As Low As I Needed To Go To Bounce Back Up
Theodore Dalrymple: “public drunkenness on the scale we see it now is in part a consequence of the relative cheapness of alcohol. It has long been acknowledged that the consumption of alcohol is affected by its price, as measured by the labour time it takes to earn it. Cheap drink means more drunks.”
My opinion on drinking (I've stopped) has been influenced strongly by James W. Prescott: “Alcohol is well known to facilitate the expression of violent behaviors, and, although addicting and very harmful to chronic users, is acceptable to U.S. society. Marijuana, on the other hand, is an active pleasure-inducing drug which enhances the pleasure of touch and actively inhibits violent-aggressive behaviors. It is for these reasons, I believe that marijuana is rejected in U.S. society. For similar reasons heroin is rejected and methadone (an addicting drug minus the pleasure) is accepted.” And in the following paragraph: “very high correlations between alcohol use and parental punishment indicate that people who received little affection from their mothers and had physically punitive fathers are likely to become hostile and aggressive when they drink. Such people find alcohol more satisfying than sex. [...] Those who describe premarital sex as "not agreeable" are likely to become aggressive when drinking and to prefer drugs and alcohol to sexual pleasures.”
I don't want to condone marijuana use nor heroin use: I am against heroin use but not marijuana, although I am against its use before driving or before working. More and more I'm against the use of alcohol in any situation, and that prohibition only applies to myself. If you "enjoy it responsibly", then fine by me. I've been saying "no thanks" to drinks lately, and one interpreted it as my not being able to drink beer (that was once true after I got the correct order of drinking gin and beer mixed up), but—and I didn't say it—it was because I was done with alcohol. I never gained from being drunk; it never made me feel more at ease with myself—although it has made me take more risks comedically, which I don't have a problem with—and I remember a time at a bar in which I was drunk, in a terrible mood, but alcohol never let me go as low as I needed to go to bounce back up. I get no satisfaction anymore from drinking, and I would get no satisfaction with sleeping with someone who was drunk. (No psychological satisfaction that is: I am agnostic on the physical element.) I don't plan on being as straight-edge as Jay, but I don't need alcohol to make me feel better or worse about myself.
Dalrymple again: “The drunkenness has an ideological component as well. To lack social or personal inhibitions is to distinguish oneself from those poor, misguided older generations who believed that self-restraint, at least in public, was a virtue. What terrible harm all those inhibitions and ideas of self-respect did! Everyone knows that you have to let your hair down at frequent intervals, and that if you do not, you will harm your health and emotional well-being most terribly.” He then knocks drunken debauchery, which is fine if he's knocking drunken debauchery and not sober debauchery. And he seems to be against public drunkenness rather than just drunkenness. I can see alcohol being the next nicotine, in that first the health effects are discovered then something is done about it either through moral suasion or state-endorsed coercion. But fat is already the next nicotine, so that will have to wait.
