Declan Lynch
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
On controlling your drinking
Controlled drinking… now, why didn’t I think of that before?
Controlled drinking… two words that can either look quite sensible, or like a twisted joke. I would favour the latter interpretation, though of course, like anyone who ever had a drink problem, I devoutly wish it were not so.
I suppose it’s that ‘drink problem’ bit which moves me towards the argument for abstinence, and away from the one which suggests that you can train yourself to control your drinking.
After all, by the time you’re engaging in this inner dialogue between abstinence and moderation, you will already have acknowledged that you have some kind of a problem, and you will have tried various, shall we say, strategies. And still, for you, the issue is unresolved.
Indeed, most of us who’ve had any kind of a struggle with an addictive substance will have reached that particular fork in the road at quite an early stage of the trip. We would love to be able to ‘control’ our drinking, because then… well… we could keep drinking.
I gave it a really good shot myself, the old controlled drinking — indeed, I don’t know any alcoholic who hasn’t given it perhaps the best shot he has ever given anything in his life. Because if we can somehow wrestle with that alligator and stay in the fight, this beautiful prize awaits us: we will never have to stop drinking.
But we’re looking at a pretty pure catch-22 situation here, which goes like this: if you could control your drinking, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The whole point — the only point — is that apparently you can’t control your drinking, that you can’t just stop at three pints and go home, and yet you are imagining a solution whereby you will somehow, eh, control your drinking. That ship has sailed, baby!
I mean, if you’re really able to control your drinking, you are of little interest to me, or to anyone involved in these very difficult matters which have afflicted us, and so many belonging to us.
But yes, for those who really are struggling, I can understand deeply where this impulse to ‘control’ your drinking is coming from. It has become something of an ideological chasm: this split between the ‘traditionalists’ who would broadly endorse the AA-type model of a clean break with the drink, of just sweeping it out of your life; and those who feel that may be too intimidating — which is a fair shout, except that the other way, while it is far more attractive in a superficial sense, over time will probably do your head in anyway. And at the end of it, you’ll still be an active alcoholic.
Alastair Campbell is one of the better-known alcoholics who returned to a regime of the occasional glass of wine, which he would consume in ‘controlled circumstances’, when his wife was present. You can either see this as proof that a card-carrying alcoholic can drink ‘normally’ if he really puts his mind to it, or you can see it as the saddest situation of all — a man still worried enough by the old addiction to need a kind of a minder in the room, yet restricting himself to the one or two glasses, which simply remind him of the glory days when this would be a mere ‘loosener’.
Oh yes, this is another slight complication, the fact that the miserable couple of glasses still contain this stuff called alcohol, which, according to legend anyway, has this strange ability to persuade people to do things they might not otherwise do — like drink more of it, for example.
In fact, the more I think of controlled drinking, the more it seems that no drinking at all, daunting though it may at first appear, is really the easy way out here. You just drop off the key, Lee, and get yourself free.
“We would love to be able to ‘control’ our drinking, because then we could keep drinking”