Lose The Booze

It’s Independence Day. I sit in my dungeonlike turn-of-the-century-brick chambers high atop Old Town Grain & Feed, a local bar/club/all-around-dive, thinking about the fireworks I was hearing over by the river about an hour ago. Now I hear a band playing downstairs and people screaming in that odd way they do when they’re getting really drunk.
My general indignation this evening began with my curiosity about whatever happened to Independence Day as a revered national holiday. Then it grew into a general irritation with alcohol and the damage it wreaks on our species as a whole. It seemed so appropriate – on this day when, two hundred and twenty years ago, our forefathers put pen to paper to solidify the basis of a new nation, I slam my fingers repeatedly into little molded plastic shapes with letters and other characters printed on them. No connection, really, just the staggering coincidence of people expressing themselves and jotting it down for posterity to contemplate. If I was feeling really cocky, I’d make some comparison about great minds at work centuries and decades apart. But that judgment is not for me to make.
No doubt, this being the Fourth of July, someone will at this point remind me most sternly that the freedom to drink oneself silly and evacuate innumerous brain cells through the medium of projectile-vomiting over the toilet is protected by the Constitution of the United States, just like the freedom I have to be saying these words. Fine. Sit back and have a drink and I’ll sit here and type. Maybe one of us will experience a revelation sometime this evening.
Every day, in just about every city in every state of the union, a local police dispatcher receives a call that someone is drunk and dangerously out of control. Maybe this person is beating a spouse or child, or threatening bodily harm. Maybe this person is walking through the neighborhood shouting obscenities. Maybe this person is just going to kill someone else, either by pulling the trigger of a gun or getting behind the wheel of a car. It’s no secret, it’s no rumor – alcohol relieves its users of their motor coordination and usually their common sense and better judgment as well. Seemingly placid individuals under the influence of alcohol have the potential to release their inner demons on the world at large.
You know, maybe Prohibition wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Maybe that’s a bit extreme. Maybe we need to begin teaching our children, at an early age, the dangers of alcohol use and abuse. Maybe we need to limit the advertisement of alcohol the way we limit the advertisement of tobacco products. Maybe we need to remember that alcohol has been legally classified as a drug – and maybe we need to consider the possibility that as such, alcohol may deserve to be ranked up there with marijuana and cocaine and other deadly substances. It has certainly resulted in the death of a lot of people.
When I was in grade school, we had an entire week devoted to learning the dangers of tobacco products. I was already terrified of cigarettes as it was. My mother and father both smoked, despite my allergic reaction to the second-hand smoke, and I hated the stench. I hated the sickening feeling I’d get from being anywhere near smoke. I hated the smell of my parents kissing me good night. The teacher didn’t have to tell me twice – I hated it. I would come to hate it even more vehemently just a few years later when my mother died of cancer. But that’s another story to be told. I don’t ever remember being lectured on the risks of alcohol in school…ever. Not even in junior or senior high. The topic just wasn’t brought up, outside of the fact that kids were suspended from school with increasing regularity for showing up on campus under the influence.
Why is alcohol such a taboo topic when we can lecture our children on the hazards of tobacco? Where is the distinction? Both are substances that are sold on the mass market. Both are products that are advertised in such a way that the potential user is told to expect glamour, popularity, and attraction to the opposite sex as a result. Both are drug-based substances that kill people, one way or another. And the ridiculous contrast here is that smoking, to some degree, kills the user passively. Drinking can get the job done actively, whether it’s the user’s life or others around him.
I don’t wish to downplay the danger of tobacco use, but since I don’t recall hearing about someone losing their inhibitions and committing crimes under the influence of nicotine, I’m inclined to believe that alcohol is the greater of these two evils. Yet of the two substances I am comparing, alcohol is the most prevalent in our society. It is advertised freely on television and radio. It has entrenched itself in popular culture by sponsoring professional sporting events, by gaining the endorsement of popular performers, and by being depicted regularly in the media. It’s ever-increasingly unhip to show a TV character smoking, but drinking? Not a problem.
It’s this pop culture foothold that the alcoholic beverage industry has that would make it impossible to revise the regulations regarding advertising. Even if TV and radio advertising of alcoholic products were outlawed, what about the sponsorships? The endorsements? Where would that line be drawn before it exits the world of regulated commercial matter and encroaches on free speech? Trying to find that distinction would be a messy business, and would most likely be overturned in court on First Amendment grounds, and quite rightly in some cases.
The key here is education, and uncompromising education. As I’ve said before on the subject of history and probably on other subjects as well, teach children – especially ever-impressionable teens – what alcohol is. It’s a drug. It’s a very dangerous drug with very dangerous side-effects. It has the potential to release one’s inhibitions, stripping higher reasoning skills and leaving a core that is capable of violence. (Of course, conversely, it also has the potential to more or less harmlessly leave you under the table, but that’s not much more desirable in my estimation!) People die because of it. Families are destroyed by it. There’s a hell of a lot more to this picture than “It’s Miller time!” And this education must be backed up in the home – parents should exercise good judgment and exhibit responsible behavior where this delicate subject is concerned.
In a world where it seems like so many people are already out of control and everything’s already going to hell, why do we need substances like this made available to the general populace when they can only make things worse?