicating affect, and get rid of it's "cultural attraction", would it just disappear?
Kids like grape juice (or any juice) because of the sugar, and it's sweet. Different juices have additional flavors, but the basic flavor is sugar. Humans have a natural predisposition to wanting sugar. It starts there.
I don't drink, but I have mistakenly been given non-virgin drinks, and you can tell right away after one sip. I don't notice an added flavor but an added texture, an added dryness, and sharpness (ie. slightest abrasions in your mouth stand up). Increased sensitivity to the liquid in your mouth and throat. I never get to the point (only one sip) to notice any buzz.
So my question...
Is the base attraction of alcohol the flavor? or wanting the effect/buzz (as stated by Orphalesion)? Does it start there? Then eventually you start noticing the nuances of the different flavors (ie. acquired taste) of alcohols?
If indeed it starts with the effect/buzz, then synthehol has no standalone attraction. Unless SF is trying to use it to wean off alcoholics while assuming that it will eventually die off in the culture.
I'm trying to think, if in any episode with chars from the future, set in the future, or in Disco, do they ever mention alcohol in the federation.
i've often wondered if the way synthehol works was it being some chemical mix that triggers the release of specific neurotransmitters in the brain, which emulate most of the less harmful side effects of the chemical interactions that alcohol has in the brain, while using different mechanisms. thus when you drink it you get the euphoria, reduced inhibitions, etc.. but not the damage to the body that having a bunch of alcohol in your cells creates. presumably said chemical mix might be easier for the body to filter out than alcohol proper (especially if it does not need to be metabolized to do so), and if the effects are neurochemical in nature, recovery from them would be much quicker (and anything else that effects neurochemistry might well overpower them)
four fucking pages of comments and not even one of you drunks answered the question
Lots of bad things are popular.
Those aren't chars from the future (timetravel people), set in the future (7of9 working in the future), or in Discovery (Season 3+ set in the future).
In current time Trek, yes, there are many references to alcohol. If synthehol was introduced a few years before TNG (assumption), then it would make sense that the current federation population were "culturally" used to alcohol. Just wondering how they portrayed the role of alcohol in the future.
Of course, I'm discounting that TOS/TNG is heavily based on western (European + NA) culture (ie. appreciation of classical music, food, etc), and it assumes they carried almost unchanged into the 24th century (ie. alcohol glasses/bottles and the way it's distributed (ie. bar setting)). This was more apparent in TNG than TOS. TOS actually had more cultural diversity than TNG, even if some of it was stereotypical. However this is another topic
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Welcome to Trek BBS.
Looking at the original question:
"Underage drinking" is a legal concept. We've got no idea whether there is a "legal drinking age" for synethol so also no idea whether the concept of "underage drinking" exists.
Adolescents are always going to indulge in boundary-pushing and I don't see that changing in the future but we don't know whether this is a boundary.
The questions are: whether synethol carries any risks; what those risks might be and whether those risks are such that it would be seen to be inadvisable for young people to be consuming it. One of the basic reasons for there to be a legal drinking age is that alcohol causes physical damage and that damage is greater in immature bodies. If synthehol carries risk then I would expect there to be some kind of limitations on its consumption. Looking at the information available on-screen, it seems to be contradictory in that some people/species have trouble breaking-down synthehol but also that synthehol avoids problems like hangovers and alcohol poisoning. That some people have problems for whatever reasons suggests that synthehol isn't entirely benign so I would expect there to be a "legal drinking age" of some description although the legal ages for the consumption of synthehol and alcohol might differ.
No. Wesley could not have a mojito before class. Frankly, I can't imagine why anyone would want to drink a mojito at any time!
"Underage drinking" is a legal concept. We've got no idea whether there is a "legal drinking age" for synethol so also no idea whether the concept of "underage drinking" exists.
Adolescents are always going to indulge in boundary-pushing and I don't see that changing in the future but we don't know whether this is a boundary.
The questions are: whether synethol carries any risks; what those risks might be and whether those risks are such that it would be seen to be inadvisable for young people to be consuming it. One of the basic reasons for there to be a legal drinking age is that alcohol causes physical damage and that damage is greater in immature bodies. If synthehol carries risk then I would expect there to be some kind of limitations on its consumption. Looking at the information available on-screen, it seems to be contradictory in that some people/species have trouble breaking-down synthehol but also that synthehol avoids problems like hangovers and alcohol poisoning. That some people have problems for whatever reasons suggests that synthehol isn't entirely benign so I would expect there to be a "legal drinking age" of some description although the legal ages for the consumption of synthehol and alcohol might differ.
No. Wesley could not have a mojito before class. Frankly, I can't imagine why anyone would want to drink a mojito at any time!
One of the biggest ideas in TNG that never really gets born out is the idea of personal responsibility in view of the larger collective. Humans do not work for "money," but work to "better themselves and humanity."
So, in that way, is alcohol still available to those in the future? Yes, more likely than not, even if they are not producing it there would be other cultures and stellar powers who might have it.
But, would they choose to do so and does that better themselves or humanity? They have a freedom to choose.
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