Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
The Drinking Problem: Is it good or bad?
Drinking alcohol is such an inherently problematic activity, it’s no wonder that so many cultures hold it as taboo. How can alcohol — with its power to separate us from our senses and ruin our lives in myriad ways — be anything but a societal evil?
This is a good question, one with which any intellectually honest happy drinker must contend. For drinking can lead to drunkenness, a condition that makes it unsafe to operate a cellphone, much less a motor vehicle. You should not sign contracts or make important life decisions while under the influence. If you drink enough alcohol, you will get sick and experience an uncomfortable morning after. If you drink too much alcohol, you might die.
For it can be argued that every drop of ethanol contains within itself a measure of destruction. You’ve probably heard it said that alcohol kills brain cells. Maybe you’ve even heard a riposte to the effect that it only kills the weak ones. While this isn’t strictly true — moderate drinking does not damage brain cells and alcohol poisoning would kill you before it kills your brain cells — prolonged heavy drinking can damage the cells’ dendrites, which pass electrical impulses from neuron to neuron. You mess up your neurons, you get cognitive problems. (The good news is that some types of dendrite damage can be reversed through therapy and training.)
Alcohol can damage the liver, heart and pancreas, soften up your immune system and increase your risks for certain cancers.
Alcoholics also have to watch out for Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, which is caused when large quantities of alcohol disrupt the body’s ability to absorb thiamine, resulting in memory problems, confusion, eye paralysis and lack of muscle coordination.
For some teetotalers (and some drinkers too) any discussion of anything other than alcoholic potency — issues of nose, mouth-feel, viscosity, color, etc. — would seem to be trivial. To them, there’s something suspect about having
developed a certain sophistication about drinking, to have acquired an actual taste for bourbon and wine and other liquids that are primarily designed to alter your consciousness.
But in the realm of the senses, nothing that is observable and reportable should be ignored. There are stories in every glass, real legends as well as manufactured back-stories. There are distinctions to be drawn.
Three or four evenings a week I’ll pour a couple inches of bourbon in a rocks glass. Or I’ll open a bottle of wine. Sometimes a good beer will slip in there. I don’t mind saying that I enjoy my drinking; I like the way it mutes at least a few of the proctors in my head, that it allows me to forget for a while that I need to call the cable company or pay a certain bill or check on the progress of a project. I am
not normally what you might call a carefree person; I tend to worry about stupid things like deadlines and climate change and whether the expense chit I turned it for the bottle of Redbreast 12 Year Old Irish Whiskey ($67) is going to be approved.
I persist though I know people who have been ruined by alcohol and others who fight a daily battle against addiction. I understand that I’m lucky in that I apparently have no genetic disposition to abuse, and that on those occasions (now long ago) when I did overindulge I never happened to make a terrible mistake.
I’m convinced that in my life, alcohol has been a benefit; it certainly made it easier for this introvert to navigate some social situations. A drink frees me from the burden of constantly trying to parse and understand a world that often operates outside any logic. A drink can make you more emotionally available and open to empathy. It won’t make you funnier, but it may dissolve the inhibitions that keep you from telling the joke.
Is it worth the risks? Maybe.
It’s not hard to understand the arguments of prohibitionists. They contend that alcohol is on the whole a bad thing, even if it has some arguable benefits. (Such as the oversold idea that moderate drinking is good for you. I tend to think studies that show drinkers at less risk for heart problems have more to do with the sort of people who tend to be moderate drinkers rather than
abstainers or alcoholics. If you’re too uptight to take a glass of wine every now and again you might be courting a heart attack anyway.) They look at how many bad things happen when people drink too much and draw the not unreasonable conclusion that few bad things would happen if alcohol wasn’t available.
They see the consumption of alcohol as morally wrong, as a sin.
And some people are drawn to this sort of Manichean taxonomy that assumes things are either good or evil. A lot of us have trouble with ambiguity and prefer the clarity of bright line rules.
But the trouble with this is that the world is a place of infinite complication. People will engage in activities that contravene their best interests, they will take great risks in order to do things they perceive as dangerous. Demonizing alcohol increases its glamour. Quotidian things aren’t exciting and sexy.
Outlawing substances
doesn’t eliminate the demand for them; it just removes the supply chain from the realm of normal commerce. People will have their booze, whether they have to smuggle it in or make it themselves. We don’t have to guess about this; in the 20th century we conducted that experiment.
Drink itself isn’t a bad thing. It isn’t a good thing. It has no moral charge; it has potential benefits as well as liabilities. And maybe it is dangerous to start, for some people do have a genetic disposition to abuse alcohol that might lie dormant if it’s never triggered. But most of us aren’t like that, most of us can learn to enjoy booze in moderation.
We can handle it, we can accept the risks. And it can enrich our lives, serving as a little poison to inoculate us against the wild and roughening world.