Would you trade your long-term lucidity for a regular glass of wine?
How about an existence of alienating yourself and others, but you get to feel a little loopy while doing it?
The normalization of habitual drinking — beer at a football game, wine with dinner, liquor at a party — allows for cases of excessive drinking to run rampant. Cases where devastating repercussions occur. Provided that alcohol’s popularity leads many down the path to addiction, why do we encourage its consumption in the first place? Maybe the Prohibitionists were right all along.
In 1919, the 18th Amendment illegalized the sale and manufacture of alcohol. For the next thirteen years, Prohibition, quite simply, failed. Communities formed for those who continued to drink, crime increased, and Congress later repealed the Amendment altogether. However, summarizing Prohibition with only its legal history misrepresents the true narrative of the anti-alcohol movement. Nearly a century prior to Prohibition, American women concerned about domestic violence, poverty, and child neglect formed the Temperance movement, urging for abstinence from drinking.
As the female supporters often affiliated with Protestant groups, abstinence from drinking became tied to religion. Due to the movement’s connection to Christianity, critics of the time discredited the women as “radical” or “fundamentalist.” We silenced those women’s voices. And today, we continue to face the consequences.
As long as Prohibition was deemed extreme, drinking could remain acceptable. Now, in modern day drinking culture, choosing sobriety continues to ostracize one from the defined norm. You’re either recovering or religious.
But why should drinking be considered the default?
A near encyclopedia of alcohol’s dangers exists, as well as a substantial population of those dependent on the substance. According to a study by the University of Oxford, alcohol use, even when mild, is associated with hippocampal atrophy, an early sign of Alzhiemer’s disease. The study shows that the severity of the diagnosis — entailing cognitive and memory decline — is proportional to one’s level of drinking. Apart from mental decline, health risks across the board increase with alcohol abuse. The CDC states that every alcoholic beverage is linked to cancer.
Social drinkers argue that, with one in ten American adults suffering from Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), a majority of alcohol consumers do not rely on the drink. Therefore, outlawing alcohol completely helps only ten percent of the country, while it remains unnecessary for the remaining ninety. However, many fail to acknowledge that alcoholism plagues more than just the individual; forty-six percent of the American population has known a family member or friend with a drug or alcohol addiction.
So what does such a circumstance entail for nearly half of the United States?
Those with a dependence on alcohol lose proper judgment, often prioritizing the substance over their loved ones and careers. Characterized by an inability to stop drinking despite interference with daily life, AUD replaces sensible priorities — spouses, children, work — with an utterly irrational one: alcohol. Furthermore, domestic abuse holds transparent ties to alcohol use. The World Health Organization reports that fifty-five percent of domestic abusers “were drinking alcohol prior to the assault.”
Evidently, families of alcoholics face problems as severe as the alcoholics themselves. If at least ten percent of Americans struggle with serious, alcohol-related health risks and behavioral changes, to which their loved ones must attend to, then is drinking really worth it?
Examining the detrimental effects of alcohol on society, I cannot help but understand the women who once wanted the substance banned.