I get what you're saying however there are different types of drinkers.
I don't avoid hanging out with drinkers period because they don't all fall into that category you're describing. But I do know ones to avoid or ones where we'll leave earlier on in the evening because I'm just not into that type of thing anymore and haven't been for years. It's not the alcohol it's the people's behaviors in those cases.
I'm not talking about the obnoxious drinkers. Those people are obnoxious even without drinking.
There is a group of us that attend various workshops or seminars together. Then we all go out to dinner or a tapas bar afterwards to chat. We often have great talks, witty, intellectual debates, (no degenerating into name calling or anything close to that,) sometimes about what the seminar was about, etc.
There was this one time, where the debate got really heated, and this one woman, who, by the way she dressed and held herself, was probably a really strong, intelligent supervisor, (but not at all arrogant,) at some corporation. She had a sense of, when she talked, she had something good to say and people listened. She was about to tell us her argument. We were all quietly waiting, on bated breath, as though she was about to tell us she had come up with the cure for AIDS. Just when it was about to come out of her mouth, her eyes went woozy
and she put her hands up to her head as though she felt the room start spinning,
and she said, "Damn. . . Sorry. I've had too much to drink. . . I just lost my thought. . . Nope. . . I can't get the thought back." And in an instant, <poof!> there went the cure for AIDS
as she had tipped over into the sloshed zone. We all groaned.
I'm not flaming her. She had every right to relax and kick back a few - or several, after work.
Yet, as a non-alcohol person hanging out with social drinkers, this happens a lot. It's not always deep conversations about splitting the atom. It could be fluff stuff, like are the even numbered Star Trek movies really that much better than the odd numbered ones? (YES, they are, BTW.
) One moment we are having a lucid conversation, then comes a moment when we are not.