by Iain Gately
The appearance of warnings had no evident effect on the nation’s drinking. The gently declining trend in consumption did not suddenly plunge, and its continuance downward was best explained by changes in corporate attitudes toward drinking. Alcohol, and alcoholism, were considered backward in the brave new world of globalization and information technology. Drinking was regarded as a juvenile activity— something to be experienced at college but abandoned once upon the corporate ladder. Multinational companies evolved antialcohol policies that their employees were expected to follow for the good of their careers. The three-martini business lunch was consigned to history, as were many corporate cocktail cabinets. The new ethos was apparent in the 1985 movie Wall Street, a Faustian tale about Bud, a young stockbroker eager to share in the immense fortunes being made in the markets at that time. Bud solicits the attention of Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider, who epitomizes the new model capitalist. “Lunch is for wimps,” he declares at their first encounter, and Bud pointedly calls for Evian when he meets Gekko in a restaurant at night. The old order is represented by Bud’s father, a union leader at Bluestar Airlines, who does his business with the men he represents over a few beers in the local bar. Gekko aims to take over Bluestar in order to break it into pieces and rob its pension fund, and Bud is forced to choose between old-fashioned beer-drinking, metal-bashing America and the greed-is-good philosophy of Gordon Gekko. After a bottle of whiskey he decides to do the right thing—intoxication leads to an epiphany that restores his moral perspective.
There were genuine monetary benefits to be gained from alcohol-free workplaces. Companies that introduced such policies found their workers had fewer accidents, thus reducing insurance premiums and compensation payments, and that they had to sack fewer workers for drunkenness, enabling savings in termination costs and the expenses of recruiting replacements. IBM, then the most profitable industrial company in America, was a shining example of an efficient alcohol-free corporation. It had long frowned on drinking among its employees, to whom it issued etiquette manuals that set out appropriate hairstyles, advised them not to wear a blue suit with brown shoes, and pointed out that being “under the influence of or affected by alcohol” constituted “inappropriate conduct” and was grounds for dismissal.
The private-sector move toward alcohol-free workplaces was followed by federal regulation. The Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991 required alcohol testing of safety-sensitive transportation employees in aviation, trucking, railroads, mass transit, pipelines, and other transportation industries. The act affected several million workers, any of whom, subject to appropriate procedure, could be tested for drink at any time while on duty. Despite the eminently sensible nature of the legislation, it was controversial. How far should the government, or an employer, be permitted to pry into the personal habits of a worker? The contract between employer and employee was a commercial arrangement and should not dictate the latter’s conduct outside of working hours. Vows of sobriety—or chastity for that matter, for the country was in the middle of the AIDS panic and compulsory testing was being considered for that too—were more appropriate to monasteries than to capitalist nations.
The Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act rounded off ten bad years for alcohol in America. There had been, however, a few bright spots in the gloom. The television series Cheers, which, after a poor first season in 1982, had shot up the ratings and spent eight years as one of the ten most-watched programs in America, was one such glimmer of hope. Almost all of its action took place in a barroom, which was modeled on the Bull & Finch Pub in Boston. Despite the promise this location offered for bottle fights between aging rummies, or as a hangout for the unemployed, Cheers focused on social drinking. The bar’s clientele were rarely shown under the influence, and when they were they were credited with motives, like promotion at work. Cheers appealed to the 66 percent of the American population aged fourteen years and over who admitted to drinking. The program was rewarded for its realism with twenty-six Emmy Awards over its eleven-season lifespan.
The final episode of Cheers, broadcast on May 23, 1993, was the most-watched TV show of that year. For most of its run the habit it portrayed had been demonized and regulated against. Just as in the glory days of the WCTU, children were being taught, as fact, that alcohol led to mental and physical ruin. If they started drinking they would move on to crack and quite possibly catch AIDS en route. The bias against alcohol was apparent at the highest level. The federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, issued in 1991, advised adults as well as children not to drink at all. Alcoholic beverages had “no net health benefit”; they were “linked with many health problems,” were “the cause of many accidents,” and could “lead to addiction.” “Their consumption is not recommended,” the guidelines concluded. However, and in the same year in which they were published, evidence to the contrary was broadcast on prime-time television, which was so persuasive that the minority of Americans who did not drink might have been expected to buy a bottle or two and toast farewell forever to abstinence.
The revelations were contained in the November 17, 1991, edition of 60 Minutes, hosted by Morley Safer. Its subject was a health conundrum, known as the French Paradox, which Safer phrased as follows: “So why is it that the French, who eat 30 percent more fat than we do, suffer fewer heart attacks, even though they smoke more and exercise less? All you have to do is look at the numbers: If you’re a middle-aged American man, your chances of dying of a heart attack are three times greater than a Frenchman of the same age. Obviously, they’re doing something right—something Americans are not doing.” Safer examined several possible theories as to what that something could be. Was it because the French ate more fruit and vegetables, or that they lingered over their meals instead of bolting them down standing up, or could it be because they drank ten times as much red wine? In the opinion of 60 Minutes, the solution to the French Paradox was hidden in a bottle: “There has been for years the belief by doctors in many countries that alcohol, in particular red wine, reduces the risk of heart disease. . . . Now it’s been all but confirmed.”
The program featured two medical experts, Dr. Curtis Ellison of Boston, who confirmed the potential of wine to protect against heart disease, but also drew attention to “the tremendous problem of alcohol abuse”; and Dr. Serge Renaud of the French health service, who was more bullish on the issue, and who was happy to state, “It’s well-documented that a moderate intake of alcohol prevents coronary heart disease by as much as fifty percent.” At the show’s conclusion, Safer raised a glass of red wine to the camera and commented, “So the answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass.” The program was watched by an estimated 33.7 million Americans, who responded positively to the good news. Within a month of the broadcast, sales of red wine increased by 44 percent. Morley Safer was honored with a special prize from LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French champagne and luxury goods producer.
While the idea that drinking might be good for you came as a surprise to most Americans in 1991, the evidence had been around for a while; indeed, ever since the depths of Prohibition. In 1926, Raymond S. Pearl, biologist, pioneer researcher into aging, wine lover, and bon viveur, had published Alcohol and Longevity, in which he demonstrated that moderate drinkers outlived both alcoholics and abstainers. The book had been inspired by research Pearl had carried out into chicken breeding. He had decided to test the hypothesis that alcohol affected the birds’ fertility, and noted that those chickens that had been made to drink “far outlived their untreated brothers and sisters.” Moving on to humans, he examined the data from a survey made in Baltimore on tuberculosis, involving 3,084 men and 2,164 women, and found that, after disregarding other factors, those of his subjects who treated themselves with bootleg hooch also outlived the dry members of their peer group.
Pearl’s findings—that moderate drinkers lived longer—were confirmed again and again over the next seven de
cades. However, and unlike his discovery that smokers died younger, they had little impact in the sphere of public health during the same period. No matter how much evidence was heaped up in favor of booze, the federal government refused to recommend it to the people. Sadly, those most in need of learning about the life-sustaining properties of drink were the least likely to have come across the issue before it appeared on TV. Abstinence was most common among Americans “with less than a high school degree,” 51 percent of whom were dry, compared to only 20 percent of college graduates. The category who’d spent fewer years in education already had a shorter life expectancy than their better-educated peers—why hold back from helping them toward equality?
Once the health benefits of alcohol were well and truly in the public domain, California’s winemakers explored ways of keeping them there by reminding drinkers of the salutary properties of their product. Since they were compelled to warn drinkers about the dangers of DUI and FAS, might they not also warn them wine was good for their hearts? Despite the evidence in favor, they were not hopeful. The federal regulator, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF), did not allow alcohol manufacturers to make “therapeutic or curative claims” about their products. Past attempts by people in the wine trade to add positive statements to their labels had been rejected, notably in the case of Kermit Lynch, an importer, who had sought and been refused permission to quote Thomas Jefferson (“Wine from long habit has become an indispensable for my health”), Louis Pasteur (“Wine is the healthiest, most hygienic beverage known to man”), and 1 Timothy (“Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake”) on his merchandise.73
Initial attempts to incorporate quotations from or references to 60 Minutes into publicity material were rebuffed by the BATF. The Leeward Winery of Ventura, California, which summarized the program and the benefits of drinking in its March 1992 newsletter, was told to stop distributing it. Mondavi, which had added neck hangers to its bottles referring to 60 Minutes, was also ordered to desist. However, in October of the same year, Beringer Estates of St. Helena succeeded in getting approval for a neck hanger with quotes from the program, one of which was Dr. Ellison’s reference to the “tremendous problem of alcohol abuse.” Despite being given the go-ahead, Beringer decided not to proceed, fearful of inflaming the ire of federal agencies other than BATF, among whom antipathy toward alcohol was universal, no matter how much evidence had piled up in favor of moderate drinking. By 1993, studies involving a total of more than half a million subjects of “varying ages, both genders, and different economic and racial backgrounds,” adjusted “for concurrent risk factors—including diet, smoking, age, high blood pressure, and other medical conditions—and to allow for separate analyses of lifetime abstainers and ex-drinkers, drinkers who reduced their consumption for health reasons, all nondrinkers, and coronary-artery-disease-risk candidates” had “consistently found coronary artery disease risk is reduced by drinking.” Indeed, when taken together, the studies made “the risk-reduction link between alcohol and coronary artery disease close to irrefutable.”
Notwithstanding such persuasive numbers, numerous official and independent bodies in the health care industry continued to attack alcohol and lobbied for a “sin tax” on the fluid to pay for the Medicaid reforms proposed by the new Democrat administration under Presi-dentWilliam Jefferson Clinton. The liquor industry lobbied back, and both sides watched anxiously to see which one of them he would believe. Their mutual curiosity was satisfied in February 1993, when a delegation from the Wine Institute met with the president at the White House. According to a reporter at the scene: “With flash bulbs popping, Wine Institute President John A. De Luca told the forty-six-year-old Clinton about recent medical research revealing potential health benefits from moderate alcohol consumption. Clinton interrupted, noting appreciatively that he had reached the age that when all this health data comes out, I want to take another glass of wine. . . . Before Clinton could even finish his sentence, the group erupted in applause. The president grinned, beating his chest, thump, thump, thump, like a healthy heart.”
36 SINGLETONS, WINE LAKES, AND THE MOSCOW EXPRESS
The American samples that I have defined as
“problem drinkers” in my treatment studies have
reported . . . an average consumption of approximately
fifty drinks per week. In Norway and Sweden,
the audiences tended to be shocked by this
amount of drinking and argued that my samples
must consist of chronic addicted alcoholics. In
Scotland and Germany, on the other hand, the
skepticism tended to be aimed at whether these
individuals had a real problem at all because this
level was regarded as quite ordinary drinking.
—American clinician on tour in Europe in 1983
The numerous studies which had concluded that alcohol could enhance longevity all noted that its benefits were greatest for moderate drinkers. But what constituted moderate drinking? Not finishing the bottle every night? A sip of champagne on New Year’s Eve? Raymond Pearl had chosen vernacular definitions in his pioneering study: “Surely it is in accord with common usage to call a person who gets drunk a heavy drinker. Also it is common usage to call a person who drinks a little but never gets drunk a moderate drinker.” While perfectly intelligible to the average drinker, such definitions were too imprecise to issue to individuals wishing to take up alcohol or cut down their consumption. Numerical guidelines were required, so that people might count their drinks as they did their calories. Moreover, such guidelines needed to provide for the different strengths of spirits, wine, and beer. The solution to the latter problem was the standard drink, a hypothetical measure of alcohol that could be equated to a glass of wine, a beer, or a shot of spirits. The issue was addressed by governments worldwide, resulting in a variety of standards. The most generous definition was made in Japan, where a splendid twenty-eight grams of pure alcohol was chosen as being a representative drink. The meanest was poured in Austria, where a mere 5 grams counted as a measure. America came to rest in the middle: standard serving sizes of beer (12 ounces), wine (5 ounces), and spirits (1.5 ounces) were all officially defined as containing the equivalent of 14 grams of ethanol.
But how many of these standard drinks could people consume and protect their hearts without compromising their livers? In Great Britain, which had settled on an austere measure called the unit— containing only 0.8 grams of pure alcohol, equivalent to a little glass of 11 percent wine, a small measure of spirits, or a half pint of weak beer—the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) had a stab at the task of quantifying safe limits. In 1982 it settled on fifty-six units per week, or roughly nine bottles of wine, for an adult male. This wonderfully liberal allowance, construed by some as an invitation to drunkenness, was reviewed in 1987 when the RCP published A Great and Growing Evil: The Medical Consequences of Alcohol Abuse, which cut it by more than half. The new report set the maximum recommended weekly intake at twenty-one units for men, and fourteen for women .74 A member of the working party responsible for the cuts later described how they had been calculated: “Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a Committee.” Better that people were made to veer in favor of caution on the basis of false figures than be allowed to make up their own minds on the best available evidence. Although statistics suggested, and some doctors protested, that up to forty-two weekly units of alcohol were better than none at all in terms of protecting against heart attacks, the invented limits were nonetheless confirmed as government gospel.
Twenty-one units a week, although a mere three and a half bottles of wine, or only half a bottle a day, could, however, still cause problems if a drinker decided to knock it all back at once. Many tried: Britons did not consume alcohol at a uniform rate—they tended to drink most at the end of a working week, and (unlike their a
ncestors) very little on Monday mornings. On their weekend sprees they clogged up the country’s emergency wards to have their stomachs pumped, their bones set, their burns treated, and their cuts stitched. This style of drinking was particularly common in northeast England, where the principal function of alcohol was considered to be to produce drunkenness. The culture of the age and the place was reflected in the pages of Viz, a Newcastle-based adult comic, whose readers competed in its letters columns as to which of them had wasted most of their pay on booze.
Curious to relate, the episodic style of drinking that was commonplace in Newcastle had not been considered as a factor in determining safe limits until the 1990s, when health care professionals and statisticians decided to look at drinking occasions, and at people’s reasons for drinking, as opposed to weekly or annual averages. They found that in the real world, a third of the people might drink two-thirds of the alcohol in one country, whereas in another, two-thirds drank seven-tenths—on Friday and Saturday nights. In extreme cases, such as the Feria de San Fermín in Pamplona, the scene for Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises, almost the whole town, and people from miles around, got drunk for an entire week every July. Such sporadic excess was labeled binge drinking, and the concept of safe limits was modified to take account of the phenomenon.