Booze, Getting Over It, and Finding Norms

The following lines are from a New York Times article headlined “What Does it Mean to have a Serious Drinking Problem” published on 2 Feb 2020. A brief personal comment by me follows:

Booze: It didn’t take much for me to feel the effects. Alcohol could make nights glittery and fun, make me love all humankind. It could also, and unpredictably, rouse demons that turned me into a wifely shrew, sparked bruising arguments, unleashed embarrassing faux pas. This morning, a new thought struck, penetrating to the bone.

“I can’t do it anymore. I quit.”

Although I’d grappled for decades with my relationship to alcohol, I didn’t consider myself an alcoholic. In online quizzes asking how many drinks I typically had per day, I could fairly accurately answer “two” (very generous drinks).

On the World Health Organization’s AUDIT quiz, which tests for drinking problems, I scored eight of 40 points, making me a “medium” drinker with a “risky” pattern. But medium didn’t sound too bad and the website said I could alter my drinking “without too much difficulty.”

I’m glad to see the DSM5 (a reference I use almost daily in my work as a consultant for the “Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) assessment”) revise its “alcoholism” diagnostic parameters, because the old models of “alcoholism” just didn’t fit my own behaviors or susceptibility to the drug. But all the risk factors were there – starting with pretty heavy drinking when I was 13, and then going on to other drugs for a while before returning to the mostly legal drug of choice, alcohol. I drank my way through grad school – twice – then spent too much time in the grubby cantinas of Guatemala.

It wasn’t till a doctor told me in 2006 that I should choose between quitting and dying. So I quit, without a drop for more than 5 years, at which point I began drinking wine occasionally, and discovered I could easily stop at 2 glasses … and if I didn’t do it more than a couple nights in a row, seemed not to be at all disably. And for the last few years I’ve had no trouble with this protocol of very social drinking.

So nowadays Mary and I usually share a bottle of wine once a week or so, although some weeks we’ll have a glass a couple or, like when we’re vacationing, even three times in a week, and other weeks won’t have anything. I enjoy most of the nights we share a cup … but don’t miss the light buzz at all if we don’t partake.

Mostly it’s about a “special celebratory” beverage in front of me to enhance the ambience or mark the occasion, something to boost the moment …. kind of like, in the days when I smoked (not since Feb 2, 1991, when the 7th round of bronchitis in 18 months almost killed me), the way a cigarette could frame 5 minutes, heightening the sensation of a special, short, interlude. Never mind that back in the old days there could be several twenty or more “special moments per day” with cigarettes, or four or five nights per week with alcohol.

Anyway, I find that a glass of San Pelligrino with a twist of lime serves to frame the moment as well as a glass of wine or beer. But at least for me, it’s nice not being a teetotaler. I do enjoy the occassional glass of wine or a beer, and no longer feel threatened by my proclivities.