Drink (87 page)

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Authors: Iain Gately

BOOK: Drink
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59
Who hath sorrow? Who hath woe?/ They who dare not answer no;/ They whose feet to sin incline,/ While they tarry at the wine.
60
She also crusaded against smoking.
61
When he was in drinking mode, London expected his liquor to kick. By his own high standards, absinthe was for lightweights: “The trouble I had with the stuff was that I had to take such inordinate quantities in order to feel the slightest effect.”
62
Sassoon records that the same commander tried to ban smoking among his men and prevent the issue of steel helmets lest these would “make them soft.”
63
The amendment was eventually ratified by every state except Rhode Island and Connecticut.
64
Prohibition had created a host of new synonyms for intoxication.
65
Champagne had a good Prohibition. It is estimated that dry-era America got through seventy-one million bottles—equivalent to a 300 percent increase in annual consumption when compared to pre-Volstead years.
66
His favorite, which he drank by the pint, was Pol Roger ’28.
67
Vomit.
68
Interestingly, much of the vocabulary of drug use was borrowed from the language of drinking.
High
appears in the 1927
Lexicon of Prohibition,
as does
splifficated; buzzing
features in Benjamin Franklin’s
Drinker’s Dictionary,
and
stoned
dates back to Jacobean England as a term for lustful drunkenness.
69
It is currently the largest-selling brand of whisky in the world.
70
The legal drinking age in Japan has been twenty since 1922.
71
The actual drinking habits of American college students changed very little between 1973 and 1983.
72
“By nature, I am a gentle, responsible, useful person, with a few special insights and gifts. With liquor, I am insane.”
73
Lynch later pointed out to BATF that “your office should proceed with caution when deciding whether Thomas Jefferson’s writing is too dangerous to be read by the American public.”
74
Lower limits were prescribed for women because they tend to weigh less and to have a greater percentage of body fat than men, leading to higher concentrations of alcohol in the blood and tissues after the same number of drinks.
75
A female
binger
needed less than two pints of beer, or three small glasses of wine, in an evening to qualify for the soubriquet.
76
And continues to do so in the present decade.
77
The problem of underreporting was not confined to Britain. A 1986 survey of drinking habits in Tucson, Arizona, revealed that while 85 percent of respondents said they did not drink beer, 75 percent of the city’s trash cans had empty beer containers in them.
78
A fatal weariness with
gourmandisme
.
79
Château Pétrus 2005 (rated 96-100 by Robert Parker) costs $4,000 per bottle.
80
Those between twenty-one and thirty-one in 2002.
81
A large cup of mouthwash can generate a BAC reading greater than .02.

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