Fomenting Female Fear

November 16, 2011 By Jay Brooks

women
The purported scientific journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research has just published another doozy, this one entitled The Legacy of Minimum Legal Drinking Age Law Changes: Long-Term Effects on Suicide and Homicide Deaths Among Women. The idea was to compare people drinking before the age was raised to 21 with when 18-year olds could still legally imbibe, but the conclusions are .. well, off the deep end and unnecessarily alarmist. So, of course, anti-alcohol groups are running with the results, just as you’d expect.

Despite it being in a “scientific journal” it appears to be nothing more than junk science. They start with this premise. “Prior to the establishment of the uniform drinking age of 21 in the United States, many states permitted legal purchase of alcohol at younger ages. Lower drinking ages were associated with several adverse outcomes, including elevated rates of suicide and homicide among youth.” Really? So the other 139 nations who allow people 18 or under are all killing their kids, getting them to commit suicide more often or generally simply not caring about their health. Most of the rest of the world allows their citizens to drink before they turn 21. Apart from the eight countries where it’s illegal for everyone — mostly for religious reasons — only a dozen countries are as high as 21 (only 5 according to Alcohol Problems & Conclusions), like us. Clearly, the rest of the world hates its kids, right?

Here’s the rest of the Abstract:

Methods: Analysis of data from the U.S. Multiple Cause of Death files, 1990 to 2004, combined with data on the living population from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey. The assembled data contained records on over 200,000 suicides and 130,000 homicides for individuals born between 1949 and 1972, the years during which the drinking age was in flux. Logistic regression models were used to evaluate whether adults who were legally permitted to drink prior to age 21 were at elevated risk for death by these causes. A quasi-experimental analytical approach was employed, which incorporated state and birth-year fixed effects to account for unobserved covariates associated with policy exposure.
Results: In the population as a whole, we found no association between minimum drinking age and homicide or suicide. However, significant policy-by-sex interactions were observed for both outcomes, such that women exposed to permissive drinking age laws were at higher risk for both suicide (OR = 1.12, 95% CI: 1.05, 1.18, p = 0.0003) and homicide (OR = 1.15, 95% CI: 1.04, 1.25, p = 0.0028). Effect sizes were stronger for the portion of the cohort born after 1960, whereas no significant effects were observed for women born prior to 1960.
Conclusions: Lower drinking ages may result in persistent elevated risk for suicide and homicide among women born after 1960. The national drinking age of 21 may be preventing about 600 suicides and 600 homicides annually.

Okay, the first thing that should stick out is the statement that “[i]n the population as a whole, we found no association between minimum drinking age and homicide or suicide.” But then they go on to suggest “significant” findings for just women, even though their findings show that for suicide, a woman is only 12% more likely to commit suicide if she starts drinking legally at 18, and 15% more likely to be murdered. That hardly sounds “significant” and seems small enough that statistical error alone could account for some of the difference. But more importantly, it makes no allowance for any of the literally millions of other factors that lead to any person committing suicide or being murdered. And there’s just no causation or direct correlation linking the two outcomes. The difference in time alone could account for the statistical difference. The time when the age was 18 was different than later, when it was 21. Times change, and so accordingly would how people react to it.

And again, even though it’s only women who the “study” found were affected, they note that the “trends were not mirrored among men,” but examining all this data that “proves” a link for women, their answer to why it doesn’t increase a risk for men is this. “It’s hard to say why that happened.” Well, how scientific. When the results are what they’re looking for, they point to the data. When the data doesn’t support the conclusion they want, they don’t know what happened. Hmm.

Join Together’s headline, Lower Legal Drinking Age Linked to Higher Risk for Homicide, Suicide in Women, claims there is a definite link (which the study itself never says). And their graphic shows a presumably passed out woman in front of a blurry empty bottle of liquor. At the end of their article, lead researcher Richard Grucza says the following. “In fact, what we have here is a natural experiment that supports that idea, by demonstrating an unintended but positive consequence that comes from having raised the drinking age.” But there’s nothing natural about that conclusion. Just like MADD in the past has claimed victory against drunk driving deaths while ignoring improved car safety, mandatory seat belt laws and countless other factors, this “study” looks at two cohorts of numbers and jumps to a conclusion worthy of Evel Knievel’s rocket car leap over the Snake River without ever showing a connection actually linking the two outcomes. Really, they just assume there is a connection, presumably for no better reason than they’re looking for one.

It just feels like there’s no real evidence to truly support such far-reaching conclusions, more like they’re using the data to force an outcome. They’ve certainly over-simplified society and the complex ways in which people determine they want out or want to take someone else out. So they blame alcohol, and when people started drinking.

Drunk Off … Er, In Your Ass?

November 11, 2011 By Jay Brooks

tampon
A mix of thanks and “how could you” to Stephen Beaumont for tweeting this story, because now that I know it, I can’t unknow it. According to Digital Journal, a growing trend among Phoenix, Arizona, area youths — disturbingly both girls and boys — is to get drunk by soaking a tampon in vodka and inserting it … well, you get the idea. According to the report, the practice was first identified in 1999, in the Oxford Journal of Alcohol and Alcoholism, although in that instance they wrote about just three case studies all of whom were adults in their late twenties to their mid-thirties. Also, in April of this year, the same thing was reported to be happening in Germany, too.

The latest story’s origin is a Channel 5 KPHO Phoenix TV report, where a Dr. Quan is the medical source, saying they’ll get a “[q]uicker high, they think it’s going to last longer, it’s more intense.” School Resource Officer (whatever that is) Chris Thomas adds “[w]hat we’re hearing about is teenagers utilizing tampons, soak them in vodka first before using them. It gets absorbed directly into the bloodstream. There’s no barrier, there’s no stomach acid to prevent it.” Dr. Quan agreed. “I would expect it to absorb pretty quickly as well, because it’s a very vascular structure.” Okay, that’s probably enough to give you the idea of what “butt chugging” is. Two things leap to mind.

One, this has got to be a hoax. Kids messing with adults and them falling for it hook, line and sinker. Maybe it’s just me, but when I was a kid, not only would this have never occurred to us, but even if it had, we would never have tried it. Heroin addicts shoot up between their toes to avoid detection. Same deal here, apparently, but there are just too many simpler ways to avoid detection than this. It’s just too much committed effort for most people. Or is that just me? Plus, mainstream media, and television in particular, loves a good scare story, something that puts fear into its viewers. This story is dripping with cautionary words, something else for parents to be “concerned” about. Perhaps some idiots did try it, but a growing trend? I’m just not buying it. You?

Second, if it is true, however doubtful, it shows the futility of having 21 be the minimum legal drinking age and avoiding any real education before that time. People will find a way to do almost anything if properly motivated. And few things motivate a teenager more than being told they can’t do something. I keep hearing that line from Jurassic Park in my head. “Nature will always find a way.” And so it goes.

tampons-soaked-in-vodka

UPDATE: Thanks to Rick at Pacific Brew News for sending me this Tiny Cat Pants post In Which I Debunk the Vodka-Soaked Tampon Myth.

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.

Scientific American Examines The Beer Glass

August 22, 2011 By Jay Brooks

Scientific American posted an interesting article this morning entitled Does Your Beer Glass Matter?. Part of their “Anthropology in Practice” section, in it author Krystal D’Costa takes a look at the beer glass through history from early man up to the recent new glass designed by the Boston Beer Co. for their Samuel Adams Lager.

Beer Missing From MyPlate

June 3, 2011 By Jay Brooks

food-pyramid
Yesterday the USDA scrapped their old food pyramid in favor of a new nutritional chart. The new one is called MyPlate, and as you’d expect it’s shaped like a plate. It’s also a bit simpler than previous efforts, divided into just four groups: proteins, grains, fruit and vegetables. And just off the plate is a fifth food group: “dairy,” looking very much like a cup of milk.

MyPlate

But where’s the beer? I say that only half in jest, as I realize that culturally there’s simply no way that alcohol would ever show up on our food pyramid. That’s despite the fact that for adults (let’s remember the food pyramid is for everybody) who regularly drink in moderation the odds are that they’ll live longer than folks who abstain or drink to excess. Yes, that means moderate beer drinkers are healthier, so it doesn’t seem like it’s too much of a stretch to think it could, or should, be included. Unfortunately, most Americans just can’t bring themselves to admit the obvious, that beer might actually be good for us. That’s especially true in a climate where a majority of adults do in fact drink responsibly while a very vocal minority of anti-alcohol fanatics do everything they can to undermine and distort those very facts.

MyPlate-beer

Not surprisingly, there are other countries whose food pyramids do include alcohol. In the French pyramid, they recommend two glasses of wine for a woman, and three for a man, every day. The Greek pyramid also suggests “wine in moderation.” In fact, eighteen EU nations give at least some type of advice about alcohol in moderation. Likewise, the Latin American food pyramid also recommends “alcohol in moderation.”

And in fact, many food pyramids with names like the “new food pyramid,” the “healthy food pyramid,” and the “Harvard food pyramid” do include the moderate alcohol drinking as part of their recommendations for a healthy lifestyle. But as long as the neo-prohibitionists are the only ones shouting about their peculiar disdain for alcohol, and the alcohol industry continues to play exclusively defense, nothing about this debate is likely to change anytime soon. It’s enough to drive me to drink.

harvard-food-pyramid
The Harvard Food Pyramid

Good News: Beer Doesn’t Kill Brain Cells

May 25, 2011 By Jay Brooks

brain-2
You’ve probably heard this old saw your whole life, same as me, that “beer kills brain cells.” According to an item in this month’s Maxim, it turns out it just isn’t true. While alcohol can damage “neurons in the cerebellum that are responsible for motor control and memory, which helps create the impaired feeling we call … drunkenness,” the good news is that they will recover, and that “alcohol definitely won’t ‘kill’ them.” Although the supporting evidence is not given, the short snippet does say it’s supported by “numerous studies.” Whew, that’s a relief.

nurse-beer

The Science Of Manipulation: New Study Comparing Underage Drinking Riddled With Problems

April 28, 2011 By Jay Brooks

Join Together and the Partnership For a Drugfree America yesterday sent out an item in their e-mail blast entitled Teens Who Drink with Adult Supervision Have More Drinking Problems, Study Finds. Alarming, right? Likewise, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s went even farther with this misleading headline: UW study: Teens don’t need parents as ‘drinking buddies’.

But do these headlines accurately convey what the study actually found? Unsurprisingly, no. Not even close. Naturally, most news organizations don’t really care about the news or how accurately they portray it. Many of the reporters do, I should hasten to add, but the companies themselves and people that run them, not so much. It’s one of those open secrets that they’re businesses and what they care about is revenue. Advertising. Making money. They cynically refer to the empty spots in their papers where there is no advertising as “news holes.” That’s not necessarily a criticism. They do, I realize, have to make a profit. But it’s important to remember that they understand that fear, danger and making people uneasy sells far more papers than telling us everything’s hunky dory. “If it bleeds, it leads” is another well-known news axiom. Headlines are designed to pull in readers, to make them want to read the article. As a result, the more salacious or fearful the headline is, the more likely we’ll be persuaded to read the paper (and see all that glorious advertising that surrounds it).

The people who are against alcohol and have their own agenda to advance — those pesky neo-prohibitionists — also know how the world works and create studies that can be used to advance their cause. Lying with statistics is perhaps one of the oldest forms of propaganda. It’s certainly one of the most effective, because people tend to believe “studies” created in academia. They get them published in so-called scientific or academic journals, which while they have the imprimatur of accuracy, are often not as accurate as they first appear to be. Firstly, there’s just the law of large numbers, with an estimated 50 million such papers having been published since anybody started tracking these things, around 1665. Then how many are truly accurate or are based on legitimate premises or science? A 2009 Scottish study (and yes, I see the irony in relying on a study to discuss the inaccuracy of studies) entitled How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data revealed that a weighted average of nearly 2% “of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results,” and “up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices.” Worse still, when surveying their colleagues’ practices, scientists believed 14.2% of them falsified papers, “and up to 72% [engaged in] other questionable research practices.” At just one university, “81% were ‘willing to select, omit or fabricate data to win a grant or publish a paper.'” The point is that journal articles are hardly as sacrosanct as the media would have us believe. Common sense is still required. Asking about the agenda, where the money or support came from or how the study was conducted often reveals surprising results, yet the supposedly fair and balanced media more often takes them unquestioningly at face value, especially if they advance a particular agenda or can be used to scare people into reading an article.

In this case, the headlines state quite emphatically that if you drink along with your underage kids that more problems will ensue for your children. How did they arrive at that conclusion? According to the articles that conclusion was reached when “[r]esearchers looked at 1,945 adolescents in Washington state and Australia and compared two approaches to underage drinking: Zero-tolerance attitudes and ‘harm minimization.'” Join Together added that “[t]hey chose to include teens from both the U.S. and Australia because the two countries have different attitudes about teens and drinking.” And they further described the differences like this. “While the U.S. Surgeon General recently issued a call to action promoting a zero-tolerance position toward youth alcohol use, in Australia surveys indicate that 30 percent to 50 percent of teen drinkers get alcohol from their parents.”

So from that, the two articles conclude the following:

The study found that by ninth grade, 71 percent of Australian teens and 45 percent of U.S. teens used alcohol. More than a third (36 percent) of Australian students reported having experienced harmful consequences resulting from alcohol use, compared with 21 percent of U.S. teens.
“Providing opportunities for drinking in supervised contexts did not inhibit alcohol use or harmful use in either state,” the researchers wrote. They recommend that policies should not encourage parents to drink with their children and parents should not allow their children to drink under their supervision.
“Findings challenge the harm-minimization position that supervised alcohol use or early-age alcohol use will reduce the development of adolescent alcohol problems,” the researchers wrote.

But let’s look at the study itself, Influence of Family Factors and Supervised Alcohol Use on Adolescent Alcohol Use and Harms: Similarities Between Youth in Different Alcohol Policy Contexts. According to the Abstract, their objective was the following:

Harm-minimization policies suggest that alcohol use is a part of normal adolescent development and that parents should supervise their children’s use to encourage responsible drinking. Zero-tolerance policies suggest that all underage alcohol use should be discouraged. This article compared hypotheses derived from harm-minimization and zero-tolerance policies regarding the influence of family context and supervised drinking on adolescent alcohol use and related harms among adolescents in Washington State, USA, and Victoria, Australia, two states that have respectively adopted zero-tolerance and harm-minimization policies

And while I’ll agree that that sounds reasonable, comparing just two makes it an us vs. them scenario. And why Australia? The claim is that it’s because of the two policy differences, but there are, of course, other ones. For example, Australian youths become adults at 18 and that includes the ability to legally buy and consume alcohol, unlike here in the U.S., where we have essentially two levels of adulthood and our youth must wait until they’re 21 to legally imbibe. Then there’s the drinking culture. Here in the U.S., we’re ranked 13th in per capita alcohol consumption, drinking about 81.6 litres (21.5 gallons per year, or roughly 230 12 oz. bottles or 9.5 cases per year). Australia, by contrast, is ranked 5th and consumes 104.7 litres (27.6 gallons, or roughly 295 12 oz. bottles or 12.3 cases per year). By percentage, the difference is that Americans, on average, drink about three-quarters of what Australians do.

I can’t help but believe that choosing just two so disparate drinking cultures, with no control, essentially created a false dichotomy, an either or situation. It seems to me, a survey or multiple nations would be far more revealing.

The so-called “harmful consequences” were self-reported and included “loss of control (“not able to stop drinking once you had started”) and social conflict (“trouble at school the next day,” “arguments with your family,” and “become violent and get into a fight”). Other alcohol-related consequences were “got injured or had an accident,” “had sex with someone, which you later regretted,” “got so drunk you were sick or passed out,” and “were unable to remember the night before because you had been drinking (blackouts).” Just under 3% of the kids had their answers discounted because they were considered to be dishonest, which given the subject matter seems quite low, to me at least. But that aside, many of the behaviors listed, except of course the ones directly related to drinking (“loss of control” and “blackouts”) don’t require alcohol to be fairly common in adolescence. As a result, it seems to me that causality doesn’t necessarily have to be in the alcohol. Any of those experiences could have happened with or without alcohol. Young teenagers could even experience something similar to a “loss of control” without alcohol — I know my friends and I sometimes did at that age. Alcohol could cause such behaviors, or exacerbate them, but it seems to me it shouldn’t be a given that the two are conclusively linked to one another.

Predictably, the prevalence of alcohol use behavior in both states increased over time between seventh and ninth grades. Lifetime alcohol use by seventh grade among Victoria students was significantly higher than among Washington students (59% vs. 39%). By eighth grade, drinking in adult supervised settings was reported by two thirds of students in Victoria and 35% of Washington youth. By ninth grade, rates of alcohol use had increased to 71% in Victoria and 45% in Washington. More than a third of Victoria students (36%) also reported having experienced any harmful consequences resulting from their alcohol use, compared

What’s also not in the reports of the study is that the kids studied were 7th graders — 12 and 13-years olds — who were then followed over the subsequent three years. So another problem with that data is that an 8th grader in the U.S. is seven years from the minimum drinking age whereas an Australian is only three years from being allowed to legally drink. That, I think, would change any parents’ decision to educate their child about alcohol, and especially when and how they’d educate them regardless of the ages being the same. It would also go a long way in explaining the results.

Another issue I see is that the general terms “favorable parental attitudes toward alcohol use” and “adult-supervised alcohol use” is never really defined, suggesting it has only a general meaning that avoids any nuanced difference. For example, I think there’s a big difference between an alcoholic who lets their kids drink because they don’t care or don’t see any possible harm and a parent who carefully tries to educate their kids about responsible drinking. One might just allow drinking in the household without limit while the other’s goal would be to sample their kids and model behavior to show that moderation and enjoyment is the key. Those are two very different approaches that would both fall under the umbrella of “favorable parental attitudes toward alcohol use” and “adult-supervised alcohol use” as far as the study is concerned.

In the summary discussion, the researchers concluded that “although harm-minimization perspectives contend that youth drinking in adult-supervised settings is protective against future harmful use, we found that adult supervised drinking in both states resulted in higher levels of harmful alcohol use.” But even in their own discussion of the study’s limitations, they admit that the lack of specificity of which adult was doing the supervising and the problems inherent in adolescents self-reporting and further contend that “a more concrete
measure asking about parents or guardians overseeing youth alcohol use may have yielded different results.”

Though not mentioned specifically, they never even bring up or account for the nature and type of the adult supervision, and for me that’s the most important factor. Because it’s not just that adults should allow their children to drink in their presence. They should use such opportunities to educate and teach them about alcohol. Merely allowing such behavior I would contend, is reckless and even counter-productive and on that point, I agree with the premise of the study. But their methods do nothing to make that all-important distinction, which is the crux of the issue, at least to my way of thinking.

And while I do doubt the sincerity of the researchers and the study itself, the media and especially the anti-alcohol groups will use the study to their own ends and gloss over the study’s own admitted limitations. As the headlines make clear, they’re not interested in accurately portraying the study’s results. Few people will go to the trouble of actually reading it, and will take it at face value, never questioning the results. Especially egregious is lead researcher Barbara McMorris’ quote that “[k]ids need parents to be parents and not drinking buddies.” Did anyone suggest otherwise? Ever? No, but characterizing any adult supervised drinking as being a “drinking buddy” makes her intentions somewhat suspect. Because raising a child to be an independent and productive adult member of society is not merely saying no. We saw how well that worked when Nancy Reagen tried it in the 80s. Sometimes we have to show them the way, teach them the difference between good and bad in a way that’s not just black and white. Things are rarely all-good or all-bad, and alcohol is a prime example. Saying adults shouldn’t be allowed to educate their children about alcohol robs them of the ability of doing their job. And pushing a zero-tolerance policy with this faulty “study” does nothing to further the goal of parents’ raising responsible adults.

So when the study concludes that their “[f]indings challenge the harm-minimization position that supervised alcohol use or early-age alcohol use will reduce the development of adolescent alcohol problems” and in the final sentence they claim that the “[r]esults from the current study provide consistent support for parents adopting a ‘no-use’ standard if they want to reduce harmful alcohol use among their adolescents,” I have to question their motives. Because those statements are essentially false. That conclusion is sound only if you ignore the manner in which the parents supervise their children, and seems to assume there is no positive way to educate your children about alcohol under supervision. I, myself, wouldn’t want to start that process in the 7th grade, but by high school, I think every child should be taught about a great many things that our schools don’t tackle. And that leaves it to every parent to prepare their children for adulthood, including teaching them about the use of alcohol. Saying the only way to prepare them for becoming an adult is to make sure they never drink the stuff all but insures they’ll binge drink the first chance they get, whether as a freshman in college or whenever they’re unsupervised. There’s nothing like a taboo to create demand. And that strikes me as irresponsible. That strikes me as the science of manipulation.

mad_scientist

When Science Becomes Propaganda: The Caffeine & Alcohol Conundrum

April 18, 2011 By Jay Brooks

Ugh. To me there’s nothing worse than junk science, especially when it’s in the service of an agenda. And that’s how this latest “study” in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research comes across. The title of the “study” is Effects of Energy Drinks Mixed with Alcohol on Behavioral Control: Risks for College Students Consuming Trendy Cocktails and was conducted at the Universities of Northern Kentucky and the Maryland School of Public Health. Here’s how the press release for the study explains it:

A new laboratory study compares the effects of alcohol alone versus alcohol mixed with an energy drink on a cognitive task, as well as participants’ reports of feelings of intoxication.
Results show that energy drinks can enhance the feeling of stimulation that occurs when drinking alcohol.
However, energy drinks did not alter the level of behavioral impairment when drinking alcohol, particularly for impaired impulse control.
The combination of impaired impulse control and enhanced stimulation may make energy drinks combined with alcohol riskier than alcohol alone.
Energy drinks mixed with alcohol, such as Red Bull™ and vodka, have become trendy. While this consumption has been implicated in risky drinking practices and associated accidents and injuries, there is little laboratory research on how the effects of this combination differ from those of drinking alcohol alone. A recent laboratory study, comparing measures of intoxication due to alcohol alone versus alcohol/energy drink, has found that the combination of the energy drink enhanced feelings of stimulation in participants. However, the energy drink did not change the level of impairment for impulsive behavior. These findings suggest that energy drinks combined with alcohol may increase the risks associated with drinking.

But take a closer look at what that says. The caffeine stimulates. Well, duh. That’s what caffeine does. Did anybody doubt that? Then the study goes on to say that “energy drinks did not alter the level of behavioral impairment when drinking alcohol,” meaning it didn’t make people more drunk. Then they conclude combining caffeine and alcohol “may increase the risks associated with drinking [my emphasis].”

Here’s how they conducted it:

Marczinski [lead author] and her colleagues randomly assigned 56 college student participants (28 men, 28 women), between the ages of 21 and 33, to one of four groups that received four different doses: 0.65 g/kg alcohol, 3.57 ml/kg energy drink, energy drink/alcohol, or a placebo beverage. The participants’ behavior was measured on a task that measures how quickly one can execute and suppress actions following the dose. Participants also rated how they felt, including feelings of stimulation, sedation, impairment, and levels of intoxication.
“We found that an energy drink alters the reaction to alcohol that a drinker experiences when compared to a drinker that consumed alcohol alone,” said Marczinski. “A consumer of alcohol, with or without the energy drink, acts impulsively compared to when they had not consumed alcohol. However, the consumer of the alcohol/energy drink felt more stimulated compared to an alcohol-alone consumer. Therefore, consumption of an energy drink combined with alcohol sets up a risky scenario for the drinker due to this enhanced feeling of stimulation and high impulsivity levels.”
“To reiterate,” said Arria, “the investigators found that the presence of an energy drink did not change the level of impairment associated with alcohol consumption.” It did, however, change the perception of impairment.
“The findings from this study provide concrete laboratory evidence that the mixture of energy drinks with alcohol is riskier than alcohol alone,” said Marczinski. “College students need to be aware of the risks of these beverages. Moreover, clinicians who are working with risky drinkers will need to try and steer their clients away from these beverages.”

But that’s hardly “concrete” as she characterizes it. In fact, it’s the very opposite of concrete. It didn’t change impairment, just how people felt about it, how they perceived it. From that “insight” they concluded that since being stimulated “sets up a risky scenario for the drinker” that therefore the risk is greater. And they recommend that people should “be aware of the risks.” So far, so good. But if you didn’t realize drinking coffee after alcohol would stimulate you, perhaps you shouldn’t be in college after all. Maybe it’s time to lower your sights if that obvious bit of wisdom eluded you. I hear McDonald’s is hiring.

When Marczinski states that “[y]oung people are now drinking alcohol in different ways than they have in the past” I have to wonder what her evidence is for that nonsense. People have been mixing caffeine and alcohol for as long as the two have been around, I’d wager. This is one of those generational things, where the older one always believes the younger generation is worse than they were. The only difference between when I was a kid and now, at least regarding caffeine and alcohol, is that you don’t have to go to the trouble of mixing it yourself.

And I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’m not a fan of alcopops or alcoholic drinks with caffeine added (that is not naturally occurring like many coffee stouts, for example). But for me, that’s not the issue. The issue is society going out of its mind over a perceived problem for which there is only anecdotal evidence that there even is a problem. And this study seems like more of the same. I don’t like these drinks, don’t drink them myself, but I don’t think they should be banned just because some people don’t like them. There are obviously adults who bought them, and want to continue buying them, and they shouldn’t be removed from shelves just so that kids can’t buy them. Kids are already prohibited from buying them. If kids can still get them, that’s an entirely different problem. Kids can’t own guns either, but I don’t see any movement to ban all guns so that we can keep them out of the hands of children. That’s just not how a society should function. We shouldn’t make the world safe for our children by only allowing kid friendly products to be in it.

In the end, this “study” is hardly the hard evidence that the caffeine and alcohol conundrum has now been solved and they’ve found the data to close the book on this scourge. Even its authors know as much, as they use qualifying words all over the place. Their hesitation is right there in the title of the press release, which is “Drinking energy beverages mixed with alcohol may be riskier than drinking alcohol alone.” [my emphasis.] Up front, it tells you this is not as conclusive as you might otherwise think because they admit that a greater risk is simply possible. Beyond using an almost laughable 56 test subjects, the study simply jumps to anecdotal conclusions that are not supported by what passes for hard data. There really isn’t any hard data beyond people’s feelings after having consumed alcohol and then alcohol with caffeine and the authors then concluding those feelings might turn into actions that were riskier.

But even as honestly as the study states that their “findings suggest that energy drinks combined with alcohol may increase the risks associated with drinking,” naturally that’s not how it’s being reported. Every headline has essentially removed the qualifying “might” and made it sound far scarier and more conclusive than it really is. Here’s just a few examples.

Combining Energy Drinks with Alcohol More Dangerous Than Drinking Alcohol Alone at Partnership for a Drug Free America and as linked to a Join Together e-mail blast. And that report begins by stating that “A new study finds that consuming a caffeine-infused energy drink combined with alcohol is more dangerous than drinking alcohol alone.” But that’s not what the study concluded at all.

Likewise, HealthDay’s headline was Alcohol-Energy Drink Combo Riskier Than Booze Alone, Study Says, MedPage states Alcohol and Energy Drinks, a Risky Combination and News Feed Researcher claims Study: Alcohol, Energy Drinks Are Risky Combo. But again, those headlines are misleading. That’s not what the “study” claims. The “study” never even mentions drunk driving, but sure enough some of the news reports do. All the “study” says is that drinking alcohol and caffeine might make you feel more stimulated which might possibly lead you to act more impulsively, which might make you engage in riskier behaviors. Maybe. Maybe we can agree that’s not exactly science, but propaganda.

Your Brain On Beer

April 14, 2011 By Jay Brooks

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A new study conducted at the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin appears to indicate that alcohol actually helps your memory, at least at the synapse level; that “alcohol primes certain areas of our brain to learn and remember better.” The new study, published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience, is a mouthful, entitled Previous Ethanol Experience Enhances Synaptic Plasticity of NMDA Receptors in the Ventral Tegmental Area. And the Abstract isn’t much clearer:

Alcohol addiction (alcoholism) is one of the most prevalent substance abuse disorders worldwide. Addiction is thought to arise, in part, from a maladaptive learning process in which enduring memories of drug experiences are formed. However, alcohol (ethanol) generally interferes with synaptic plasticity mechanisms in the CNS and thus impairs various types of learning and memory. Therefore, it is unclear how powerful memories associated with alcohol experience are formed during the development of alcoholism. Here, using brain slice electrophysiology in mice, we show that repeated in vivo ethanol exposure (2 g/kg, i.p., three times daily for 7 d) causes increased susceptibility to the induction of long-term potentiation (LTP) of NMDA receptor (NMDAR)-mediated transmission in mesolimbic dopamine neurons, a form of synaptic plasticity that may drive the learning of stimuli associated with rewards, including drugs of abuse. Enhancement of NMDAR plasticity results from an increase in the potency of inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) in producing facilitation of action potential-evoked Ca2+ signals, which is critical for LTP induction. This increase in IP3 effect, which lasts for a week but not a month after ethanol withdrawal, occurs through a protein kinase A (PKA)-dependent mechanism. Corticotropin-releasing factor, a stress-related neuropeptide implicated in alcoholism and other addictions, further amplifies the PKA-mediated increase in IP3 effect in ethanol-treated mice. Finally, we found that ethanol-treated mice display enhanced place conditioning induced by the psychostimulant cocaine. These data suggest that repeated ethanol experience may promote the formation of drug-associated memories by enhancing synaptic plasticity of NMDARs in dopamine neurons.

Professor Hitoshi Morikawa, who wrote the paper, is slightly less jargon-laden and impenetrable on the University’s website, where he more generally lays out the goals of his research:

This lab specifically focuses on the dopaminergic neurons in the ventral midbrain. They are activated by the perception and expectation of rewards. Therefore, the dopaminergic projections from the midbrain to the limbic structures constitute an endogenous reward circuit. Behaviors that lead to the enhancement of dopamine release in this brain reward circuit tend to be repeated (reinforced). Addictive drugs induce stronger stimulation of dopaminergic transmission than almost any natural reinforcers (food, sex, etc). Thus, drugs are repeatedly used (abused) in vulnerable individuals, which will lead to plastic changes in the reward circuit.
The amount and temporal profile of dopamine release is controlled by the firing pattern of dopamine neurons, which is determined by the interaction of their intrinsic membrane properties and the afferent inputs they receive from other neurons. Accordingly, we make detailed analyses of the influence of addictive drugs on membrane ionic conductances and neurotransmitter inputs of dopamine neurons, and investigate the resulting alteration in the firing pattern. We use brain slices because they retain intact synaptic connections that are necessary for these studies. Brain slices are obtained from drug-naïve animals and animals that are chronically treated with drugs to elucidate the plastic changes induced by repeated exposure to drugs in vivo. Technically, we perform patch clamp electrophysiological recordings combined with confocal fluorescent imaging of intracellular ions. These methods will allow us to delineate the cellular events that determine the excitability of neurons with a preciseness that could not be attained by other conventional techniques. Therefore, this lab offers an ideal system to link the behavior of certain types of central neurons to that of a whole organism.

But a science news website, Physog.com has the most understandable account of the study, and what it means.

Essentially, and somewhat confusingly, the study shows that while common view that too much alcohol can be bad for memory retention and learning, that how your brain reacts to it is more complicated than that.

“Usually, when we talk about learning and memory, we’re talking about conscious memory,” says Morikawa, whose results were published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience. “Alcohol diminishes our ability to hold on to pieces of information like your colleague’s name, or the definition of a word, or where you parked your car this morning. But our subconscious is learning and remembering too, and alcohol may actually increase our capacity to learn, or ‘conditionability,’ at that level.”

So while short terms losses may occur, long term gains in subconscious memory may also be taking place. “Morikawa’s study found that repeated ethanol exposure enhances synaptic plasticity in a key area in the brain, [and] is further evidence toward an emerging consensus in the neuroscience community that drug and alcohol addiction is fundamentally a learning and memory disorder.”

When we drink alcohol (or shoot up heroin, or snort cocaine, or take methamphetamines), our subconscious is learning to consume more. But it doesn’t stop there. We become more receptive to forming subsconscious memories and habits with respect to food, music, even people and social situations.
In an important sense, says Morikawa, alcoholics aren’t addicted to the experience of pleasure or relief they get from drinking alcohol. They’re addicted to the constellation of environmental, behavioral and physiological cues that are reinforced when alcohol triggers the release of dopamine in the brain.
“People commonly think of dopamine as a happy transmitter, or a pleasure transmitter, but more accurately it’s a learning transmitter,” says Morikawa. “It strengthens those synapses that are active when dopamine is released.”
Alcohol, in this model, is the enabler. It hijacks the dopaminergic system, and it tells our brain that what we’re doing at that moment is rewarding (and thus worth repeating).
Among the things we learn is that drinking alcohol is rewarding. We also learn that going to the bar, chatting with friends, eating certain foods and listening to certain kinds of music are rewarding. The more often we do these things while drinking, and the more dopamine that gets released, the more “potentiated” the various synapses become and the more we crave the set of experiences and associations that orbit around the alcohol use.

Between that, and new research from the University of Michigan that may have identified a gene — the GABRA2 — that increases the risk of alcoholism in certain individuals, it seems clear that there are environmental and genetic factors that make some people more susceptible to becoming unable to drink responsibly, along with the obvious psychological factors, too. But what that also suggests is that alcoholism is more like a food allergy insofar as it does not effect everyone in the same way, and in fact the vast majority of people who do consume alcohol are able to do so responsibly and in moderation, which also allows them to take advantage of the many health benefits of drinking in moderation. Contrary to neo-prohibitionist propaganda, not everyone becomes an alcoholic with the first sip they take. Most, in fact, not only don’t, but never do, yet the anti-alcohol contingency tends to treat alcohol as a toxic substance that is dangerous to everyone equally or that everyone has the potential to become an alcoholic. I just don’t think that’s true. And the science seems to bearing that out. And because of all the beer I’ve consumed, I can remember all that, too. Thank you, beer.

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