Posts Tagged ‘alcoholism’
“Here’s to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”*…
Of all the substances people intoxicate themselves with, alcohol is the least restricted and causes the most harm. Many illegal drugs are more dangerous to those who use them, but are relatively hard to obtain, which limits their impact. In contrast, alcohol is omnipresent, so far more people suffer from its adverse effects. In 2010 a group of drug experts scored the total harm in Britain caused by 20 common intoxicants and concluded that alcohol inflicted the greatest cost, mostly because of the damage it does to non-consumers such as the victims of drunk drivers…
No Western country has banned alcohol since America repealed Prohibition in 1933. It is popular and easy to produce. Making it illegal enriches criminals and starts turf wars. In recent years governments have begun legalising other drugs. Instead, to limit the harm caused by alcohol, states have tried to dissuade people from drinking, using taxes, awareness campaigns and limits on where, when and to whom booze is sold.
The alcohol industry has pitched itself as part of the solution. In Britain more than 100 producers and retailers have signed a “responsibility deal” and promised to “help people to drink within guidelines”, mostly by buying ads promoting moderation. However, if these campaigns were effective, they would ruin their sponsors’ finances. According to researchers from the Institute of Alcohol Studies, a think-tank, and the University of Sheffield, some two-fifths of alcohol consumed in Britain is in excess of the recommended weekly maximum of 14 units (about one glass of wine per day). Industry executives say they want the public to “drink less, but drink better”, meaning fewer, fancier tipples. But people would need to pay 22-98% more per drink to make up for the revenue loss that such a steep drop in consumption would cause.
Health officials have taken note of such arithmetic. Some now wonder if Big Booze is sincere in its efforts to discourage boozing. In 2018 America’s National Institutes of Health stopped a $100m study of moderate drinking, which was partly funded by alcohol firms, because its design was biased in their products’ favour. And this year the World Health Organisation and England’s public-health authority banned their staff from working with the industry…
Governments are growing more suspicious of Big Booze: “Alcohol firms promote moderate drinking, but it would ruin them.”
See also “How much beer does your state drink? In the thirstiest, about 40 gallons a year per person,” source of the image at top.
* Homer Simpson
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As we muse on moderation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1944 that Harvey, a play by Mary Chase, opened on Broadway. It ran for 1,775 performances and won the (1945) Pulitzer prize for Drama. The story of a care-free dipsomaniac named Elwood P. Dowd, whose best friend was a “pooka” (an imaginary rabbit named Harvey), it was directed by Antoinette Perry– the actress, director, and co-founder of the American Theater Wing, for whom the Tony Awards are named. It’s been regularly revived on-stage, and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film that starred Jimmy Stewart as Elwood.
Tricks of (Historical) Perspective, Part 72…
These days, the name Henry Ward Beecher conjures, if at all, only in that it evokes his better-remembered sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. But in his time Beecher (pictured above, in a Matthew Brady portrait) was a much more prominent presence.
The first pastor of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, New York, Beecher shared his sister’s commitment to social causes; in particular, to abolition. But at the same time he turned a gift for tempering self-improvement advice with dialect and humor into a fabulously-successful career on the lecture circuit. (Click here to read a wonderful example of Beecher’s helpful homilies, as reported in the Falkirk Herald in 1871.)
Such was Beecher’s standing that, the following year, when Beecher was outed (then subsequently tried) for adultery (with Theodore Tilton’s wife Elizabeth), it “drove Reconstruction off the front pages for two and a half years” and became “the most sensational ‘he said, she said’ in American history” (quoth Walter McDougall). Indeed, French author George Sand planned a novel about the affair, but died before it could be written.
In his time, Beecher was arguably The Most Famous Man in America.
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As we look to our Ps and Qs, we might send a birthday verse to Henry Charles Bukowski; he was born on this date in 1920. The “laureate of American lowlife,” Bukowski discovered his muse as a young teen, when a friend introduced him to drinking (as recounted in Ham on Rye). “This [alcohol] is going to help me for a very long time”, he later wrote, describing the genesis of what was chronic alcoholism– or, as he saw it, the genesis of a method for making his way through life as a writer.
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human– “Beasts Bounding Through Time”
In the end, Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. As Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker observed, “the secret of Bukowski’s appeal. . . [is that] he combines the confessional poet’s promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.”
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