How do you drink?

In a February issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored the cultural impact on how we drink. He titled his essay, "Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it." His conclusions about the external influences on alcoholism yield some thought-provoking questions about how we formulate alcohol-related policies.

At the outset, Gladwell describes the experience of anthropologist Dwight Heath in mid-twentieth century Bolivia. Heath, an "old-fashioned" ethnographer, fully immersed himself into the cultural undertakings of the local tribe, the Camba. Each weekend, the Camba gathered as a community and socially drank a natively brewed rum, frequently inviting Heath and his wife along. Upon his return to the New Haven, Connecticut, a colleague of his at Yale's Center of Alcohol Studies persuaded him to write a journal article detailing the drinking habits of Camba. The rum, as it turns out, was an astonishing 180 proof, nearly that of laboratory alcohol.

But Gladwell and Heath note that the Camba had not exhibited any signs of alcoholism and its degenerative effects. In fact, despite binge drinking industrial grade alcohol every weekend, the Camba showed incredible social stability:

A dozen or so people would show up on Saturdaynight, and the party would proceed--often until everyone went back to work on Monday morning... They did not drink alone. They did not drink on work nights. And they only drank within the structure of this elaborate ritual.

Drinking did not invade their productive lives, nor did it result in the violence and depression so frequently associated alcoholism.

So where does drunken rowdiness come from? Gladwell's answer suggests that we take signals from our environment. He highlights two competing theories about how we understand drunkenness. The first is disinhibition, which "suggests that the drinker is increasingly insensitive to his environment--that he is in the grip of an autonomous physiological process."

The alternative theory, and more persuasive I think, is the myopia theory. This concept postulates that "the drinker is, in some respects, increasingly sensitive to his environment: he is at the mercy of whatever is in front of him." In other words, a drinker responds to the immediate signals of his surroundings, or as Gladwell puts it, "by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the countless movies and televisions shows and general cultural expectations that say young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy."

If Gladwell is right, then we have glaring holes in our national policies on alcohol. Nobody would or should expect the government to create safe controlled havens for drinkers. Such an idea would be ineffectual and impossible. But the effect of current alcohol policy is one that enables the negative environments in which we drink--primarily the environments that facilitate drinking underage. The prohibition of alcohol for drinkers under the age of 21 has pushed consumption into dangerous, unsupervised locales like the basements of fraternity houses. Here, drinkers follow the example of their surroundings, drinking as much as they can as quickly as they can, in secret. Drinkers trying to not be found.

In the futile attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol, our current alcohol policy has ignored the crucial elements needed to treat the current epidemic of alcoholism, education and example. Education is not solely dispensed in the classroom, but also done by cultural example. It is on this point that Gladwell argues best:

There is something about the cultural dimension of social problems that eludes us. When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink. The consequences of that failure are considerable, because, in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law... Nowhere in the multitude of of messages and signals sent by popular culture is there any consensus about what drinking is supposed to mean.

Without a positive and affirmative example of how to drink, prohibitions and danger warnings will not succeed. We need less messages concerning how not to drink and more messages concerning how to drink. Our policies only enable and cultivate the bad environments which we try to prevent. That is what needs to change.