About Drinking

Here is a long entry on drinking that I wrote a few years ago. It's worth bringing forward again, after being reminded of it by a reader. My opinion of alcohol hasn't changed. Alcohol is a gift from the gods but like many such gifts, is very dangerous indeed. It also is the content of a huge treatment industry that is controlled by questionable dogma, dogma that is not flexible or international enough. This is not the mainstream American treatment industry attitude toward booze but instead is based on my personal experience and on six months of study in a medical library when I myself was in a treatment center at the VA.

The Writing Life II: Drinking: the full entry.

"I have profound respect for alcohol. I don't consider it a destructive drug so much as a gift from the gods. I belong to the Dionysian School of Alcohol. All gifts from the gods can be abused. The secret to drinking alcohol is knowing when and how to use it and to recognize when its spiritual gifts have been dissipated by wrongful use.

I have more respect for Alcoholic Spirits (there is a reason they are called this) than I do for the American treatment industry (Europe has a different view, as I learned while working in a medical library), which is part of a fashionable institutional wave determined to turn everyone into a victim. The first step in a 12-step program is to admit Powerlessness. In practice, this confuses the power of a spiritual experience with the decision to enter one in the first place, which is a matter of choice. Alcohol is like gravity. If you jump off a building, you land at the bottom -- but this does not mean you are powerless when faced with the option of jumping. You are powerless against gravity only if you choose to put yourself within its domain."

Liquor and Lit is about alcohol and writers.