Return to Prohibition?
| 15 October 2009
Last night I watched the BBC’s Horizon documentary ‘Do I Drink Too Much’, in which addiction expert John Marsden explored the addictive nature of alcohol. Marsden begins with the personal demon of his father’s alcoholism, and the paradox of being an addiction expert while knowingly exceeding the NHS limit of 21 units of alcohol per week. It sets up an anti-alcohol bias from which Marsden never falters throughout the one hour piece.
Next Marsden meets Professor David Nutt who explains pharmacologically why we like it. A “remarkable drug, many people use different aspects of it to serve their own purposes”. It has the tranquilising effect of Diazepam, the dopamine buzz of Cocaine, the anti-depressant effect of Prozac, the addictive potential of heroine, and the barbiturate / anaesthetic effect of Phenobarbital. Quite a cocktail! Nutt concludes ‘if alcohol was discovered today, it would be classified under the Misuse of Drugs Act’.
Marsden then takes us on a personal journey of discovery of his own relationship with alcohol as he is poked, prodded and guinea pigged through various tests for liver damage, neurological reward system triggers, and addiction, interspersed on the one hand with damning statistics about the UK’s binge drinking culture and the damage it’s doing, and on the other with painful memories from Marsden of his father’s problem.
Forty-seven minutes of weaving these threads readies the viewer for the documentary’s grand idea:
Alcohol is such a dangerous drug. Already 7% percent of UK adults are showing signs of dependency, and in a decade the number of us going to hospital because of drink has gone up 70%. So should we even drink at all? A colleague of mine has come up with a seriously radical idea. He wants to eliminate alcohol, to design an alternative drug, one that you could simply add to a soft drink. But the difference is that it would not be addictive. It would not harm your brain or your body. You’d get all the benefits of drink without the danger. If his drug works, ideally the next generation of children will not even touch alcohol.
Marsden’s piece certainly paints a sinister picture of alcohol without even faintly brushing over the scientific studies that have pointed to its health benefits. But there was something in this grand idea of replacing alcohol that left me far more concerned. The idea that an alternative to alcohol could be added to a soft drink addresses perhaps pharmacological substitution, but entirely misses the contribution alcohol has made to gastronomy. There’s no drug + soft drink that could ever substitute a 1945 Mouton-Rothschild, or a 2001 Prüm Wehlener Sonnenuhr.
Yet, if you look at the American political debate prior to the introduction of Prohibition there in 1919, gastronomy didn’t come into it. Neither did it at repeal. In an opposite sense, neither did gastronomy come into arguments about the UK’s more recent ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces – a move which allowed those of us who enjoy food to smell it instead of cigarette smoke in restaurants. No, the argument there was solely about the health damage cigarette smoke was doing to the restaurant staff through ‘passive smoking’.
Marsden’s piece provided a jolting reminder that while I enjoy wine for gastronomic pleasure in its boundless nuance and variety, for the way it connects people around the table, and the drinker to the maker, and place of its origin, and history... and yes, for the pleasure of the alcohol, none of these benefits will matter a jot if the public mood swings toward alcohol prohibition. The arguments that hold sway will be exclusively health and public cost based on the one hand, and liberty based on the other. Views like mine that wine is an important part of our civilisation will be in a distinct minority. A depressing thought and one that I hope I don’t have to see come to fruition (if that’s the right word!).
The BBC’s Horizon documentary ‘Do I Drink Too Much?’ will remain viewable on BBC iPlayer for UK residents until approximately 13th November 2009.
