The Case Against Drinking
Let’s make Dry January permanent.
From as far back as I can remember, my plan had been to be a kind of low-intensity alcoholic. I hoped that it wouldn’t make me beat my family or wet myself at work, and that it wouldn’t lead to organ failure in the end—always the question, isn’t it?—but it seemed a gamble worth taking. The social life of the West is built almost entirely around the copious consumption of alcohol, with its professional life closely adjacent to that. It seemed hard for me to imagine how to be a loveable old person without tippling and saying inappropriate things. And a great deal of my early education was dedicated to preparing for a lifelong career of drinking. In the bars where my high school friends drank (only the ones with braces would get carded) we felt that we were proudly keeping up tradition—these were the same bars where our teachers had drunk before us. And at the beginning of college, my best friend and I made a pact to drink every day for a month straight (I think we made it to 20 days).
A good plan, except that I woke up one miserable day when I was about 28 and had a head-splitting unprecedented hangover and then I woke up on another dark day when I was about 35 and was just nauseous from undigested alcohol in my system—and from an overpowering sense of betrayal. No one, I felt, had told me this would happen. Well, okay, everyone had, but I had stayed pretty clear of the third rails—didn’t binge drink, wasn’t actually an alcoholic, was an honest-to-god moderate drinker. Still, my body was telling me in the clearest possible way that it just wanted nothing to do with this, that it regarded alcohol as pure poison and wanted me to stop no matter how unloveable that made me in old age.
I tried different tricks to fool my body—tried drinking lots of water and eating well, tried beer-only, tried organic wine, even in a desperate bid tried vodka under the theory that it was purer—but my body was adamant. So I stopped drinking.
I assumed it would be a big deal, but, astonishingly, it really wasn’t. It wasn’t very hard to tell people that I didn’t drink, and if they had a drink in front of me I didn’t want to drink it any more than if they had been sipping a fine arsenic. The only thing that really changed was that, like an alien learning the ways of the earthlings, I had to remember that, at a certain point in the evening when people started saying strange and impolite things, they were probably drunk.
But I did notice how much my daily patterns—even if I really hadn’t been a heavy drinker—were built around alcohol. The reward for a good day’s work was a drink, the consolation for a bad mood was a drink, a meeting with a friend meant drinking, and the end of the week, or any holiday or life milestone, was supposed to be celebrated by drinking. Because whether a drink is had or not, the idea of the drink—really, the idea of the first sip—is the whole psychological reward system of Western life. Once I stopped drinking (and the cycle of the alcohol-reward feedback finally washed out of me), I found myself part of a completely different psychological system. More of the day was available to me—the evening was open to do work in and so was the weekend. Maybe I was a little more tightly-wound (I didn’t have anything to take the edge off) and maybe I was less social (although that was for reasons that had nothing to do with alcohol), but I really was pleasantly astonished at how much of the day was back in my control as opposed to being surreptitiously dominated by the lure of the first sip.
The more I moved into sober life—the more that became a fact rather than anything to think about—the more I found myself questioning the alcohol-based structure of Western society. And so it felt like a real confirmation of something when new studies emerged this month claiming that a drink or two a day is actually really bad for you, overturning the moderate drinking “consensus”; and when the surgeon general recommended placing cancer warnings on alcoholic beverages. It was like, yes of course. I could feel that a glass of wine a day had to be bad news; and it seemed bizarre that science had taken so long to come around to that.
Shortly before I quit drinking I had been spending a lot of time around AA—as part of working on a documentary about veterans—and had been profoundly moved and shaken by that experience. Vets, it seemed, all became alcoholics—there really wasn’t another way (apart from hard drugs) to take the edge off as they transitioned away from service—and alcohol was unavoidable in American society. Sobriety seemed like an astonishing, dizzying act of will—I was in a position to witness different vets trying with all the willpower they had to stay sober (which, especially for the vet I was most closely following, was literally a matter of life and death) and just not being able to do it—and the consensus among those I talked to was that it really shouldn’t be this way. There was a certain amount of ill will towards the pharmaceutical and medical industry, which had been strikingly uninterested in medications for alcoholism—the medications that have been FDA-approved for decades (naltrexone, acamprosate, and disulfiram) are, for some reason, almost never advertised or prescribed, with only 2% of those with alcohol use disorder prescribed medications. At the time I was working on the documentary, Ozempic was just coming out, with the reduction of the craving for drinking as an accidental side-effect to weight-loss, and the attitude was like, oh great, now the medical/pharmaceutical industry is finally showing some belated interest in addiction, where before AA had desperately been trying to keep people sober through Higher Powers and the thread-and-piano wire approaches of “the program.”
All of this made me wonder what had gone wrong in America—why around 10% of the population are alcoholics and a third are “excessive drinkers,” why the entire pleasure/reward system of society revolves around alcohol’s rhythms, why the medical industry either forgot about it or treated it as an unsolvable problem. Of course, there had been a concerted effort to deal with drinking. American liberalism in the 19th century had been closely paired with the temperance movement—which was the attitude of all right-thinking people, including every single denizen of Mount Rushmore. (And alcoholism in the 19th century really had reached epic proportions—W.J. Rorabaugh in the aptly-named The Alcoholic Republic estimated that, between 1800 and 1830, annual per capita consumption of hard liquor averaged five gallons, nearly triple today’s rate.) When Prohibition passed in 1919, it passed—let’s not forget—not through a bill or executive order but through an actual constitutional amendment. Prohibition, by the way, was very different from how it’s remembered. The 18th Amendment and Volstead Act didn’t ban alcohol. They banned the commercial manufacture and distribution of alcohol. As historian Mark Lawrence Schrad argues, Prohibition—which he calls “that most misunderstood chapter in U.S. history”—really wasn’t about curbing anybody’s right to drink. It was dedicated to fighting “traffic,” which is to say the business of preying on addiction. “Prohibition was not about the stuff in the bottle, but about the predatory capitalism of the liquor traffic,” Schrad writes.
Almost needless to say, Prohibition didn’t work, but it’s worth asking ourselves why it didn’t work—and the real reason it didn’t work was that it was just difficult to enforce. It was the first really major narcotics ban in the United States—which started, at a stroke, with the single most popular narcotic, the mainstay of society’s social life—and law enforcement was quickly overwhelmed. It was, also, a corrupt era, and police forces were easily bought off to look the other way from the bootleg trade. And, then, Prohibition had only 13 years before it was reversed (for the less-than-noble reason of trying to raise tax revenues during the Depression). It was imposed on a population that was, in a word, already alcoholic—that was steeped in the habit of drinking. There wasn’t time for new habits to come in, or for police forces to gradually stamp out the speakeasies, or for building a big beautiful wall to cut off the flow of liquor from Canada. Prohibition was over before it started and never really had a chance (although it did, by the way, drastically curb cirrhosis rates and overall alcohol consumption).
Now, I’m not actually arguing for a revival of Prohibition. But I am arguing for a revival of temperance. Prohibition was the most unfortunate of political events—a movement got everything it wanted, failed, and then found itself illegitimized. Once Prohibition was over, it was like society forgot entirely about the perils of drinking.
And that is, in a sense, where we have been from that day to this. The pharmaceutical industry, in its infinite wisdom, neglected to promote the medical treatments it already had. The scientific community kept cranking out studies claiming that moderate drinking was actually beneficial to health—which, in retrospect, seem to have been based on faulty study parameters. Everybody drinks. Everybody spends their youth being exhorted to drink—alcohol is ubiquitous and there really is no alternative to drinking if you want to be social. Everybody is pulled, whether they like it or not, into a relationship with an addictive depressant that has no upside and that has absolutely predictable deleterious effects with age. Everybody is expected to slightly ruin their health, to drink when any occasion demands it, and for anybody who teeters over the edge and becomes addicted to the ubiquitous addictive substance, all sympathy is suddenly removed—their problem is understood to be an extension of a lack of will or character. It’s a ridiculous, destructive relationship that the whole society is complicit in.
So since “Dry January” is, apparently, a thing, let’s think about making it permanent.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
And yes, we will also soon be publishing “the case for drinking”....
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Reduce consumption of alcohol? Seems like a good idea in general. However, why make this a semi-political / cultural valence? If you don't want to drink, don't drink. If you want to drink occasionally and socially, do so. I very seriously doubt there's any real risk unless you drink an excessive amount or have excessive occasions where you drink. Stopping entirely makes sense if you can't control it after you start. Stopping entirely when that's not an issue is cutting out one of life's enjoyable experiences. Again, fine if you choose to do so. Unnecessary to make that choice a political issue.
Am I the only one who thought it was weird that the author claimed not to be an alcoholic or a binge drinker, but then claimed to get back *hours of the day to be productive* when he stopped drinking? Maybe I simply don't have enough experience with alcohol, but that doesn't seem to follow. I've been drunk plenty of times in my life, but the only time it was anywhere near frequent was college, and even then, it was less than once per week. After I graduated, it was maybe a couple of times per year.
I don't disagree, but can we pick a different month? If alcohol didn't exist, January would cause it to spontaneously burst into existence. And thank God. Let's go with May.