Confessions of a binge drinker

[salvorhardin]

Derek Brown makes an excellent point -- that public health policy when it comes to drug use is asinine when it's divorced from sociocultural considerations.

Dwight Heath, perhaps the foremost expert on drinking and culture -- and a professor of anthropology at Brown University -- describes drinking as a bio-pyscho-social experience in his International Handbook on Alcohol and Culture. Heath describes cultures that, despite drinking almost lethal amounts of alcohol, sit peacefully while imbibing, with no instances of violence, crime, or suicide. Many examples of peaceful, safe drinking exist (even within our culture) and show that, while the act of drinking alcohol engenders certain physical effects, our cultural interpretation and psychological state determine what those effects mean.

Anthropologists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton in Drunken Comportment: A Social Explanation, are more to the point:

...Since nowhere is it the case that once one is drunk, anything and everything goes, we submit that it is highly misleading to construe that state of drunkeness as if it were an interval during which all sense of right and wrong has, as it were, gone on holiday.

We, as a culture, set the rules. When they're broken it's not solely the fault of a drink or even five. It's the underlying message accompanying the way that we drink. That's something I believe we can change by recognizing drinking as a meaningful activity and by addressing problem drinking, which involves a more complete assessment, with culturally relevant programs and not with fruitless pleas to "drink less."

Full post: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/01/confessions-of-a-binge-drinker/251582

[Warpy]

1. Cultural context is very important

I knew somebody ages ago, a Cherokee kid whose dad had come out west to live on a rez and who visited his dad and went down the peyote road with him. I asked him what he thought about the whole thing and he said it wasn't a whole lot different from the Baptist tent revivals his mother dragged him to when he was too little to resist.

Well, except for the throwing up.

In any case, bad trips and paranoia are seldom reported in that context, which is one where participants are surrounded by relatives of some description or another and supported through it.

There's a long tradition of imbibing alcohol in the Andes, binge drinking to the point of passing out. Yet the violence is mostly ritualized in the Tinku, not associated with drinking during the rest of the year.

Because of the damned Puritans, we mostly lack a cultural context for mind altering drugs and so we run into trouble with them, from binge drinking bar fights to LSD bad trips. It's ironic since the Puritans themselves lived on alcohol and went through life smashed.

[salvorhardin]

3. Exactly!

I'm reminded of Becker's famous sociological study "On Becoming A Marihuana User" (http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/brines/becker.pdf)

All drug use has social and cultural components. In Becker's study, part of the experience of cannabis use was that new users had to learn to appreciate the experience of being high, and this was done primarily in a social context. Very few people start smoking pot alone -- it's a shared cultural experience. Same thing with coffee, alcohol, nicotine, coca, opium, etc.

To suggest that high levels of drug consumption are necessarily problematic outside of the social context they occur in is, well, I already said it's asinine.

?"...deviance is not a quality of a bad person but the result of someone defining someone’s activity as bad." -- Howard S. Becker.

[bemildred]

2. I've seen some really fatuous definitions of what "binge drinking" is too.

Like you go to a party once in a while and drink a 6-pack and you are a binge drinker. Real drinkers go through cases, drink a couple boilermakers just to get straight, and then go from there, all the time.

This piece makes sound points too.

[handmade34]

4. interesting

we ALL use (albeit sometimes different) means to create an altered state of consciousness at times... it is imperative for humans to do this... alcohol, perscription drugs, marijuana, other mind altering substances, religion, sex, food, exercise, etc... Yes, our culture sets the rules and at the moment our rules are not serving us well...