AHS Views

A study recently done in the UK – interviews with young adults about drinking - found that young people consider planned drinking, including getting drunk, to be a fun leisure activity – the way people who don’t drink would plan a vacation or a night out to dinner and the movies. Interestingly enough, Professor Christina Griffin of the University of Bath in England, who carried out the study, said her first step to handle the problem would be to “Stop demonizing and making generalizations about young people and their drinking. We also need to listen and incorporate their views and perspectives,” – which doesn’t sound like she’s viewing their drinking as ‘entertainment’, the way the study participants do. She’s looking at them as troubled people who need addiction help.

A friend of my son’s who can easily knock back eight or 10 beers when he comes home from work told me that he drinks that way because he likes to ‘come home from work and have a few beers.’ That was his only explanation, and his only understanding of why he did it.

There was no concept of stress at work, no idea that he was troubled in any way, no idea that he was trying to relieve whatever pressures being mentally alert brought to bear. He just likes to ‘have a few beers.’ Which, to him, is eight or 10 of them.

He did this for many years. He needed some kind of addiction help, and he had absolutely no awareness of it whatever. That’s how far things had gone. And I believe that’s the case with many people who drink a lot.

Their close friends and family probably know better – they can see the destruction the person is engaged in, they often know when the drinking started and what incident or set of circumstances in the person’s life set them off on that course.  But the drinker can’t see it at all.

It is said that one night of drinking impairs critical thinking for a month. It’s obvious that, in this person’s case, his ability to think has been so severely impaired he doesn’t even really do it anymore. He just drinks. Because he ‘likes to come home and have a few beers.’

It’s important to get these people into addiction help services before their brain is totally pickled. Today they can’t think well enough to know why they drink, tomorrow they might not be able to think well enough to hold down a job, or take care of their family, or keep themselves from falling off a building or drinking so much they pass out and have to be taken to emergency. Whatever …. they need help. Don’t buy their ‘entertainment’ thing.