Paper or Plastic & Beer

January 18, 2012 By Jay Brooks

paper-or-plastic
Here’s an odd little story from Virginia, sent in by an alert reader (thanks Jeff). In many places, there’s a growing debate about plastic bags, paper bags or no bags at the grocery store. In Virginia, there currently is no law regarding them, but that hasn’t stopped stores all along the southeastern coast of Virginia — an area known as Hampton Roads — from insisting that customers get a plastic bag, if they’re buying beer, that is. It’s not the law, of course, as confirmed by Kathleen Shaw, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

According to a story in the local Daily Press, apparently “[c]ashiers are either erroneously told by their employer that Virginia requires them to bag alcohol or they mistakenly equate store policy to state law. Either way, beer is bagged at nearly every supermarket and convenience store in Hampton Roads.” As the article, entitled The ABCs of plastic bags and beer shopping in Virginia, points out, in many places outside the area, stores are actually prohibited from using plastic bags, while still others champion their use.

But whether you think plastic, paper or your own bag is the way to go at the grocery store, that’s not what caught my eye. It’s the notion that it’s “beer” that has to be covered before it leaves the store. As for why that might be the case, multiple 7-11 franchise owner Raj Gupta, had this to say: “it’s convenient for the customer [and] it deters customers from drinking alcohol in the store parking lot.” Uh-huh. Whether it’s more “convenient” is debatable, and a bit beside the point if it’s mandatory at all of his stores. And as for deterring customers from ripping open the thin plastic bag and starting to drink in the parking lot, I can’t believe placing the six-pack into a bag is really going to do much good. Gupta certainly doesn’t care about the environment, as he also states. “If they don’t want the bag, they can throw it out in the trash can when they leave the store.” And then start drinking it, one presumes, which is what he was claiming the bag prevented.

But since those reasons are as flimsy as the plastic the bags are made out of, it seems more likely it’s his third reason why “he requires cashiers to bag six-packs, bottles of wine, and single cans and bottles of alcohol.” And it’s a doozy. “[I]t prevents minors from seeing people carrying alcohol.” Holy crime wave, Batman, thank goodness Gupta’s on the scene. We wouldn’t want the little kiddies “seeing people carrying alcohol.” Goodness knows what untold harm that might cause. He doesn’t mind selling alcohol, but he doesn’t want children seeing it. If parents bring their children into his stores, do employees have to cover the kid’s eyes? Or is alcohol on a shelf safe; it’s only dangerous when an adult is carrying it? Or when it’s outside the sanctuary of the store.

Yes, I’m making fun of him, but only because he deserves it. Yes, he’s free to run his stores any way he sees fit, just as anyone is free to not shop at any of his stores. But it points out a deeper issue, which is that he has some weird, unhealthy issues with alcohol. They’re obviously deep enough that he believes that children seeing adults carrying alcohol is such a problem that he’d make it his “company policy” to avoid it happening. As I pointed out, not enough of an issue that he’d voluntarily stop selling alcohol, but still. Why that might be, I can’t fathom, but I’m curious enough to want to know. It has to have something to with the way alcohol is demonized by certain factions of our society. It has to have something to do with our society only hearing one side of the story, with neo-prohibitionist groups spreading their biased propaganda, and doing everything in their power to prevent anyone else from having their say, telling the opposite side of that tale. How else to explain a businessman who sells alcohol believing it’s in his best interests to make sure that children don’t get the idea that people buy alcohol. What possible benefit could he derive from that “company policy?” Frankly, I’m stumped. I can’t think of one reason that’s not fanatical, based on erroneous information or just plain looney.

The Absurdity Of Binge Drinking Statistics

January 11, 2012 By Jay Brooks

This is one of those things that’s increasingly pissing me off, because it avoids real problems that some people have with alcohol in favor of trying to turn individual problems into an epidemic. It’s not. If anything, overall consumption of alcohol is decreasing. But it’s hard to get funding, finance addiction clinics and raise money to fight the scourge of alcohol if you don’t make the situation sound as dire as possible.

Take binge drinking, for example. ABC News just did a story (thanks to Julia Herz for tweeting it) about a “new” report claiming that 38 million Americans “binge drink an average four times a month.” Their story, entitled CDC: Millions of Americans are Binge Drinkers, details how the CDC is claiming that 1 in 6 “adults binge drinks about four times a month, and on average the largest number of drinks consumed is eight.” Not only that, but this is apparently on the rise. Here’s what the CDC website has to say.

New estimates show that binge drinking is a bigger problem than previously thought. More than 38 million U.S. adults binge drink, about 4 times a month, and on average the largest number of drinks consumed is eight. Binge drinking is defined as consuming four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men over a short period of time.

In the ABC report, Dr. Fulton Crews, director of the Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is quoted in what must be one of the most out-of-touch statements ever made on this subject. “But most people don’t realize that binge drinking is unhealthy.” Seriously? Is there anyone who hasn’t been bombarded with neo-prohibitionist propaganda, whether it’s our government, MADD, Alcohol Justice or some other anti-alcohol group. My kids started receiving the message literally in kindergarten, before they were even able to process it. There isn’t a man or woman alive who believes that drinking too much is good for you.

What people might not know is that what it means to be a “binge drinker” is not as concrete as these “reports” insist. How binge drinking is defined keeps changing, and always it’s narrowing, pulling more people into the circle of binge drinkers, not because they’re suddenly drinking more, but because how it’s defined has changed. I don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I detailed some of the history of this transformation a couple of years ago, in two posts entitled Inflating Binge Drinking Statistics and Son of Binge Drinking Statistics Inconsistencies. And the year before that I wrote about it in Inventing Binge Drinking. What’s clear is that binge drinking went from something somewhat vague — you knew it when you saw it — to ever more specific definitions, the kind that could be quantified and used to alarm people, and, by no small coincidence, be used by anti-alcohol folks in their propaganda.

So yet again the definition seems to be changing. The actual number of “too many” drinks has been somewhat fixed for the last few years at 5 for a man and 4 for a woman. But what keeps changing is the period of time. Initially it was “in a row,” then “within a few hours.” This latest CDC “report” says “in a sitting” and “over a short period of time,” which conceivably could be almost any length of time. At least the ABC report mentions this inconsistency, noting that the definition of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, says the alcohol must be consumed in “two hours or less.” That works out to a beer every thirty minutes for a woman, and for a man, one every 24 minutes.

But what’s also absent from their definition of binge drinking is weight. The definition of being considered drunk is always expressed as a calculation combining time, the amount of alcohol consumed and the weight of the person drinking it. But binge drinking never takes that into account, apart from dividing up gender, presumably under the premise that men are generally bigger than women. That reality, of course, is not true in every case. And it may be indelicate to say so, but with our obesity issues as a nation, in theory it should be taking us longer to actually get drunk today than it did twenty years ago. But the reality is that a 200-pound man will take longer to get drunk than a 120-pound man. The same amount of alcohol will effect the two differently. So why should both be defined as binge drinkers if one becomes inebriated but the other does not?

And frankly, there’s another elephant in the room that troubles me, but is rarely, if ever, talked about. If you’re an adult and choose to drink 5 beers in a row, are not driving, and are not in any other way putting yourself or others at risk, why shouldn’t you be allowed to go a little crazy once in a while? You are, actually. It’s not illegal. Although neo-prohibitionists might not like it, there’s nothing to stop you from going on a bender if you feel like it. You shouldn’t be made to feel guilty about it. If it gets out of hand, your friends and family will likely step in. If it doesn’t so what? Who are you hurting? But every time these “reports” come out, the implication is that binge drinking is bad no matter what. But not all bingeing is the same, especially as they now define it. The average beer dinner runs to at least five courses (unless Sean Paxton is doing it), meaning that every single person attending such a beer dinner is considered a dangerous “binge drinker” by the CDC and other government agencies. Is that rational or realistic? Of course not. That’s entirely different from a person who bellies up to the bar and downs five shots of rotgut in rapid succession. Yet both are considered equally dangerous and costing society untold millions of dollars. It’s absurd.

Here’s some more of the statistical data, which it should be noted was complied through a telephone poll, from the CDC’s press release:

As reported in this month’s Vital Signs, the CDC found that those who were thought less likely to binge drink actually engage in this behavior more often and consume more drinks when they do. While binge drinking is more common among young adults aged 18–34 years, binge drinkers aged 65 years and older report binge drinking more often—an average of five to six times a month. Similarly, while binge drinking is more common among those with household incomes of $75,000 or more, the largest number of drinks consumed on an occasion is significantly higher among binge drinkers with household incomes less than $25,000—an average of eight to nine drinks per occasion, far beyond the amount thought to induce intoxication.
Adult binge drinking is most common in the Midwest, New England, the District of Columbia, Alaska, and Hawaii. On average, however, the number of drinks consumed when binge drinking is highest in the Midwest and southern Mountain states (Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah), and in some states— such as Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—where binge drinking was less common.

But perhaps where this absurdity becomes most evident is in one of the CDC’s suggestions on how to combat binge drinking, which they list under the heading “what you can do.” Here’s the suggestion: “Follow the U.S. Dietary Guidelines on alcohol consumption; if you choose to drink, do so in moderation — no more than one drink per day for women and no more than two drinks per day for men.” Except those are NOT the most recent USDA dietary guidelines. Not even close. The 2010 guidelines “defines ‘low-risk’ drinking as no more than 14 drinks a week for men and 7 drinks a week for women with no more than 4 drinks on any given day for men and 3 drinks a day for women.” So that’s two government agencies that can’t agree on safe levels of consumption, and one that’s essentially lying about it to bolster their own point of view. The UK has had similar problems with their guidelines, when it was revealed a few years ago that their government just made up the safe guidelines, which then became carved in stone for the next twenty or more years, despite being literally plucked out of thin air.

Before the angry comments start flooding in again, I should point out that I don’t believe that binge drinking is always a good idea, or that people should do it all the time. I’m not arguing in favor of it. However, I do believe one does have the right to go on a binge if they feel like it (and as long as they’re being safe and aren’t doing so frequently enough to alarm those people closest to them). I do believe that how the CDC and others define binge drinking is ludicrous and does more harm than good. By making almost everyone a binge drinker through their ever-narrowing definition, they’re avoiding dealing with the serial binge drinkers who really are hurting themselves, and possibly others around them. This does nothing to combat the people who really need help. All it does is demonize all alcohol drinkers, making us all the same, which even the most jaded neo-prohibitionist has to admit, we’re not. It’s not how many drinks one has, or over what period of time, it comes down to how one handles themselves in that situation. If you’re a safe and responsible drinker, none of the rest of that even matters. Drink by example, that’s my new motto.

UPDATE: One of the biggest problems with studies like this is how uncritically they’re reported by the mainstream media. The most common way a press release like this one is used is by taking it and maybe changing around the words slightly but essentially just regurgitating it wholesale, not doing any follow up or critically examining it, and accepting all of it without question. That’s not what journalism should be, but in many cases that’s what it’s become, sad to say. Case in point is The Daily’s piece on it, Binge There, Done That. On the plus side, there’s this cool infographic they created based on the data from the telephone polls that the CDC conducted. On the negative side, there’s no key to the data, but the report mentions that it’s the “percent of the population” that are binge drinkers.

120112-binge-drinking

MADD Rates The States

November 17, 2011 By Jay Brooks

drunk-driving
According to a press release sent out by the neo-prohibitionist organization MADD yesterday, it’s the five-year anniversary of the launching of their Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving® program, which you can tell is all about the results since they went to the trouble to get a “registered trademark” on the name. I also find it somewhat ironic that an organization whose name is “Mothers Against Drunk Driving” has to start a side campaign within its organization to eliminate drunk driving. Isn’t that supposed to be their main purpose? It was, of course — once upon a time — but it’s moved so far from that simple idea now that it seems it’s almost an afterthought so that five years ago they had to create a new program to address the issue of drunk driving.

So yesterday they released the somewhat arrogantly-named “Report to the Nation, which rates each state on its progress toward eliminating drunk driving.” The news is just what you’d expect, indeed what it is every time. “[W]e’ve made substantial progress together, but there is still much work to be done.” And so it goes. Every time. They have to make progress, or why do they even exist, but there always has to be more to do, or else who would keep giving them money? That dichotomy creates contradictions that call all of their assertions into question. For example, on page 6 of the 32-page report, a splash page entitled “A New Hope,” the headline is “drunk driving fatalities reduced by almost half.” And that would certainly be good news, I don’t dispute that. Except that what they refer to as “remarkable progress” in the first paragraph morphs into something entirely different by the second paragraph, which begins: “Despite great progress, drunk driving fatalities have remained relatively stagnant since the mid-nineties, with roughly one out of three highway deaths caused by a drunk driver.” Now how exactly can fatalities be “reduced by almost half” while at the same time “remaining relatively stagnant?”

It’s a game, sadly. Non-profits may not care about profits the way corporations do, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care about money … a lot. They complain constantly about the money that alcohol companies spend on lobbying or influencing policy, but that’s exactly what these neo-prohibitionist groups do, too. Most non-profits may start out with the best of intentions, with a clear goal in mind, but then seem to collapse under their own weight into money-sucking organizations nearly as bad as those they often rail against as they grow larger. In a sense, they become victims of their own success. They become “institutions,” with fixed costs, offices, salaries to pay, consultant fees, marketing materials, advertising, webmasters, etc. They need a lot of money just to take care of their day-to-day costs, never mind whatever they’re trying to achieve. MADD’s gone so far from their original intent that when my son was in kindergarten, he got a bookmark from them during “red Ribbon Week” so he’d know that drugs are bad. Never mind that he parroted that message the next time we tried to give him medicine when he was sick, not quite old enough to process that not ALL drugs were bad.

The “report” also floats yet another made up number of how much it all costs, this time that “drunk driving costs the United States more than $132 billion annually.,” similar to the CDC’s recent $223.5 billion figure, though that was for “excessive alcohol use,” not just driving. Their “research” was done by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE), and their figure “includes $61 billion in monetary costs, plus quality-of-life losses valued at $71 billion,” just as notoriously impossible to quantify as lost wages, though they did still try to include “crashes outside of work involving employees and benefit-eligible dependents.” The full study itself, however, is not included in the “report,” just a one-paragraph summary of it so I don’t know all of the particulars.

Another aspect of the report is about “turning cars into the cure,” which really means just “ignition locks,” one of the most invasive ideas ever implemented, especially for first-time offenders who do not constitute the bulk of the problem. What continues to bother me about this is that MADD, and the rest of the Anti-Alcohol bunch, continue to ignore supporting a much better solution, the technology to create cars that drive themselves. That technology is surprisingly close to becoming a reality, with several prototypes in various states of development and being tested. It would virtually eliminate not just drunk driving, but bad driving, texting and telephone issues while driving, and so much more. Just input the address of where you want to go into a computer and the car takes you there while you sit and watch. Instead, MADD seems to prefer technology that punishes. At a minimum, why not support both?

But the bulk of the “report,” around half of it, is their evaluations of how each state is doing to combat drunk driving, at least according to their criteria. They use a five-star scale, with each star representing whether the state does what MADD wants them to regarding the following:

Interlocks for All First-Times Convicted Drunk Drivers
Sobriety Checkpoints
Administrative License Revocation
Child Endangerment
No Refusal

MADD-rating-states-map

Five states got highest marks:

Arizona
Illinois
Kansas
Nebraska
Utah

And like a good bell curve, five got just 1 (nobody got a zero):

Michigan
Montana
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Dakota

There’s also an interactive map where you can see how your state did. California, for example, got a surprising 4. I’m sure Alcohol Justice would disagree with that one.

MADD-rating-states-cal

The states that got a five are still, of course, encouraged to do more. And by more, MADD means for each state to accept what they think is the best approach. Do what we say, or risk a bad rating, that seems to be at least part of the message. With most states receiving a three, there’s plenty of room for improvement, and plenty of need for more fund-raising.

Societal Costs vs. Personal Costs For Alcohol

November 3, 2011 By Jay Brooks

cdc
At first glance I thought my pals at Alcohol Justice (AJ) got their hooks in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), because I don’t know anyone better at making up behaviors that cry out for personal responsibility that are ascribed to society (for the cost) and business (for the fault). Their absurd “charge for harm” campaign, which seeks to make alcohol companies, the businesses that sell their products, and the communities that they live in wholly responsible for the personal decisions and behavior of a minority of people who abuse alcohol, seems to have been swallowed whole in a new study, apparently by the CDC, that was recently published in the American Journal for Preventative Medicine. That study, not surprisingly, was the subject of a recent AJ press release, CDC Releases New Cost Study: Excessive Alcohol Use Cost the U.S. $223.5 Billion in 2006, which they summarize:

Of the total costs, 72.2% ($161 billion dollars) is attributed to lost productivity in the workforce. The remaining costs are attributed to healthcare (11%), criminal justice (9.4%), and effects such as property damage (7.5%). While the CDC has had strong data on premature deaths caused by alcohol consumption (79,000 annually, with an estimated 2.3 million years of potential life lost each year), it last performed an economic cost analysis in 1998, when the annual cost was estimated to be $184.6 billion.
While $223.5 billion dollars is a massive number — almost 3 times what the federal government spent on pre-primary through secondary education in 2010 — the authors of the study believe that it is a substantial understatement of the true costs of alcohol use in the United States. They recommend “effective interventions to reduce excessive alcohol consumption—including increasing alcohol excise taxes, limiting alcohol outlet density, maintaining and enforcing the minimum legal drinking age of 21 years, screening and counseling for alcohol misuse, and specific countermeasures for alcohol- impaired driving such as sobriety checkpoints.” With the national cost of alcohol consumption ringing in at nearly $2 per drink, we could not agree more.

Of course they couldn’t agree more, it’s catnip to their agenda and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a closer link to the study that has not been disclosed since it seems so much like a self-fulfilling prophecy of their own propaganda with conclusions that so closely mirror their own proposals to “fix” alcohol abuse at the expense of the majority of responsible drinkers and local craft brewers who positively affect their local economies and communities. And my instinct turns out to be true, though not with AJ, but because this study “was supported by generous grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the CDC Foundation.” For me, that’s the smoking gun. If you don’t know who the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is, they’re the mother of all neo-prohibitionist groups, and they fund most of the other ones, setting the agenda for a majority of other anti-alcohol organizations nationwide. Supposedly, AJ no longer accepts donations from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, though when I asked when they stopped receiving support from them, I never got an answer.

But a closer look at the study reveals that the charges it ascribes to “society” are not actually borne by society at large, at least to my way of thinking, but instead are paid privately by the individuals who supposedly abused alcohol or the private companies that employ them. To me, that makes them false statistics because they say one thing that turns out to not actually be true. So let’s look as those numbers of societal “costs.” Here’s the breakdowns, according to AJ’s press release:

72.2%: Lost productivity in the workforce
11%: Healthcare
9.4%: Criminal justice
7.5%: Property damage

Okay, the biggest expense blamed on alcohol abuse is “lost productivity in the workforce,” accounting for nearly three-quarters of the total, or about $161 billion. But unless they work for the government (and there’s no data on what percentage might) the costs, it seems to me, would be paid by the private companies they work for. And if they continually show up late, hungover or so they can’t do their job, how many would remain employed for an extended period of time? However you slice it, that’s not me or society paying for the poor performance of that binge-drinking employee. I suppose you could argue that a company filled with such people might result in higher prices passed along to consumers, but any such company that doesn’t weed out employees who don’t perform their jobs well is most likely going to go out of business for other reasons, as well.

The other lost productivity category is early mortality by alcohol-abusers. These people apparently selfishly die before they can do enough work to be considered to have paid their debt to be a member of society. But if you drink yourself into an early grave, your unfinished work or debt to society has got to be the least of your troubles. It’s more likely that the reasons for your early demise have multiple causes, many of which were probably not addressed by the society who was as responsible for you as they claim you were to country, state, community and family. I honestly can’t see how you can total dollar amounts for work undone by one individual, when undoubtedly another person stepped in and did it instead. I don’t mean to sound cold, but with unemployment so high, when a position becomes available under such circumstances, I feel confident that there will be someone to take that job and get the work done. So how does that cost society anything?

But let’s also look at the number itself, $161 billion. GDP at the end of 2006 (the same timeframe as this study) was $13.58 trillion. That makes this “cost to society” 1.19% of GDP. Not only is that a pretty small percentage though, even if true, nothing in their reasoning suggests it’s anything close to the truth.

The next highest cost is from healthcare. But again, unless the binge drinker has no health insurance and doesn’t pay his own medical bills, how is society paying? For those with insurance, their policy pays their medical bills, and whatever isn’t covered under their policy they become personally responsible for. I admit that it’s more likely that a person who abuses alcohol, and may not be able to keep down a job, might not have health insurance, but in the only civilized nation without universal healthcare I would argue that’s more a failure of our society than a cost to it. Whoever ends up paying for the medical care of binge drinkers, it seems more likely it will be insurance companies first, responsible individuals second, and, if at all, society last.

Third, criminal justice apparently accounts for 9.5%. What is meant by “criminal justice” includes $73 billion, of which “43.8% came from crash-related costs from driving under the influence, 17.2% came from corrections costs, and 15.1% came from lost productivity associated with homicide. Other categories include fire loss, crime victim property damage and “special education” about “fetal alcohol syndrome.” In the full text of the study, Table 2 lists who they think is responsible for all these costs, whether the government, the drinker and his family or society (though I should point out how that was arrived upon is completely absent from the study). Given that the entire study supposedly claims the “cost of excessive alcohol consumption in the United States in 2006 reached $223.5 billion,” you’d think that the personal costs even they admit to would not be a part of the total at all. Even by the CDC study’s own admission, 41% of the costs they claim are to society, are actually “paid” by the individual drinker (and his family). That’s almost half that don’t appear to be a cost to society as a whole. How does that not call into question their methodology and/or their conclusions?

But many of these other categories seem plain silly. Fire loss and property damage? Those are crimes, whether or not the person perpetrating them was drinking or not. To say it’s alcohol-related if they had a drink before they robbed someone seems as ludicrous as including a car accident in which the passenger was drinking in drunk driving statistics (which actually has been routinely done). And corrections? If you’re in jail for a crime you committed, yes that’s a cost to society, but that’s a cost we’ve all agreed is supposed to be borne by society, like the police and fire departments. It’s not like there’s some special jails that don’t count or count double if the criminal had a drinking problem. It’s really just a way to inflate the numbers and, as usual, make the problem with alcohol abuse seem far worse than it is.

And while I’m on that subject, let’s briefly mention how absurd the very definition of a “binge drinker” is in compiling these statistics, too. I’ve written about this many times, such as in Inflating Binge Drinking Statistics, Son of Binge Drinking Statistics Inconsistencies and Inventing Binge Drinking.

Lastly, “property damage,” which is really “other effects,” is listed as 7.5% of the harm blamed on alcohol. This is very confusing, because in the study’s Table 1, “criminal justice” is actually listed under “other effects” so I’m not sure what AJ is up to with their list. So I’ve actually addressed property damage above here, though Table 1 also includes a separate column for “crime-related” so the row for “criminal justice” is 100% “crime-related” so I’m not sure what’s being doubled-up on, but surely something is odd, if not intentionally.

The other factors not accounted for, as usual, are any positive effects of alcohol. Although both the study and AJ makes a big deal about what negative effects they couldn’t quantify, they’re completely unconcerned about any omitted positive ones. Certainly there are economic benefits for local communities as well as society at large. But even ignoring those, this “study” undoubtedly does not take into account how total mortality is improved by moderate, responsible drinking as set forth in the most recent FDA dietary guidelines, as well as a number of scientific studies and meta-studies that have shown the same thing. How many people who do drink moderately as part of a healthy lifestyle actually save society money because of their responsible behavior, which includes a drink or two daily?

It also doesn’t take into account how many crimes are prevented or stress relieved which might otherwise have led to “costs to society” because a person had a drink or two and calmed down, relaxed and decided not to do something rash, stupid or illegal. Given that the majority of people who drink alcohol do so responsibly and do not cost society anything, even by these absurd standards, it seems likely a lot more “costs” are actually prevented by moderate alcohol consumption. So where’s the balance? As even this “study” admits, “[m]ost of the costs were due to binge drinking — it’s the subtitle of the CDC’s press release — although the CDC claims “[e]xcessive alcohol consumption, or heavy drinking, is defined as consuming an average of more than one alcoholic beverage per day for women, and an average of more than two alcoholic beverages per day for men, and any drinking by pregnant women or underage youth.”

Of course, that’s at odds with the most recent dietary guidelines that the FDA released, which “defines ‘low-risk’ drinking as no more than 14 drinks a week for men and 7 drinks a week for women with no more than 4 drinks on any given day for men and 3 drinks a day for women.” But the anti-alcohol groups didn’t like that definition, and they gave the money for this study to be done, so they can safely ignore anything that doesn’t fit the conclusion they paid for. Why the government is so hot to be in bed with anti-alcohol factions is a bit trickier, but I feel confident money and control are at the root. The CDC’s handling of autism research has made me more than a little suspect of their motives and their ties to the medical industry and academic institutions.

But the larger picture is the question of Societal Costs vs. Personal Costs for alcohol. Few other products sold in America are as demonized as alcohol and it remains one of the few that continues to be blamed en masse for the actions of a minority of people who abuse it. Whatever harm they do personally is writ large across the entire spectrum of consumption, as if everybody who drinks is a bad person costing society its moral compass and leading us down the mother of all bad roads. We are becoming the scapegoats for all of society’s ills. Make no mistake about it, there are people who want a return to prohibition and the groundwork is being laid as we speak to try it again. And we know how well it turned out the last time. But we should be honest about it. Everything we do costs society something, but only alcohol is singled out to pay for the small number of people who abuse it. It’s a question of weighing the good with the bad and what’s best for a majority of people. Given that the vast majority of people are responsible drinkers who enjoy both drinking alcohol and the rituals that go along with it, I’d say that society has always been better off when its populace could have a beer. And that’s good both for the individual and society as a whole.

Drinking & Cultural Anthropology

October 28, 2011 By Jay Brooks

BBC Magazine published online a couple of weeks ago an interesting piece on cultural anthropology as it relates to drinking patterns, entitled Viewpoint: Is the Alcohol Message All Wrong?. While the article itself I found compelling on its on, the way in which it was attacked in the voluminous number of comments is at least as interesting, too.

It was written by Kate Fox, a co-director of the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC). As for Fox’s ideas, she begins with the media-driven perception that Britain is “a nation of loutish binge-drinkers – that [they] drink too much, too young, too fast – and that it makes [them] violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.” She suggests that those very perceptions are deeply believed among people living there, but that they are wrong.

In high doses, alcohol impairs our reaction times, muscle control, co-ordination, short-term memory, perceptual field, cognitive abilities and ability to speak clearly. But it does not cause us selectively to break specific social rules. It does not cause us to say, “Oi, what you lookin’ at?” and start punching each other. Nor does it cause us to say, “Hey babe, fancy a shag?” and start groping each other.
The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol.
There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call “ambivalent” drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.
There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours — cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life — about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as “integrated” drinking cultures.”

Seems reasonable enough, almost common sense really. And it’s certainly consistent with my own personal experience. Some people are bad drunks, they use the idea that alcohol will make them act badly to act badly. I’ve seem many examples of such people growing up and through the present. But they’re the minority. I’ve also seen countess people who don’t believe that drinking alcohol will alter their moral compass in the least, and for those people — easily the vast majority of people I know — it doesn’t. The effects of alcohol in such people are largely benign. They don’t don’t turn into assholes. They may get more chatty, more open, more sleepy perhaps; but they don’t become “violent, promiscuous, anti-social and generally obnoxious.”

Fox goes on to suggest that there’s little difference in the amount of alcohol consumed, as it makes little difference at all. What matters is the cultural norm, the attitudes of the society that, at least in part, dictate the consequent behavior. And she says there are numerous studies that prove just that. These “experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol” even if given placebos. She continues:

The British and other ambivalent drinking cultures believe that alcohol is a disinhibitor, and specifically that it makes people amorous or aggressive, so when in these experiments we are given what we think are alcoholic drinks – but are in fact non-alcoholic “placebos” – we shed our inhibitions.
We become more outspoken, more physically demonstrative, more flirtatious, and, given enough provocation, some (young males in particular) become aggressive. Quite specifically, those who most strongly believe that alcohol causes aggression are the most likely to become aggressive when they think that they have consumed alcohol.
Our beliefs about the effects of alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies — if you firmly believe and expect that booze will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. In fact, you will be able to get roaring drunk on a non-alcoholic placebo.
And our erroneous beliefs provide the perfect excuse for anti-social behaviour. If alcohol “causes” bad behaviour, then you are not responsible for your bad behaviour. You can blame the booze — “it was the drink talking”, “I was not myself” and so on.

She then explains that it may be our attitudes toward alcohol and what it does to us, or what we believe it allows us to do, that we should focus on changing. If the people who use alcohol as an excuse to act badly instead acted like the rest of us and believed otherwise, there might be less bad drunks. That doesn’t sound too radical to me, but judging from the 1000+ comments made in just 48 hours after the article was posted, you’d think she was suggesting we kill puppies and children.

Many of the commenters complain that the author, Kate Fox, is a shill for the alcohol industry because her organization, the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) receives funding from companies who sell alcohol. And that does appear to be the case, although the total funds they receive appear to be from a wide variety of sources, many of which (in fact it would appear a majority) are not alcohol companies. Their funding page does include Diageo, Greene King and the Wine Action Trade Group. But those three are the only ones among 56 donors listed, some of which are very big companies indeed. SIRC’s stated mission is “SIRC is a non-profit organisation that conducts research and consultancy across a wide range of topics, including on-going monitoring and analysis of social trends and related issues.” And given the wide and varied sponsors, it would appear that they’re not exactly in the pocket of big alcohol, as their critics seem to insist.

The main charge lobbied at them is that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) attacked them in a study entitled “how seriously should journalists take an attack from an organisation that is so closely linked to the drinks industry?” But that appears to be in response to SIRC criticizing journalists for publishing stories on health scares so in a sense it seems the BMJ was responding to being criticized by criticizing them. Most commenters seem to believe that the BMJ, and “academic journals” in general, are unassailable, which I’ve found is hardly the case. They’re as open to misuse as anything or anybody. My point is that while it can be important to look at who’s behind any study (and I do it all the time) I find that it’s done far more routinely when it’s a business interest than an anti-alcohol group. If this was an anti-alcohol piece, the media would be falling all over itself in acceptance of it as fact, despite that what comes out of anti-aclohol groups is every bit as much self-serving propaganda as what they’re accusing SIRC of, and without any actual proof, either; just character assassination.

The vitriol in the more than 1,000 comments is staggering, and just the number of comments removed for violating their house rules — language presumably — is higher than I think I’ve ever seen. There’s so many that are just emotional responses, and very little beyond she’s wrong, he’s wrong and I know best kind of opinions. It may well be that SIRC is not to be trusted, but the dismissal of the substance of Fox’s arguments or a seeming unwillingness to either understand or address them, or indeed just remain civil, says more about the fanatical commenters than anything else could.

Particularly interesting is that in the final paragraph Fox concludes that “[o]ver the past few decades the government, the drinks industry and schools have done exactly the opposite of what they should do to tackle our dysfunctional drinking.” That doesn’t exactly jibe with her alleged image of an alcohol industry shill.

So while I don’t believe her theory is the only reason that some people behave badly when they drink, I certainly think it can account for a lot of the problems that are currently being blamed on alcohol. Shouldn’t we at least be able to talk about alternatives to the one way we now think about alcohol in society? Especially when you consider that the very organizations against it keep saying that the problem is growing and all their efforts are for naught. You’d think the neo-prohibitionists would welcome another way to combat what they perceive to be the biggest problem to hit society since the plague. But judging by this article’s critics, I can’t help but think they’re not going to change the way they think about alcohol anytime soon.

Stop A Mate Driving Drunk: Legend

October 27, 2011 By Jay Brooks

Monday, I posted some PSA’s aiming to prevent drunk driving in rural Australia — Prevent Mate Morphosis. They used something we’re not used to seeing here in the U.S.: humor. Now here’s another great PSA, this time from New Zealand, that uses a sense of humor to get its message across without pandering or using propaganda. You might have to watch it twice to pick up the idiomatic patois but I love how straight forward it is and how they don’t make such a big deal out of everything. The friend is worried about his mate, is afraid of saying something and appearing uncool, and decides it’s worth it. His friend agrees, problem solved. Everybody’s safe. Beautiful. Bloody legend, indeed.

The Inspiration Room also has some commentary on the thinking behind the ad, which was created by the New Zealand Transportation Agency and launched last Sunday.

Tipping The Sacred Cows Of Addiction

May 29, 2009 By Jay Brooks

I have nothing against Alcoholic Anonymous per se. I know that it’s been helpful for thousands, perhaps millions of people since 1935. There are currently estimated to be just under 2 million members in a little more than 114,000 groups around the world, with the majority being in the U.S. and Canada.

I grew up with an alcoholic stepfather who was also psychotic and prone to violence, and many, if not most, of his circle of friends were similarly afflicted. When I was in my early 20s, I even went to a couple of meetings for “Adult Children of Alcoholics,” though I don’t recall if they were affiliated with Al-Anon or Adult Children of Alcoholics (a.k.a. Adult Children Anonymous). Not to disparage those groups, but it wasn’t for me. I was an unfocused, troubled youth, trying to find my way in the world alone. But it didn’t take me long to figure out that I wasn’t that untypical or that it had as much to do with losing my mother to breast cancer at 21 than anything else, not to mention my own personality quirks.

But I’ve never been comfortable with their tacit suggestion that it’s the only way. For A.A. to work, one has to admit being “powerless” when in fact many people are powerful enough to overcome their addiction. I remember seeing a documentary several years ago that contrasted AA with a philosophy common in Japan for working with people with addictive behaviors. To the Japanese way of thinking, a person wasn’t “cured” until they could enjoy the occasional drink without lapsing back into their over-indulging ways. That always seemed more correct to me. The AA way of simply avoiding alcohol never seemed like a cure but a way of circumventing the problem without actually addressing it or the underlying causes.

On their website, under the heading “is AA for you?,” it states. “We who are in A.A. came because we finally gave up trying to control our drinking. We still hated to admit that we could never drink safely” and the general pamphlet about A.A. goes on to say that members “cannot control alcohol. [They] have learned that [they] must live without it if [they] are to avoid disaster for [them]selves and those close to [them].” Their stated purpose “is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety.” But, of course,” staying sober for many is a lifelong struggle. For many they believe it’s the only way they can function. But what if it wasn’t the only way, as so many A.A. members insist? Wouldn’t that be something they would embrace? Well, no, apparently not. It appears that the only way being powerless works is to believe it, then the rest can fall into place. So it’s my experience that challenges to the A.A. ethos are fierce and vigorous, because they believe it will undo the base upon which its foundation stands. If they’re not powerless, then it becomes a house of cards.

So with that in mind, the Toronto Star published an article last week entitled Addiction: Could It Be a Big Lie? The article is examining a new book by Harvard professor Gene M. Heyman, a psychologist. His new book carries the incendiary title Addiction: A Disorder of Choice and “argues that addiction isn’t really an illness, infuriating the medical establishment.”

According to the article, it’s not the first to do so, but is one of several published in the first decade of the 21st century to challenge the conventional wisdom, which the article calls an “overwhelming scientific consensus that addiction is an involuntary disease.” The Star goes on to give voice to people who disagree, who use the opportunity to insult both the author and Harvard itself for even allowing a dissenting opinion into the world.

Heyman’s goal is nothing short of persuading “us that we have been persistently deceived by so-called addiction experts who do not understand addiction.” The book is complex and the publisher describes it like this:

In a book sure to inspire controversy, Gene Heyman argues that conventional wisdom about addiction—that it is a disease, a compulsion beyond conscious control—is wrong.
Drawing on psychiatric epidemiology, addicts’ autobiographies, treatment studies, and advances in behavioral economics, Heyman makes a powerful case that addiction is voluntary. He shows that drug use, like all choices, is influenced by preferences and goals. But just as there are successful dieters, there are successful ex-addicts. In fact, addiction is the psychiatric disorder with the highest rate of recovery. But what ends an addiction?
At the heart of Heyman’s analysis is a startling view of choice and motivation that applies to all choices, not just the choice to use drugs. The conditions that promote quitting a drug addiction include new information, cultural values, and, of course, the costs and benefits of further drug use. Most of us avoid becoming drug dependent, not because we are especially rational, but because we loathe the idea of being an addict.
Heyman’s analysis of well-established but frequently ignored research leads to unexpected insights into how we make choices—from obesity to McMansionization—all rooted in our deep-seated tendency to consume too much of whatever we like best. As wealth increases and technology advances, the dilemma posed by addictive drugs spreads to new products. However, this remarkable and radical book points to a solution. If drug addicts typically beat addiction, then non-addicts can learn to control their natural tendency to take too much.

But as the Toronto Star points out, it’s “fundamentally based, however, on that last, simple point: Addicts quit. Clinical experts believe addiction cannot be permanently conquered, Heyman writes, because they tend to study only addicts who have entered treatment programs. People who never enter treatment – more than three-quarters of all addicts, according to most estimates – relapse far less frequently than those who do, since people in treatment more frequently have additional medical and psychiatric problems.”

Star reporter Daniel Dale continues:

People who have stronger incentives to remain clean, such as a good job, are more likely to make better lifestyle choices, Heyman writes. This is not contentious. But he also argues that the inability to resist potentially harmful situations is a product of others’ opinions, fear of punishment, and “values”; it is a product of a cost-benefit analysis.
He does not dispute that drug use alters the brain. He does not dispute that some people have genes that make them more susceptible to addiction. He disputes that the person who is predisposed to addiction and the person whose brain has been altered are not able to ponder the consequences of their actions. In other words, he disputes that biological factors make addicts’ decisions compulsive.

I find such discussions fascinating because of my own experiences along with what I’ve seen and read about addiction. In my stepfather’s case, his family enabled him by pretending his aberrant behavior didn’t exist and dismissed or excused his violence as something my mother and I either deserved or exaggerated. My mother was also a party to the dysfunction and was clearly co-dependent, but that’s a story for another day. The point is, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more dysfunctional individual who seemingly could not control himself. And yet every summer we’d take a one-week car vacation and over the course of my childhood we drove (from Pennsylvania) as far north as Canada, as far south as the Florida Keys, and as far West as Indiana. A few weeks before we’d load up the car, my stepfather would inexplicably just stop drinking and work harder than I’d ever seen him (for most of the time, he was a mechanic, and owned his own repair shop) to save up money for our vacation. There was no fanfare, no detox time, he’d simply be drunk one day and decide the next it was time to earn the vacation money. It was usually two weeks and sometimes longer if my folks had planned a more extensive trip. So every year, for between two and four weeks, my stepfather seemingly just flipped a switch inside himself and became sober. There were no side-effects I ever saw, no temptations I ever witnessed, it just seemed as natural as the sun coming up each morning. This odd, almost contradictory behavior, I realized (unfortunately, not until I was older), seemed to seriously fly in the face of what conventional wisdom had to say about alcoholism, that my stepfather had no control over himself or his actions. And his example wasn’t the only one I saw, just the one I knew best.

But when Join Together posted this story, most of the comments were predictably dismissive and downright abusive or insulting. Some took a “how dare he” position as if a contrary opinion constituted a personal attack. They seem to think his opinion was just shot from the hip or has no foundation whatsoever and therefore he had no right to state it, even when none had actually read it. I haven’t read it either, of course, but I’m willing to give it a chance whereas the addiction crowd doesn’t seem capable of that, and I suspect it’s that house of cards idea that it could all come crashing down. But that’s what happens when you build with straw or sticks, an idea comes along and huffs and puffs.

The history of science is filled with examples of individuals who theorized beyond the scope of the conventional wisdom of the day and were insulted, disgraced, ruined or worse before later being vindicated. Obviously, I can’t say with any certainty that Heyman’s ideas will stand up to further scrutiny and testing, but history suggests we should at least listen to him and explore his ideas further, and not so quickly dismiss them out of hand, as appears to be what’s happening. The only news organizations to even cover the book’s publication are from Canada. A Google News search came up with not one American article, which in and of itself I think is telling.

The other Canadian piece is an interview in Maclean’s, essentially Canada’s weekly Time magazine and Newsweek rolled into one. It’s a very interesting and enlightening read. Heyman, I’m not surprised to learn, comes across as very even-handed and practical, even saying kind things about A.A.’s effectiveness, despite the addiction crowd’s apparent attack on him.

To the question about how on earth “the idea that addiction is a disease governed by uncontrollable compulsion [took] root?” Heyman replies.

The first people to call addiction a disease were members of the 17th-century clergy. They were looking at alcoholism and they didn’t describe it as sin or as crime. I have a theory as to why they thought this—and why we think it even today. It’s this problem we have with the idea that individuals can voluntarily do themselves harm. It just doesn’t make sense to us. Why wouldn’t you stop? In the medical world, in economics, in psychology and in the clergy, they really have no category for this, no way of explaining behaviour that is self-destructive and also voluntary. The two categories available to them are “sick” or “bad.”

And that does seem to conform to how I see addiction and alcoholism portrayed, yet I have witnessed so many people who have been able to simply quit of their own volition that on reflection it seems almost obvious that it can’t be a disease. It would be like deciding to cure your cancer and then just doing so by simply making such a decision. It would be like saying “that cancer was ruining my life so I just decided to quit having it.” If one person did that, it would be a miracle. But if thousands, perhaps millions of people can effectively just quit doing something considered to be a disease, wouldn’t you have to reevaluate or reconsider that very notion?

And on the other side of the coin, I see lots of people who get drunk and use being drunk as an excuse to do things and get away with doing things that wouldn’t be tolerated from a sober person. To me, that’s the really bad side of viewing alcoholism as a disease. It allows people to not be responsible for their actions when they can persuade others that it was the alcohol that “made them act that way.” Sure it was. I’ve known — and still know — plenty of bad drunks who still play that game. Many people let them get away with it, and I contend it’s because they accept the idea that they can’t help themselves when they’re drunk, that they’re somehow not responsible for their actions. Bullshit, I say. People should be held accountable for their actions, whether sober, falling down drunk or somewhere in between. So I imagine a lot of people who’ve been getting away with acting badly and blaming alcohol will be quite unhappy with Heyman’s assertions, after all it undermines their ability to be jerks and get away with it. But I also believe such people are ruining it for the rest of us, who don’t turn into assholes when we drink too much. I get more talkative and eventually more sleepy. I get friendlier and am probably better company as I’m less reserved in person than usual. But that’s about it, I retain my ability to judge right from wrong, to know what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not. I don’t harass people or get in their face. I’m usually acutely aware of my own level of intoxication. Most importantly, I don’t think I’m unique in that. The majority of people I drink with regularly are similarly self-aware and don’t become a drunken Mr. Hyde to their sober Dr. Jekyll.

So who’s right? Obviously, it’s a complicated question and one not easily decided. But like most things, it’s worth at least discussing the possibility that alcoholism is not a disease, even if it makes some people uncomfortable and may undermine conventional wisdom. We can only evolve in our intellectual understanding of the world if we remain open to new ideas. Some of us can discuss such ideas over a beer, others not so much, at least as long as we cling to the idea they just can’t help themselves.

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