by Jason Vale
If someone drinks eight pints in the pub, they are generally considered to be a social drinker. If a businessman downs half a bottle of Scotch every night, he is considered an alcoholic. If somebody downs half a bottle of wine with lunch, nobody says a word but if someone is lying on a bench drinking a can of beer, they have a problem. Most drinkers judge other drinkers. Why? To make themselves feel better of course. I used to say things like, ‘Have you noticed how much so and so is drinking at the moment? She downed two bottles of wine by herself last night. I think she might have a problem.’ But another time I would say, ‘Do you know what I am going to do tonight? I’m going to run a nice hot bath, crack open a good bottle of wine and relax with a book.’ If I had said that I was going home to drink a bottle of wine by myself for the sake of it, that would have sounded as if I had a problem but, by making it sound good, I could justify my intake of the drug. That is what all drug addicts do: they try to justify their own intake. Haven’t you judged people because they happen to be drinking at a different time to what is considered acceptable? Have you ever criticised someone else for drinking too much? The drinker’s attitude is often ‘holier than thou.’
I have said that I drank to be sociable but what is sociable about drinking alcohol? Being sociable means interacting. How can you possibly interact with someone who has lost control of their senses? How can drinking alcohol increase your ability to socialise? It can’t, it’s yet another lie. The lie, or illusion, is created by the fact that you happen to be socialising while having a drink, consequently you believe that the drinking is sociable.
Not long after I’d stopped drinking I went to a place called Aberdovey in Wales, for a water-skiing weekend with friends. On the first night we all went to the pub and I was asked what my ‘poison’ was. I replied that I would like a pineapple juice and lemonade. The person buying the round responded by saying, ‘No, come on, what are you having really?’ I thought that the last thing I wanted was to get into a discussion about not drinking, so I simply said that I was driving. That still wasn’t good enough, as my friend said that he was also driving and we could all leave our cars where they were and jump into the minibus they had ordered to take us back to the hotel. I then explained that I wanted to start off with a soft drink. Everybody then started to comment and ask what I intended to have after that. In the end I was forced to tell them that I didn’t drink alcohol any more. I really don’t know what reaction people get from their heterosexual friends when they tell them they are gay but I can only imagine that it is similar to telling people that you have stopped drinking. I had absolutely no idea how much interest and disbelief that this ‘admission’ would cause; I felt as though I had just come out.
Inevitably the first question was, ‘Oh I didn’t realise that you had a drink problem – are you an alcoholic?’ The question appears obvious as we have been conditioned to believe that if you stop drinking for good it can only mean one thing: you have lost control and are an alcoholic. This question is ridiculous when you analyse it. I don’t drink any more, so how could I have a drink problem? The irony was that they were drinking alcohol (taking the drug) while asking me if I had a drink problem. You would think it odd if a heroin addict took heroin in front of you, offered you some and because you refused, commented, ‘I didn’t realise that you had a problem with heroin – are you a heroinoholic?’ How absurd would that be? Who would you, or in fact anybody, think had the problem? You really don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work it out do you?
My friends in Aberdovey reacted by saying things like, ‘Come on you boring bastard, what’s the matter with you, you antisocial git?,’ ‘Go on, let your hair down, we are here to have fun’ and so it went on.
Just when did I become boring? At what point had I become antisocial? When did I say that I wasn’t going to have fun? Just before they asked me what I wanted to drink, we were in the same place, talking, having a laugh and being sociable, so what had changed from the moment that I said that I didn’t drink alcohol? I was still the same person; I was happy, not boring and being sociable because I was out with people. The only thing that had changed was that the drinkers could no longer take their drug without having to think about what they were doing as I was no longer a co-conspirator. Hardly anybody who takes alcohol thinks about it when they are in a room full of people taking the same drug. They are, after all, telling the same lies and believing them. I realised something that night that I had never understood until that point.
When I smoked and saw people around me who had stopped, I would envy them because I wanted to be like them. I knew that all smokers would love to stop given the choice and that all smokers envied non-smokers but I never thought that would apply to alcohol. Even when I was drinking and saw people who had given up or stopped for a while, I never envied them; in fact, there was a part of my brainwashed mind that actually felt sorry for them. I was, after all, suffering from the delusion that they were missing out. The real problem was that they were too. That is why I didn’t envy these people when I was drinking; they were miserable and depressed because they couldn’t drink. They were pining for a drink and feeling deprived. Why on earth would you envy people like that? There is nothing to envy about feeling miserable, uptight and depressed. As this is the image we have of people who don’t drink, no wonder we are scared of giving up. Unlike smoking, of whom there are now literally millions of ex-smokers who don’t miss cigarettes, people who stop drinking still feel as though they have made a sacrifice.
However, there I was, in a pub of all places, being sociable, laughing, talking, interacting, dancing, having a good time, not moaning because I didn’t have a drink but actually feeling elated because I didn’t have to drink any more. I never realised that this presented a totally new image of me. This was why they started to envy me as they began to realise that I was still being sociable and doing everything I had before except drinking, and that I was not being a bore.
When you take a drug of any kind and somebody else isn’t, you start to question why you need it and they don’t, especially when they are happy without it. These friends started by saying I was unsociable, boring and had a drink problem but finished by questioning their own drinking habits.
I digress slightly. I will return to ‘other drinkers’ in a later chapter. The point I am making here is that there is no such thing as ‘sociable drinking.’ When alcohol takes effect, you cease to be sociable, instantly. Being sociable means interacting with others and if you are doing this without consuming alcohol, you are still being sociable. What you shove down your throat doesn’t make you sociable. The sociable aspect of alcohol is just another fallacy.
The sad reality is that a world in which alcohol is drunk by the vast majority of people would be a world of beatings, rapes, violence, arguments, obnoxiousness and overemotional behaviour. It would be a world of stress where true courage and confidence has been lost in a bottle or two; a world of suicides, murders and muggings. It would be a world of family hardship and abject poverty. That is what the world would look like if the majority of people drank alcohol. How do I know? Because it does.
I mentioned earlier in this chapter that there is always a price to pay for drinking alcohol, whether it’s physical, psychological, social or emotional, but what about the financial cost? Have you ever really worked out how much money you will spend because you are hooked on the stuff? I know I never did but it is worth looking at, as it’s anything but a …
Liquid Asset
This fact will blow your mind, I know it did mine. The average drinker will spend roughly £100,000 on alcohol in their lifetime. Let me just repeat that as it is a bit of an eye opener. ‘The average drinker will spend one hundred thousand pounds on alcohol in their lifetime.’ That’s a lot of money. Sometimes in my private consultations drinkers will say to me that they are not worried about the money, but why aren’t we worried? Drug addicts of any kind constantly delude themselves. We can even fool ourselves into thinking that we have sav
ed money on alcohol. For example, when you buy duty-free alcohol, you always think, ‘What a result, I’ve saved thirty quid.’ We are always talking about a saving and never an expense. How on earth have you saved money when you have just spent £30? It is still £30 more than a non-drinker spends. This is only an average figure; for some it will be a lot more.
I used to get through sixteen pints of lager a day at one stage; I was actually spending more on alcohol per day than I was being paid to work at the time. I would always wake up broke on a Monday morning. I would then have to sub some of my wages to pay for the next fix of my drug. I never saw it this way at the time; I was just a young lad who liked a beer and what was wrong with that? My wages at the end of the week were always pretty thin, as I had already drunk most of them the week before but when the weekend arrived it was always time to let my hair down and have a drink.
The situation changed slightly when I got a more professional job. I had more responsibilities so I had no choice but to control my intake. I was never really in control but felt as though I was. I wasn’t spending more than my wages on alcohol any more (a major achievement) and was now a ‘normal’ drinker. I was spending as ‘little’ as everybody else. However, I never realised just how much drinkers have to pay in real terms to get their drug.
There is the direct financial cost that I mentioned, of course, but what about all the additional expense nobody ever thinks about that accompanies a dependency on alcohol? First there are the taxi fares. One of the biggest joys of being free is being able to drive my car whenever I choose; to go anywhere without having to worry about how or when I will arrive home. I used to pay good money every month for my car, yet during my leisure time I couldn’t drive it because I was hooked on alcohol. I think back now on all those cold nights standing outside pubs and clubs drunkenly waiting for a cab. It would cost me a fortune to get home and the crazy thing was that I was paying for a car to sit my house. What about the times too when a cab driver refuses to take you home because you might be sick in his car and leaves you stranded? The average drinker will spend roughly £18,000, yes, eighteen thousand pounds, on taxis in their lifetime as a direct result of drinking.
Even before you get into the taxi, you may have the additional expense of buying food, or stuff that they tell you is food. As we all know, alcohol came first and kebabs second. The only reason that I would seek out a curry or kebab house with a restaurant at the back was simply to obtain more alcohol after hours. Again, the food is an additional expense. Next, you have the expense of losing money in your drunken state, possibly down the back of the seat in the taxi. You wake up in the morning with your head pounding away as blood is trying to pump through your dehydrated brain so you have to buy some more drugs to counter the effect of the drug alcohol; yet more expense. In addition, occasionally there is the cost of the flowers and cards to apologise for behaving like a complete idiot. Then you have the major expense of losing time at work. In the UK there are now eight to fourteen million working days lost each year as a direct result of alcohol. For some, there are repair bills either to their home where they have punched holes in doors and smashed things in the house or for damage to other’s property. For some, it’s the cost of losing their licence, not to mention the possibility of prison, or the fines for being drunk and disorderly. Many others suffer the huge financial cost of losing their jobs due to alcohol. The reality is that the financial cost seen in black and white is quite phenomenal.
I never really thought about the money because alcohol was my liquid asset and worth every penny, or so I thought. However, it was never an asset. Far from it, in fact. I was paying good money to be mentally and physically abused by a product that, in real terms, did absolutely nothing for me. It was all just a clever confidence trick. Just because millions of people are paying through the nose for something they believe to be genuinely beneficial, doesn’t mean it is. Some 99 per cent of the population once believed the world was flat – were they wrong? Were they lying to other people by telling them that the world was flat? The answer is no. The world does appear to be flat. Even when you are flying around it your perception is still that you are flying in a straight line, isn’t it? I have never been into space to check for myself that the earth is round but we now know for certain that it, is but doesn’t this go completely against our own perception? In order to see the truth we have to move our minds beyond the appearance of something. Once almost everyone thought the earth was flat, except for one or two people. Christopher Columbus announced he was going to sail around the world and everybody thought he was insane. How can you possibly sail around something that is flat? Could he not see for himself the line in the distance that was the edge of the earth? Everybody else could easily see it, why couldn’t he? People like Columbus and Galileo moved beyond the accepted thinking and opened their minds. As a result they got to explore and literally expand their horizons. They viewed things from a different perspective. The flat earth was just an illusion.
This book is all about changing your perceptions so you can see the truth. Alcohol does absolutely nothing for you at all. It only appears to give courage, happiness, confidence, relaxation and stress relief. But it’s all an illusion. Those who open their minds and see it clearly can really explore who they are and expand their horizons. Columbus experienced a life that many were too frightened to pursue as they were afraid of falling off the edge. The only thing stopping those people was their false perception.
Even our government tells us that alcohol is good for us. Why do they keep perpetuating this blatant lie? Maybe it is because they are one of the biggest drug dealers in this country, if not the biggest! They are always talking about waging war on the drug pushers, yet not only do they allow alcohol to be advertised but they make a £8.5 billion profit (HMRC 2009) every year from a drug which is known to kill 9,000 people each year in the UK alone. I once watched a documentary which stated that half a million pounds is spent on alcohol each Saturday night in Newcastle alone. That really is something else!
As I’ve already mentioned, there are some people who are so brainwashed that they will spend hundreds or sometimes thousands of pounds on a bottle of wine. What plonkers (pun intended)! Sometimes I would justify the amount I spent on drink because I believed the biggest lie of all about alcohol which is that …
A Little of What You Fancy Does You Good
This is without any doubt the biggest lie about alcohol. It’s good for you!
Who tells us that alcohol is good for us? ‘Experts’ who are alcohol addicts themselves. But what does your body tell you? Wild animals have a very clever device to detect the difference between food and poison. It’s their senses. We also have these incredibly clever devices. We do not need somebody with ‘qualifications’ to tell us what is poisonous; our senses will do that. It has only recently been recognised that smoking is incredibly harmful to the human body but a few years back the experts were telling us that smoking was good for us. It was usually these experts who were smokers themselves and that included many doctors. Perhaps they were attempting to justify their own intake of the drug?
When someone who has never smoked lights up a cigarette for the first time, they cough, splutter and can even be physically sick. What other health warning do you need? It is exactly the same with alcohol. When you had your first alcoholic drink how did your mind and body react? Didn’t it make you feel physically and mentally sick? That is because it is a poison. Alcohol is a poison that destroys the entire central nervous system and increases blood pressure. It also destroys brain cells. Did you know that? Maybe you did, but have forgotten! When you drink alcohol regularly you literally pound the brain. It is rather like going into a boxing ring every weekend and deliberately hitting yourself on the head over and over again.
Is it good for you to destroy brain cells? Of course it isn’t; the brain controls everything in your body and it tells your body how to work. If the brain cannot tell it how to work it will become sick. A nurse friend
of mine told me that she was once present at a ‘commando operation’ on a man who had a tumour on the side of his face. It had spread so much that they had to remove virtually all the side of his face plus part of his head. This exposed his brain during the operation. The surgeon said that the man was obviously a heavy drinker and my friend asked how he knew. He asked her to look at its size which was a lot smaller than it should be. This, he informed her, was a direct result of the patient’s drinking. So, alcohol actually shrinks the brain.
The experts tell us that alcohol is dangerous on the one hand but that, in small doses, it can be good for people over the age of forty. How did they come up with this? We hear this kind of nonsense all the time yet we never really question it. Why? Because it has been put across by the so-called experts. But does it make any sense at all? They say that alcohol can lower blood pressure and that it can also increase blood pressure. It either does one or the other. How can it do both?
Alcohol kills over 9,000 people a year in the UK, what is healthy about that? They say that the health gains are for people over forty who may be protected against heart disease yet over 80 per cent of people over the age of forty-five drink alcohol and heart disease is still the number one killer in the UK. If alcohol helped protect against heart disease, as is claimed, then we should be the healthiest nation in the world and our instances of heart disease should be almost zero. Kevin Lloyd, who played ‘Tosh’ in the television series ‘The Bill,’ died of heart failure, along with hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, because of the alcohol he consumed. It is not good for you and, to say that it is, is a blatant lie. You don’t need to take my word for it either, just look at the statistics. In the UK, 70,000 die each year from coronary heart disease. Add that statistic to the other effects of alcohol, which has been medically proved to: