If you could name one drug that is intimately connected to practically all rites of passage in the western world, it is alcohol. Most rites of passage have a religious element attached since culturally, they not only mark important transitions in life but also reinforce the religious views and values of a culture. Births, deaths, and marriages are, for example, all typically attended by priests of one stripe or another.
On such momentous occasions, alcohol is almost always along for the ride too. Even good Christians line up on a weekly basis to receive the blood of Christ (but not before the priest) as if wine had some mystical transformative quality (which, if you ask most non-religious people on any given night, it certainly has).
Informally too, long before any baptism, we ‘wet the baby’s head’ to celebrate a man’s transition to fatherhood and birthdays and any other special occasion in adulthood is almost inseparable from the raising of a glass or three. Beer, as they say, is not just for breakfast.
How could one drug become so inseparable from the human experience in such a wide cross section of humanity? First, availability. As an organic compound, ethanol results from the fermentation of sugars by yeasts — both compounds abound in nature. Ethanol has been used by humans since prehistory as the driver of all alcoholic beverages. Dried residue on 9,000-year-old pottery found in China suggests that neolithic people consumed alcohol (and were probably doing so a lot longer before pottery was invented to store it).
The word alcohol itself seems to have originated from the Andalusian Arabic, ‘al kuhl’. The Arabs brought many great inventions to Spain, reflecting their advanced knowledge of science. Al kuhl refers not to ethanol but rather the cosmetic powder kohl black, which is a powdered preparation of antimony. This etymological dog leg connection refers to a process of refinement rather than any product itself i.e., creating a powder through grinding materials, but also to distillation by boiling down or reduction.
For the Arabs, alcohol as a preparation was used as a sedative, not as an intoxicant and perhaps this understanding put it in its proper context. Even today, is it not curious that it remains a disavowed intoxicant by Muslims but continues to be enshrined in Christian rites and secular life in the West?
The place where I live, Finland, and the country where I was born, Britain have a problematic relationship with alcohol (and religion too,I suppose). If you look at the stats for 2023, on average across both sexes, Finns consume 10.65 liters of ethanol a year, while the British glug 11.45 liters (that’s less than the Irish by the way, and doesn’t hold a candle to the Latvians at a heady 13.19 per annum). Nor do these statistics consider the way in which it is consumed, whether in the form of lower percentage delivery systems like beer versus the 40 proof and upwards of spirits or by steady weekly increment or blow out binges.
Despite advice to the contrary, there is no safe limit to the consumption of alcohol, and if it were assessed on its merits as a drug, it is positively poisonous. Consumption can lead to adverse effects on the heart (ACM) , physical destruction of the body’s second most vital organ, the liver, and a veritable apocalyptic stable of cancers, from those of the head, neck, throat, oesophagus, liver, pancreas, breast, colon and rectum.
Finally, let’s not forget the havoc of accidents in the home, domestic violence, drunken sexual abuse, public disorder, and the carnage of drink driving on the roads to complete the list.
All told, the price of a good time is high.
I was quite fortunate to dodge the drinking bullet metaphorically speaking, despite the locations where I have lived and continue to live. Growing up in Britain, neither my mother nor father took any interest in drinking despite having a well-stocked liquor cabinet for rare social occasions. My father often recounted with disgust, the story of his father, who drank his way through four years of backpay due to him as a policeman in less than a year after he was liberated from a Japanese concentration camp. Impoverished by war and want, this money which could have put his whole family back on their feet was pissed up the wall. My eminently sensible mother despite her Irish provenance has hardly touched a drop through her life and is all the better for it.
Without sounding sanctimonious, taken on its demerits, alcohol is a dangerous drug. On a physiological level, alcohol it is such a poisonous substance that the liver prioritizes all other vital processes to neutralize and expel it from the body. In its chemical breakdown by enzymes in the liver, it becomes acetaldehyde, a cumulative carcinogen which is the main cause of dizziness, nausea, and hangover. Finally, it becomes acetic acid (ie vinegar).
From your first drink to your last, the kidneys work overtime to expel these harmful metabolites from the body hence the excessive number of visits to the urinal in one evening and the dehydration that accompanies drinking that literally shrinks the brain. Fortunately, with the right amount of alcohol the night before, you probably won’t remember a lot of the things you said or did but you won’t forget the hangover.
I have not spat in the glass, as they say in Finland and still appreciate the craftsman-like refinement of the raw product into great wines, thirst quenching ales and exalted single malt whiskeys. A country pub in Britain is the high altar of the common man and the starting point for many great ideas and conversations. But all told, my personal journey with alcohol is coming to an end. Life as they say, does not get longer by stopping alcohol but it just seems that way. Learning to socialize without it might cost you a lot of good friends and potentially a lot of good times too.
Overall, however, I think it’s time for a big reset on this drug societally.
In many respects, I think this is happening with the younger generations (though not with the recalcitrant boomers who were trained on it from an early age) and I hope it brings with it a new and revitalized kind of society. In many respects, (and returning to the common theme of religion and alcohol), for many people alcohol is a religion itself and to decry it is a form of sacrilege.
But like all religions, and indeed superstition, if you take away the dogma and mumbo jumbo, and replace it with cold hard science, it doesn’t hold water. We’re not talking sobriety as such, rather clarity of mind. Drunks, with few exceptions, are poor conversationalists.
You might argue I am simply spouting the same weary tropes of new puritanism, but I would argue that drinking will go the way of smoking. As the haze clears, butts are stubbed and the last smokers shuffle off this mortal coil, coughing and clutching their oxygen bottles, many will wonder why we did ourselves so much self harm and at such a great expense to ourselves physically and financially.
I don’t discount the need for humans to get high one way or another but in industrial and post- industrial capitalist societies, ‘legal drugs’ have been productized, marketed heavily and weaponized to ensure that the masses are in thrall to their influence.
If you are good and productive taxpayer, you smoke and drink heavily and drop dead at retirement. Think about it. A good place to start is to take its control out of the hands of the government, which enriches itself on the customs duties and the monopolies it enjoys here in Finland and in the same manner in other Nordic countries. The hypocrisy of criticizing the harm it does while gladly enjoying the profits cannot be measured.
The next step is obviously reengineering the culture to reject the very persistent lie that socializing is best with a drink in the hand (nor do I advocate its replacement with a spliff, despite an earlier held belief that cannabis was somehow better than alcohol). There must be a better way, but that better way requires work and education on a personal and societal level.
I might be waxing lyrical, but I’d like to think that my own children will look back in horror at the alcoholic excesses of our generation. I don’t see why every rite of passage that we celebrate means falling down the same hole again and again. As Einstein himself said: No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. If we all strived for a higher level of consciousness without the bane of alcohol, an earthly paradise would be that much closer to achieving.
