It ages you, as you age you handle it worse.
However, this large (12,000 man) study across widely different cultures
found alcohol consumption was correlated with lower mortality form heart disease. Meat and animal food in general were associated with higher mortality.
The worst thing was butter, the best was legumes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10485342
Qulaity of life-wise, I've become more and more anti-alcohol as I age and see friends stagnate, get fat with drinking, and go off track in their lives.
I myself put on weight I still have not been able to get off years later now that I rarely drink.
The one reasonable excuse I had was I was working a remote and dreary prison and hated it, but needed to save up a certain amount of money and thus could not realistically quit.
To keep going, I felt that I had to drink at night most nights, and drank about 2/3 bottle of wine per night which led to me gaining weight.
in that case, I rationalized drinking as sort of a anesthesia; a way to tolerate an operation that was necessary but temporary.
But just as you may need anesthesia for an operation and it would be insane for your to continue taking those powerful drugs, it's equally insane, once you are in a reasonably rich environment, to continue getting drunk.
The worst thing is the opportunity cost. With the sort of rare exception of social drinking with new and interesting people and finding out things you would not have found out otherwise, time drunk is time spent not learning, not achieving , not practicing as well as you could have.
And overall achieving less in your life.
