The British Medical Association published a report on the dangers of drink this week, but assured us the organisation is not “anti-alcohol”. Well, it bloody well should be. (From the Times)
Alcohol is directly linked to more than 60 medical conditions and costs the NHS millions of pounds every year. The casualty departments are full of drunks. They also contain the sober victims of alcohol-induced violence, drink-driving and various other horrors of secondary drinking. I gave up alcohol on September 24, 1986, but it’s still quite possible I will end up in hospital or the morgue because of someone else’s drinking.
My dad, an enthusiastic patron of public houses, often said: “If you knocked down all the pubs, you’d have to build a lot of lunatic asylums.” A friend recently said to me that if there was a genuine attempt to stop people drinking, there’d be rioting in the streets. Clearly, this is a dependency culture. Alcohol is killing people in a variety of ways but a large part of the population can’t face life without it, so the carnage is allowed to continue.
All our decisions can be roughly broken down into things we do because of love and things we do because of fear. The BMA’s reluctance to condemn drink as firmly as it condemns tobacco is not based on the love of those in its care but rather the fear of the outrage if people were told they should face life head-on, without the soothing softener of alcohol.
People need booze to make themselves and their acquaintances seem more exciting. How many parties or nights in the pub have been rescued by booze slowly oiling the social machine? There are pills that do the same job. Would it be OK to use them in the same way? If you turned up at a friend’s dinner party and she casually handed out sedatives, wouldn’t you feel a bit weak and pathetic?
I’m starting to sound like an old-fashioned Temperance League member, but it irks me that alcohol is seen as a social necessity, an ice-breaker. You get drunk with a new workmate or neighbour in order to bond with them. It loosens people up and makes them more gregarious. Well, what’s going on here? Are we saying we need a mind-altering drug to enable us to reach out to another human being or give us the courage to speak in a group? Shouldn’t we deal with that?
We’re back to love and fear again. Why do you drink? Is it because you love the people you’re with or because you’re slightly afraid of them? Is it because you’re unhappy with who you are and so feel the need to change yourself — even if it’s just a little bit — with the aid of alcohol?
I often sat with friends, the lunchtime after the night before, discussing our drunken exploits. The thing Steve said to the bloke at the chip shop, the way Darren fell off the bus. None of us had the guts to say: “But it wasn’t really us, was it? It was us made more colourful by a drug. These things we did — our displays of courage and eccentricity — only happened because they were induced by chemicals. We sit here shining our puny badges of rebellion and celebrating our maverick lifestyle, but deep down we know it’s all a sham — an alcohol-induced charade.
“Who are we when unaided by intoxicants? What stories concerning the real, unaltered us are worth telling? If there is none then we must stop taking the easy option — the short-term fix — and strive to make the real, unaltered us worthy of the tale.”
Of course, I never said that or anything like it because I was keen to continue the charade; to tell the stories and enjoy my part in them.
I was a heavy drinker. I have been known to wake up in a pool of my own urine in a place I didn’t know. So-called social drinkers will read this and say, “His case is different; he had a problem”, but anyone who is reluctant to face social gatherings without the aid of alcohol should be asking themselves why.
I got drunk, ultimately, I suppose, because I was afraid of being sober. The social drinker is afraid of being sober and of being drunk. He seeks a cosy middle ground where social situations are made that little bit more manageable, that little bit easier to navigate. It is double self-deception; it is neither a real world nor one that is free from dependency.
The Government may consider public health less important than alienating voters and rich brewery owners or losing the revenue on alcoholic drinks, but the BMA should forget about cosmetic changes, such as banning advertising and happy hours, drop the niceties, come down at least as hard as it did on tobacco and say what needs to be said: alcohol is a dangerous drug dressed up as a warm and reassuring companion. It temporarily kills who you really are and replaces it, in varying degrees, with a chemically created persona — that’s when it’s not literally killing you, making you ill or terrifying those around you who are not similarly benumbed.
We can’t trust the people to decide for themselves because their dependency — often not readily apparent and so easily denied — obviously clouds their judgment. We need the BMA to provide impetus for a great national sobering-up.
Alcohol is directly linked to more than 60 medical conditions and costs the NHS millions of pounds every year. The casualty departments are full of drunks. They also contain the sober victims of alcohol-induced violence, drink-driving and various other horrors of secondary drinking. I gave up alcohol on September 24, 1986, but it’s still quite possible I will end up in hospital or the morgue because of someone else’s drinking.
My dad, an enthusiastic patron of public houses, often said: “If you knocked down all the pubs, you’d have to build a lot of lunatic asylums.” A friend recently said to me that if there was a genuine attempt to stop people drinking, there’d be rioting in the streets. Clearly, this is a dependency culture. Alcohol is killing people in a variety of ways but a large part of the population can’t face life without it, so the carnage is allowed to continue.
All our decisions can be roughly broken down into things we do because of love and things we do because of fear. The BMA’s reluctance to condemn drink as firmly as it condemns tobacco is not based on the love of those in its care but rather the fear of the outrage if people were told they should face life head-on, without the soothing softener of alcohol.
People need booze to make themselves and their acquaintances seem more exciting. How many parties or nights in the pub have been rescued by booze slowly oiling the social machine? There are pills that do the same job. Would it be OK to use them in the same way? If you turned up at a friend’s dinner party and she casually handed out sedatives, wouldn’t you feel a bit weak and pathetic?
I’m starting to sound like an old-fashioned Temperance League member, but it irks me that alcohol is seen as a social necessity, an ice-breaker. You get drunk with a new workmate or neighbour in order to bond with them. It loosens people up and makes them more gregarious. Well, what’s going on here? Are we saying we need a mind-altering drug to enable us to reach out to another human being or give us the courage to speak in a group? Shouldn’t we deal with that?
We’re back to love and fear again. Why do you drink? Is it because you love the people you’re with or because you’re slightly afraid of them? Is it because you’re unhappy with who you are and so feel the need to change yourself — even if it’s just a little bit — with the aid of alcohol?
I often sat with friends, the lunchtime after the night before, discussing our drunken exploits. The thing Steve said to the bloke at the chip shop, the way Darren fell off the bus. None of us had the guts to say: “But it wasn’t really us, was it? It was us made more colourful by a drug. These things we did — our displays of courage and eccentricity — only happened because they were induced by chemicals. We sit here shining our puny badges of rebellion and celebrating our maverick lifestyle, but deep down we know it’s all a sham — an alcohol-induced charade.
“Who are we when unaided by intoxicants? What stories concerning the real, unaltered us are worth telling? If there is none then we must stop taking the easy option — the short-term fix — and strive to make the real, unaltered us worthy of the tale.”
Of course, I never said that or anything like it because I was keen to continue the charade; to tell the stories and enjoy my part in them.
I was a heavy drinker. I have been known to wake up in a pool of my own urine in a place I didn’t know. So-called social drinkers will read this and say, “His case is different; he had a problem”, but anyone who is reluctant to face social gatherings without the aid of alcohol should be asking themselves why.
I got drunk, ultimately, I suppose, because I was afraid of being sober. The social drinker is afraid of being sober and of being drunk. He seeks a cosy middle ground where social situations are made that little bit more manageable, that little bit easier to navigate. It is double self-deception; it is neither a real world nor one that is free from dependency.
The Government may consider public health less important than alienating voters and rich brewery owners or losing the revenue on alcoholic drinks, but the BMA should forget about cosmetic changes, such as banning advertising and happy hours, drop the niceties, come down at least as hard as it did on tobacco and say what needs to be said: alcohol is a dangerous drug dressed up as a warm and reassuring companion. It temporarily kills who you really are and replaces it, in varying degrees, with a chemically created persona — that’s when it’s not literally killing you, making you ill or terrifying those around you who are not similarly benumbed.
We can’t trust the people to decide for themselves because their dependency — often not readily apparent and so easily denied — obviously clouds their judgment. We need the BMA to provide impetus for a great national sobering-up.
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