Randy is a buzz-kill Part 1: Are we slowly poisoning ourselves with moderate drinking?

If there's one thing I'm good at, it's fretting fruitlessly about things that may or may not exist. I think it's high time I shared this talent with the class.

Sometimes I wonder whether my drinking habits - which vary widely, but seldom involve more than a couple of drinks per night - are slowly poisoning my brain. The alcohol's gotta be doing something up there, right? How do I know it's not leaving any scars?

But for some reason few scientists seem to share my curiosity. After a good while scouring the internet, all I could find on the subject was a 2012 study that showed lab mice with a 0.08% blood-alcohol content (the legal limit for sober driving) generated 40% fewer new neurons than their abstinent peers. In short, even "moderate" drinking led to a pretty substantial impairment in ability to learn and remember. No one's tried this on humans, but the authors of the study conclude: "even socially acceptable levels of alcohol consumption can have long-lasting and detrimental consequences for brain health and its structural integrity."

Why the heck aren't we more curious about this? Why do we have countless studies on a glass of red wine being good for your heart, endless evidence for binge drinking destroying your liver, and barely a handful of experiments about how the very seat of consciousness is affected by something billions of people do every day?

When people see I'm becoming agitated about this and want to calm me down, they reassure me that alcohol consumption has been going on for so long in so many cultures that surely we would know any important negative effects of moderate drinking among adults already. But for me this sounds uncomfortably similar to arguments for tobacco use, which seemed like a great idea for about 400 years before people realized it was linked to cancer. Or like lead poisoning among the Romans, who called lead plumbum, which begat our word plumbing, because they used the stuff to carry their drinking water, for crying out loud. When a substance is subtly harmful, widely used, and culturally approved, I fear that all too often we enjoy it too much to ask questions.

Any MDs or neurochemistry buffs in the crowd who can help me feel better / definitively worse about this? Cheers to all in the meantime!