You Don't Have To Be An Alcoholic For Drinking To Be Deadly For You And Your Loved Ones

I wasn't aware of Harold Johnson until hearing him on the CBC's Sunday Edition yesterday.   He made a strong impression on me because of the experience of my family with alcoholism and his honesty in pointing out the failure of the various models of understanding and dealing with alcoholism, the medical (what I usually call the "scientific") model, the illness model, the punitive model and others.  He is also honest about the fact that alcohol is a drug for which there is really no reliably safe dose,  you don't have to be an alcoholic or even legally drunk to have it produce disaster for you or those you encounter in your life.

The idea that drinking is in some way positive or fun or sophisticated or smart, or daring or grownup and that advocating sobriety is that greatest of all vices of moderny life, unstylish, something pushed by show-biz and other effective propaganda since at least the 1920s is a big part of the problem 

Harold Johnson's idea that it is necessary to promote the positive value of the experience of sobriety in place of those stories is essential.  While shaming is bad because it is ineffective, the presentation of drunkenness or buzzed as positive is far worse.  I'd rather risk people feeling bad about doing something that might injure or kill them or cause them to injure or kill other people by presenting drinking, honestly, for what it is, the consumption of poison for, among other things, the sensation of a relaxation of responsibility to not do those things.  Anyone who thinks making people feel bad about that is wrong has no real sense of morality or even a hierarchy of responsible behaviors. 

I haven't read his book,  Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours), yet, but I will.   As I am facing alcoholism in the generation after mine, people I took care of when they were young children, people for whom I have feelings that are as strong as those of a parent,  I'll try anything to try to convince people not to drink,  I've seen the consequences of drinking in the most horrible and graphic of ways, including the most horrible deaths from alcoholism in all of their horrible manifestations that are seldom gone into because they are horrific,  including many deaths in accidents by people who are not alcoholics, including the deaths of those who didn't drink at all who were killed by people who had been.  

I would call your attention to what Harold Johnson has to say about bans on alcohol in First Nations communities and the way that the Canadian Supreme Court violated Treaty 6 which the Cree people in Saskatchewan insisted include a ban on the alcohol that they already knew was deadly, the Supreme Court violated that treaty on the basis of individual rights.   Prohibition in the American model was not much of a success, unfortunately, but that doesn't invalidate the idea in all forms.  At any rate, making it harder to get and trying to restrict its use is certainly a good idea.  I remember when we all thought that removing the criminal penalties for public drunkenness was a nice, liberalish thing to do,  you have to wonder how many people were deprived of not only all of their rights but their lives on the basis of that alleged freedom.  As I've had occasion to point out to some of my alcoholic relatives and many an online atheist, anyone who is drinking is, temporarily or permanently, giving themselves up to the power of an idol, the ethyl alcohol molecule.  They give up their freedom to act as a competent agent to it.   Along with some good things, liberals in the 60s and 70s made some really stupid legal decisions based on "freedom" babble.