(WP) - Public health discussions about drug and alcohol use tend to be dour, humorless affairs. We talk about all sorts of terrible things associated with drug use, like car crashes and mental illness and kids getting high and people killing themselves and others.

Take a look, for instance, at how the federal government describes the effects of alcohol:

Alcohol affects every organ in the drinker's body and can damage a developing fetus. Intoxication can impair brain function and motor skills; heavy use can increase risk of certain cancers, stroke, and liver disease.

All of this is true, of course, but it's incomplete. You don't pour a glass of wine with dinner to "damage a developing fetus;" you do it because the wine helps you relax after a long day. You don't go out to the bar and down five beers with your buddies to "increase the risk of certain cancers;" you do it because the beer helps the conversation and camaraderie come easier.

In other words, most people get drunk because it's fun.

[America’s trendiest new bar is your living room]

This is why some new research from England is so important: It attempts to quantify exactly how much happiness we derive from that glass of wine or bottle of beer. And it does so using a massive real-time data set — the Mappiness app, a free iPhone app that pings people a few random times a day and asks them how happy they are on a scale of 1 to 100.

The app, developed by the London School of Economics in order to better understand human well-being, also asks users whom they're with (friends, family, alone, etc.) and what they're doing (working, socializing, drinking, etc.). For the alcohol study, researchers compiled 2 million responses to the app that over 31,000 people recorded between 2010 and 2013. What they ended up with was a large data set that could be used to answer the question: Do people report being happier when they're drinking?

The answer to that question may not surprise you: "drinking alcohol is associated with considerably greater happiness at that moment — 10.79 points on a 0-100 scale," the researchers found. In other words, pour yourself a drink and voila — an immediate happiness boost.