Melville CookeMelville Cooke
LAST THURSDAY, Dr. Anthony Vendryes did an excellent piece on alcohol's effect, ahead of this even higher than usual intake season. Coincidentally, a few days later I was listening to BBC radio and heard the story about an Irish town that is putting a temporary emergency care facility on the road over the Christmas and New Year period, in anticipation of the accidents and incidents related to alcohol consumption. Last year they had been caught napping and paid the bloody price.
The mantra of the alcohol industry is 'drink responsibly', a slug line that some PR firm may just have made into the most expensive two-word non-sequitur of all time. You can drink water responsibly; you can drink juice responsibly; drinking alcohol responsibly is an oxymoron.
Alcoholic drinks are legal narcotics, dressed up poison, bottled (or canned), portable, unprocessed urine. The official hard line is against cocaine, heroin, morphine, marijuana, Ecstasy and the like, but they ain't do nothing that good old alcohol can't and does not do.
The list of possible diseases from heavy alcohol consumption is daunting. Arthritis, heart disease, foetal alcohol syndrome, hypoglycaemia, kidney disease, liver disease and nervous disorders, with psychological disturbances such as depression, anxiety and insomnia to sweeten the pot.
However, while these often hidden (at least, from the general public) effects are the long of it, the short is the kicker. Alcohol can get to the brain in about the same time as it takes to start up and sign on to a computer, or use $10 on a Digicel to Digicel call a minute. And then a couple thousand brain cells get fried.
But inside the alcohol drinker's body, it is the liver that really gets it. When alcohol gets to the liver it gets off its preferred diet of fatty acids and deals with the alcohol, so the fatty acids accumulate. And that leads to a fatty liver. In the long run, that can damage the liver beyond repair, causing what is known as cirrhosis of the liver. And that is not good news.
The short-term effects of alcohol, however, are the really spectacular one. When liquor hits the brain the person may just feel or inflict the pain in short order. We tend to make jokes about 'the car driving the driver home', but it is not funny at all; not when driving under the influence of alcohol can and has caused accidents and deaths. It is also a very effective rape drug; who needs Ecstasy if you can get her to drink enough to 'loosen up' nicely? And there is also the aggression factor, with the term 'drunken brawl' a police report standard.
Religion may be the opiate of the people, but alcohol seems to be the sedative that they are allowed.
Whatever the psychological reason for the proliferation of alcohol (and there is no way marijuana should be illegal when alcohol is available to all who would try it), those who use it should be aware that in large part they are drinking unprocessed urine. For that is where quite a lot of it comes out; drinkers are certainly very familiar with their personal flushing systems.
I have a personal grouse against alcohol, in that it was used as a weapon by the whites against the Native American population, then, in a cruel irony, the caricature of the 'drunk Injun' used to degrade an entire people. Nobody told the 'red people' to drink responsibly now, did they?
Despite the chortling in the advertisements, there is only one way to drink alcohol responsibly don't.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
