A2 - Sunday News, January 31

, 1982

strictly personal

by Bob Hunter

THERE WAS a funeral in North Van a little while

ago that I should have
didn’t.

It was a cremation. The
person being cremated was a
fairly young lady who'd
poisoned herself to death
with alcohol.

She drank so much one
weekend her body just
suddenly rotted out from
under her‘and she died
horribly.

A good-looking lady. I
remember the first time I
met her, thinking: Mm-
mmm. She was going out
with a friend of mine, a great
but frustrated artist.

We were at a pub. After
about half an hour of more-
or-less rational con-
versation, the lady suddenly
insulted me. When my
friend, the artist, tried to
mediate, she turned on him
viciously.

I left early that ovEe ae
unable to figure out why
friend put a with such) a
neuretic But later, my
wife ania "Dott you ery
she’s an alcoholic? He
he can help her.”

Aha. Right away I could
see there was a profound but
tragic love affair in the
works. Either that or my
friend had just decided to
self-destruct along with the
lady.

We,

gone to, I guess, but I

It all seemed very per-
sonal.

But, you know, it wasn't.
The real question wasn't
about love, it was about why
the lady was an alcoholic in
the first place.

And that’s a social issue,
not a private issue. Society
determines how much booze
is available — and how much
booze there is available
determines how many
alcoholics there are going to

In fact, you can tog the
number of alcoholics in
society on what is known as
a logarithmic normal curve.

As the per-capita con-

sumption of alcohol on-
creases, the number of
people suffering from

coholism, cirrhosis of the
and

liver alcohol-related

8
t we'll get t the theory
later.

Coholic lady my
artist friend decided to live
with turned out to be beyond
the reach even of love.

She was carrying a pretty
hideous guilt-load, you see.
She'd been an alcoholic for
quite a while. And one of her

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Why alcoholism?

children was born slightly
retarded as a result.

Maybe she didn’t know
that alcohol damage to a
fetus often occurs during the
first three months.

Maybe she didn't know the
kid could also have been
malformed as well as
retarded — just because his
mother couldn't get it
together to stop boozing for
nine month.

After it became apparent
that the child was, indeed,
suffering from fetal alcohol
syndrome, as it’s called, the
lady really went to pieces,
feeling sorry for herself,
feeling guilty, basically
seeking oblivion.

At one level, you can say,
“Too bad she didn't do it
earlier.” That sounds cruel,
but it’s pretty cruel being
retarded, too, especially
because of your own
mother’s irresponsibility .

As for poisoning herself to

death afterwards, thus
avoiding facing the

oftsequences of her actions,
there’ ’s nothing heroic about
that.

In the end, she’s a tragic
figure. But rather con-
temptible. That's really why
I didn’t go to her funeral. |
hope she reincarnates as 8
vegetable. Probably will.

But then, thinking about
it, I realize that she needn't
have been an alcoholic. She
might have been born, for
instance, in a place like
Egypt, where alcohol isn't
socially sanctioned, and she
probably wouldn't have
drunk at all.

A certain portion of her
guilt has to be assigned to
social rules which permit
and even encourage the
widespread use of alcohol.

If the consumption of
alcohol by a large number of
people is plotted on a graph,
the result is a smooth line
that retains its essential
steady form as per capita
consumption increases.

If you have more drinkers,
you have more moderate
drinkers than ever, and you
also have more hard-core
boozeheads.

There are thought to be
three basic approaches to
the alcohol question.

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The first, the “bimodal
model”, claims that the
individual alcoholic is sick,
and therefore there is no
relationship between normal
drinking and pathological
drinking.

Then there's the ‘“in-
tegration model”, according
to which all restrictions
should be swept away.

Finally, there is the “single
distribution model”, which
says there is just no way to
influence the number of
heavy drinkers without
changing the average
consumption of the drinkers
at every other level.

The first two approaches
are misguided, to say the
least. The first allows the
beverage industry to
promote an overal) increase
in consumption while
claiming no_ responsibility

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The second — that you
should sell it on every corner
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soon as possible so they'll get.
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to get booze than anywhere
in the world. ;

France also happens to
have the highest rate of
alcoholism. One-half of its
hospital beds are taken up by
victims of alcohol-related
disorders.

The answer, ['m afraid, is
higher taxes on booze, a
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legal drinking age, and
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