Drink (76 page)

The last nonrecommendation, advising nondrinkers not to start, may be contrasted with the position in Great Britain, where, despite a government-inspired binge-drinking scare, the Royal College of Physicians nonetheless advised dry British subjects to get wet for the good of their hearts.

The appearance of neotemperance resulted in a revival of the temperance genre in fiction. Once again, Americans were able to titillate themselves with stories of raging drunks harming themselves and terrorizing others. However, twenty-first-century examples of the genre tended to give more weight to redemption than Victorian-era tomes, with degradation serving as a prelude to uplifting demonstrations of willpower.
A Million Little Pieces
(2003) by James Frey, initially presented as a true story, was typical of the new wave of temperance fiction. The book chronicled the efforts of its author to overcome alcoholism and addiction at a treatment center modeled on Hazelden in Minnesota. Written in direct and effective prose,
A Million Little Pieces
offered willpower as a way of escaping the treadmill of alcoholism. It was, moreover, critical of the AA twelve-steps program, which formed the core of treatment at Hazelden in real life: “I have been to AA meetings and they have left me cold. I find the philosophy to be one of replacement. Replacement of one addiction with another addiction. Replacement of a chemical with God and a Meeting. The Meetings themselves made me sick. Too much whining, too much complaining, too much blaming. Too much bullshit about Higher Powers. There is no Higher Power or any God who will cure me. There is no meeting where any amount of whining complaining and blaming is going to make me feel any better. I am an Alcoholic and a Drug Addict and a Criminal. . . . I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. . . .”

In addition to stimulating a revival in temperance noir, contemporary attempts to demonize alcohol provoked a counterculture, which glorified booze and drunkenness. Publications such as
The Modern Drunkard
magazine (motto: “Say it loud, say it plowed”) celebrated the pleasures of overindulgence and intoxication, highlighted some of the excesses of the neotemperance brigade, and also served the serious purpose of questioning the power and influence of campaigning bodies such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. MADD had proved to be an extremely effective lobbyist in the decades since its formation. It had fought for and won stricter federal controls over drunk driving. By 2002, all states had lowered the Blood Alcohol Content, above which drunk driving became a per se offence, to 0.08. MADD’s present ambition is to prevent any drinker from ever driving at all, through further reduction of the permissible BAC, stricter penalties for drivers who exceed it, and compulsory ignition interlock devices to be fitted to every auto in America. The program is justified by the MADD assumption that even one is too many. According to Penny Wagner, a MADD chapter president, “once you’ve consumed your first drink, you’ve lost that ability to make a sound judgment,” which is simply untrue. Analyses of accident statistics suggest that impairment commences when the driver’s BAC is above 0.1, so that the current limit of 0.08 has a built-in safety margin. Moreover, should MADD’s ambitions to lower the BAC to .02 be realized, the result would be a law that declared sober people to be drunkards,
⁸¹
denied them their driving privileges, punished them with fines and prison sentences, and robbed them of their civil rights, not least of all the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in criminal trials.

Notwithstanding the efforts of the neotemperance movement to demonize America’s favorite recreational drug and to introduce discriminatory legislation against those who used it, the opening years of the new millennium were full of good news for drinkers. The three-quarters-plus of American adults who drank, over 90 percent of whom did so in moderation, were found to be calmer, healthier, longer-lived, richer, and cleverer than their dry compatriots. In the years when Strom had raged against wine labels, further positive “health effects” of alcohol had been uncovered, including evidence that it offered some protection against a malady afflicting millions of Americans— stress. A 1999 paper concluded that “studies of the relationship between alcohol and stress suggest that drinking can reduce stress in certain people and under certain circumstances,” particularly “people who have difficulty controlling their behavior, are highly self-conscious, or have difficulty organizing new information when sober.” While the stress survey must be characterized as pioneering, rather than definitive, the body of evidence that had continued to accumulate in favor of the ability of all types of alcohol to reduce heart disease was now so substantial as to be irrefutable. Moreover, research into the mechanics of the protection offered by a drink or two every day was uncovering new and exciting potential in alcoholic beverages, especially wine.

Experiments carried out in 2006 on a special breed of mice, genetically hardwired for obesity, revealed that if their diets were supplemented with resveratrol, a compound that occurs naturally in grape skins and red wine, they lived longer and more fulfilling lives than their obese peers, without themselves having to lose weight: “Fatrelated deaths dropped 31 percent for obese mice on the supplement, compared to untreated obese mice, and the treated mice also lived long after they should have.” The overweight overachievers on massive doses of resveratrol were also conspicuous for their activity. According to Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School, “These fat old mice can perform as well . . . as young lean mice.” In his opinion, his program had found “the Holy Grail of aging research.”

There was plenty more good news for alcohol fans. The same demographic surveys which showed that college graduates were much more likely to drink than the rest of the population revealed the truth that abstainers risked not only their health, but also their wealth, every time they said no to the bottle. According to a 2006 study of the relationship between alcohol and affluence, “self-reported drinkers earn 10-14 percent more than abstainers” and “males who frequent bars at least once per month earn an additional 7 percent on top of the 10 percent drinkers’ premium.” The premium mostly applied to moderate drinkers, and since these constituted the majority, “drinking and socializing” was a “potentially productive investment that positively influences future earnings.” The report concluded that “anti alcohol campaigns can be considered harmful to individuals and the economy as a whole.”

In addition to improving the mental, physical, and financial well-being of drinkers, and contributing to the prosperity of the nation, alcohol also seemed to make its aficionados brighter than their sober peers. In 2004, a decades-long survey of 10,000 British civil servants concluded that even those who drank only one glass of booze a day had “significantly sharper thought processes than teetotalers.”

Established drinkers, and abstinent people tempted into joining them, enjoyed access to an unparalleled choice of drinks in the opening years of the present decade. American craft brewers and wineries produced thousands of idiosyncratic brands between them, the major manufacturers created an annual Niagara of beverages that were models of homogeneity and sheer drinkability, and domestic choices were supplemented by a host of beers, wines, and spirits of every grade of quality, from all over the world. Good news, and good booze, led to a sea change in official attitudes toward alcohol around 2005. It was recognized at the federal level that drinking was not just part of people’s lives, but also beneficial to the economy, beyond being a simple source of revenue. It was time to start to praise and encourage domestic manufacturers of alcohol, rather than to launch another doomed investigation into their advertising practices. On June 6, 2006, the House of Representatives gave its unanimous consent to
Resolution 753
, which put it on record that “American craft brewers promote the Nation’s spirit of independence through a renaissance in hand crafted beers like those . . . produced here by the Nation’s founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for the enjoyment of the citizenry.” The resolution further observed that the craft brewers’ diverse and “flavorful” beers had made the United States “the envy of every beer-drinking nation in the world,” and commended them for “providing jobs, improving the balance of trade, supporting American agriculture, and educating Americans about the history and culture of beer while promoting the responsible consumption of beer as a beverage of moderation.”

American craft brews, excellent as they were, were nonetheless outshone by California wine. In May 2006, The
Judgment of Paris
contest between the best California Cabernet Sauvignons and Premier Crus of Bordeaux was re-adjudicated using the same ten wines, all now more than thirty years old, and the court found, once again, in favor of California. This time the Californians improved their rankings, winning all the first five slots. Best overall was Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello ’71, with Stags Leap ’73, the victor of 1976, in second place.

Interestingly, and despite their tested excellence, for most of the life of wines such as Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello ’71 it had been impossible for most Americans to obtain them through the mail. The sale of alcohol followed the repeal era three-tier system, composed of producers or importers who sold to wholesalers, who sold to retailers, who sold to individuals. Sending wine through the mail or via a common carrier direct to a drinker was illegal in twenty-three states and a felony in some, including Florida, Kentucky, and Utah. This meant that drink manufacturers were effectively excluded from selling via catalogs or on the Internet, and the issue was tested in the Supreme Court in 2005. Its justices held that states must allow direct shipment by out-of-state wineries if (indicative of a lingering nervousness about alcohol) they allowed them by instate wineries. The new ruling had been recognized by thirty-three states by January 2007, enabling many Americans, at last, to order their own country’s wines direct. Small vineyards without national distribution and connoisseurs living far from their favorite wineries may now trade to their mutual satisfaction, unless they live in such recalcitrant states as Kentucky, where anyone caught ordering non-Kentuckian wine more than once still faces a felony charge.

A three-tier retail system was not the only hangover from the Volstead era in Kentucky. As of August 2005, 54 out of its 120 counties prohibited the sale of alcohol, and a further 36 had restrictions of some kind on its retailing, including 19 where residents might only drink on golf courses. Indeed, and unbeknownst to many Americans, Prohibition lingers on in many parts of their native land, principally in the southern states. Most of the northern counties of Alabama are still dry, as are nearly half of all counties in Mississippi, and Tennessee and Texas both still harbor large numbers of alcohol-free jurisdictions. Ironically, Lynchburg, Tennessee, home to Jack Daniel’s whiskey, is dry. The grandchildren of the Prohibition era find such dinosaurs amazing, not to say infuriating, when they chance across them. Here, for example, are the reactions of the writer Tucker Max to discovering that a part of the country he loved forbade the sale of booze:

Fortunately for the rising generation of drinkers, dry areas, gradually, are being submerged. The Pacific Coast has been all wet since 2003 when Monmouth, Oregon, voted to license drinking. Most of the former temperance heartlands in the Midwest and Northeast have also been flooded, including such shining examples of self-denial as Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, which had been dry since its foundation by Zebulon Cooper in 1789. Slippery Rock went under in 2001, for entirely commercial reasons: It wished to attract business and development but felt these would not come unless there were places to drink after work. Paradoxically, the same logic was used in Bridgewater, the last dry town in Connecticut, as a reason for staying arid. According to an official of the Bridgewater Historical Society, “We’re not looking for development. . . . We’re not looking for a way to bring bigger, better businesses to this place.” Anyone from Bridgewater wanting a drink must travel four miles out of town, despite the fact that it contains a winery within its jurisdiction. There remain other notable strongholds of temperance in the East, whose persistence might have given the pioneers of Prohibition some consolation. Ocean City, New Jersey, founded in 1879 by a quartet of Methodist ministers as a “moral seaside resort,” is still dry; a liquor barn sits just outside the city limits on the only causeway in. Consolations aside, a metaphorical stake was driven through Wayne Wheeler’s dead heart in January 2006 when Westerville, Ohio, former headquarters of the Anti-Saloon League and once known as the “dry capital of the world,” licensed the sale of beer for the first time since 1875. The first legal glass for 130 years fetched $150 at auction. Its buyer toasted his fellow citizens before he drank to the end of more than a century of paranoia over alcohol. “Here’s to a new tradition in Westerville,” he said.