Dr. Andrew Weil once wrote in Natural Health Natural Medicine that
“Alcohol is the strongest and most toxic of the common psychoactive substances. It is a hard drug, harder than heroin, cocaine, LSD and all the other illegal drugs in its impact on the body and on behavior. Our culture promotes and encourages the use of alcohol and gives the false impression that it is not as dangerous as the disapproved drugs.”
May I interrupt with these comments?
A few years ago on KUER-FM 90's morning talk show, host Doug Fabrizio interviewed David Gilmour. At one point, Gilmour, in discussing what he taught his son about drugs noted that he forbid him to use the illicit drugs, but encouraged him to learn how to use beer responsibly. Many exhibit this double standard of an attitude. My view is he should have discouraged recreational drug use of all types and that includes alcohol, which is a dangerous misused recreational drug. The alcohol in beer is a drug. Therefore, beer drinking is recreational drug misuse, as much as misusing marijuana or cocaine or methamphetamine.
Some make some sort of distinction between the alcohol in beer, versus wine, versus spirits. However, the alcohol is the same --- no matter the dose. Alcohol is a system-wide depressant in beer, wine and spirits.
Dr. Weil continues in his warning:
"Periodically, some research group will report that moderate use of alcohol improves health. Often this research is biased, either consciously or unconsciously. . . . Researchers . . . like most people in our culture, are likely to be alcohol users. Users have an unconscious need to legitimize the drugs they choose to take.”
Or less diplomatically put, they have a need to legitimize the drugs to which they are addicted.
If humans had not discovered alcohol thousands of years ago, but instead Bayer researchers had discovered it last week, the Food and Drug administration would eventually require a prescription to use it and would list a long list of warnings and side effects.
Law enforcement lobbies members of Congress and state legislators coast-to-coast for more funds to finance the War Against Illicit Drugs. Meanwhile, Utah’s Legislature considers liberalizing Utah’s liquor laws.
As leaders obsess over how governments will help pay for the costs of medical treatment, Utah’s Legislature is considering liberalizing Utah’s liquor laws.
Someone should teach Utah’s legislators that alcohol is the world's most abused drug.
Pretend for a minute that humankind had not discovered alcohol until Drexel distilled it in 2000. After years of testing, the Federal Drug Administration probably would not allow it to be sold as a drink At best, the FDA would place it under a restrictive prescription schedule, complete with a list of warnings against the side effects and addiction potential.
Studies that tout alcohol’s benefit on heart health illustrate that some “scientific” testing is actually designed to justify our habits. If Drexel had discovered alcohol and tried to market it as a heart medication, the FDA would have denied the proposal because of its dangerous and addictive side effects.
Ancient beers and wines had minor food value and low alcohol contents. In specific times and places, they were safer to drink than the waters. Through the ages, humans experimented with beers, wines, and spirits, not to improve their food value, but to increase their alcohol jolt.
The snobbishness surrounding wine collection and consumption should not mislead the wary. Vintners can be just as obsessive about high alcohol contents as are the distillers of whiskey.
Alcohol, with tobacco and marijuana are the big-three hypocrisies in the American War on Drugs. Proponents of these substances would have us believe they are really good for us because they are (in the popular cliche) “natural.”
I find this logic laughable. I hope you do too. Mankind has so hybridized the plants involved in wine and the various types of tobacco and marijuana cigarettes that nothing is “natural” about any of the products.
For example, mankind has so throughly hybridized marijuana in the past fifty years that the original plant probably does not exist anywhere on earth anymore. People tinkered with it – especially since the late 1970s – to increase the psychoactive buzz, not its dubious medical properties.
Neither the War on Drugs nor the Medical Crisis can be taken seriously when billion$ are squandered to treat conditions and illnesses caused by culturally accepted drug abuse. When we are really serious about decreasing medical costs and drug abuse, we will end recreational consumption of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana.
WHAT IS THE GOVERNOR THINKING?
This is why I read with horror that Governor Huntsman approves of proposals to liberalize the alcohol laws in Utah, making alcohol easier to get, purchase and consume because well – we have to be like everywhere else.
As MisteRogers would say, “Can you say Cultural Peer Pressure?”
Government should use its influence to educate the public, to reduce — if not end — alcohol consumption. It should not look to exploit people’s alcohol addictions as a way of increasing revenues. This hypocrisy should be too obvious to require me to condemn it, but apparently this hypocrisy is not obvious to the Utah governor. Government should be using its influence to reduce people’s addictions to harmful substances. Utah should not be increasing them or liberalizing them for the sake of increased revenues.
AN ALLEGORY SORT OF
If I made conditions in my house conducive for my addict friends to take cocaine or marijuana or heroin, the authorities would rightly label me an enabler. These proposals to change the Utah liquor laws basically will make Utah an alcohol enabler for the sake of increased revenues. Just because other states encourage the use of this depressive drug is not a particularly good reason for Utah to do so.
This observation may seem like an aside, but it is not. We should not tolerate high food prices when people tie up so much valuable land in landscape that we cannot eat and in unhealthy crops that feed people’s addictions. Who wants to tell the starving poor that agribusiness wants higher prices for growing marijuana, opiates, coca and the ingredients for alcohol?
Alcohol is a depressant drug, one of the strongest and most addictive available. It is not primarily a drink; it is first and foremost a drug. When doctors prescribe it, if at all, they prescribe it in small doses. When chefs put alcohol in food, typically they put in small dabs.
We should not drink alcohol in big doses for recreation.
Alcohol and barbiturates — barbs, bluebirds, blues, downers, goofballs, tooties and yellow jackets — can both addict users. Both have bad side effects on users. We exhibit hypocrisy of the first order if we think we should restrict and outlaw one and encourage the other.
THE BOTTOM LINE RECOMMENDATION
The state should not use increased tax revenues as a rationalization to encourage alcohol consumption. Greater profits for merchants is a flimsy rationalization as well. We could use such flimsy logic to legalize marijuana use, cocaine use, crack cocaine use and the use of other dangerous illicit substances and then levy taxes on it.
The stuff is harmful to us. The state must discourage alcohol’s use at all levels as a matter of public health.
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