by Jason Vale
Depress your entire central nervous system.
Undermine your courage, confidence and self-respect.
Destroy your brain cells.
Break down the immune system making you less resistant to all kinds of disease.
Interfere with the body’s ability to absorb calcium, resulting in bones that are weaker, softer and more brittle.
Distort eyesight, making it difficult to adjust to different light.
Diminish your ability to distinguish between sounds and perceive their direction.
Slur your speech.
Dull your sense of taste and smell.
Damage the lining of the throat.
Weaken the heart muscle and its ability to pump blood efficiently through the body.
Inhibit the production of white and red blood cells.
Weaken muscles.
Destroy the stomach lining.
Irritate the lining of the intestines, which in turn can cause ulcers, cancer, nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, sweating, loss of appetite and loss of the ability to process nutrients and vitamins.
Overwork the liver, kidneys and pancreas.
Cause diabetes.
Cause obesity.
In short, how can anything which is known to damage every single organ in the human body be good for you in any way, shape or form? The crazy thing is that all this information is common knowledge to the same experts who are telling us that drinking is good for us. In fact alcohol is just as toxic to the human body as heroin. Let me repeat that as it is not a very well known fact. Alcohol is just as toxic as heroin. Are they going to tell us that heroin is good for us? Inebriation is called intoxication for a reason.
Alcohol is just as toxic as heroin.
They even talk about sensible drinking limits. Sensible? How would you feel if they said that it wasn’t sensible to get hooked and dependent on heroin but in small amounts it was sensible? Would you believe them? What really gets my goat is that they even brainwash us into thinking that people who drink small quantities are healthier than non-drinkers. This is rubbish, a huge whopper of a lie, but it’s been repeated for so long that even the medical profession thinks it’s true. They argue that alcohol can help to prevent blood clotting and, yes, alcohol does decrease the production of blood clotting agents. However, what they fail to tell us is that the blood is meant to clot otherwise we could suffer uncontrolled bleeding. Do you think that someone who takes heroin in small amounts is healthier than a non-heroin addict? Do you think that a body with small, regular amounts of poison is healthier than one that hasn’t? There is no such thing as sensible drinking anyway. Have you ever seen anyone acting and talking sensibly when intoxicated? It’s a contradiction in terms.
‘But surely, if you drink for social reasons, then a little of what you fancy doesn’t do you any harm, does it?’ That is the same as saying, ‘There is no harm in jumping into quicksand as long as you only go in up to your waist.’ The nature of both is to drag you in one direction … down. The only difference between the two is that one is quick and obvious, the other relatively slow and, to most, very subtle. There is no such thing as sensible drug taking. The only reason many doctors claim that alcohol is good for you and that the consumption of the drug is not an addiction is probably because they are hooked themselves. Virtually all doctors in the UK drink alcohol. I am not criticising them for this; they are in exactly the same trap that I found myself in and, because they cannot see it for themselves, they assume that there is no danger in taking alcohol in small doses. That is fine I guess because they may really have no idea that they are not in control, but to suggest that alcohol is actually good for you is nothing less than scandalous.
Why aren’t we warned about alcohol before we start taking it? Why aren’t there adverts letting everybody know that alcohol is a highly addictive drug with severe mental and physical side effects? Like everything else in this book, I want you to make up your own mind; but, remember, some years ago we were told that smoking was good for us.
Just because the body is clever enough to build up a tolerance to this poison doesn’t alter the fact that alcohol is a powerful poison and a highly addictive drug. When you wake up after drinking alcohol do you feel good? When you see people vomiting in the street do they look healthier than someone who doesn’t drink? ‘Yes, but surely a couple of glasses of red wine a day, for example, can be good for you?’ No it can’t! The nature of any drug is to take more and more. Therefore when the medical profession makes statements like: ‘A small number of units of alcohol a day is good for you but when you exceed our guidelines it becomes harmful,’ they give the impression that people can control their intake. Surely they realise that we know just whose interests these statistics are serving? It certainly isn’t the alcohol addict. I have already said that this is a fallacy as the drug always controls its victim, whether the victim realises it or not. The drinker regularly has to exercise resolve in order not to increase the intake. It only takes a very bad situation to occur in their lives and their resolve ends and the drinking increases. The more alcohol they take, the further down they go; the quicker they descend, the more they take. They end up in a downward spiral.
Sensible limits for alcohol vary throughout the world. Do people in the US have different insides from us? Can the constitution of a Scandinavian cope better with fewer units of alcohol? That is what we are led to believe when we compare the recommended daily intake of units around the world. There is only one safe limit for any drug that will damage and destroy you physically, mentally and emotionally, and that limit is the same level recognised throughout the world for every other mind-altering drug. No units at all.
In 1985, £100 million was spent treating alcohol related diseases in the UK. That sounds healthy doesn’t it? I am not highlighting these health statistics to scare you into stopping because that rarely, if ever, works. I remember when I was drinking heavily, my doctor told me that my liver would pack up by the time I was thirty, so the first thing I did was to have a drink to calm my nerves. Little did I know at the time that it was absolutely not failing to calm me down. It was, in fact, doing the complete opposite. The reason for quoting these statistics is to underline the self-delusion that is involved in drinking and to help you see the product for what it actually is.
Everything I have just stated simply concerns the alcohol itself. I haven’t even mentioned all the chemicals used to preserve it to make it appear drinkable. The chemicals used are too numerous to mention, but surely they cannot be good for us.
We are also told that if the damage is already done, then it is too late. What is? Is it ever too late to stop putting a poison into your body? Is it ever too late to cure yourself of a disease? It is certainly never too late to gain control of your life. The human body is, without doubt, a highly efficient survival machine programmed to keep you alive. When you stop putting a poison like alcohol into your body, it literally breathes a sigh of relief. No matter how long you have been drinking, when you stop your body will start to repair immediately. The body can do one of two things when a poison enters the system: either it can store it or it can get rid of it. It cannot store alcohol as, if it did, you would die, so it must get rid of it. The body wants to expel alcohol and will do so successfully as long as you don’t put any back, which brings me to another part of the alcohol brainwashing process. Your body is incapable of craving alcohol no matter how long you’ve been drinking or your intake. Your mind and only your mind craves the benefits it believes alcohol offers. A craving is nothing more than an internal expression of the way you perceive a product; perceive it for what it really is and you will not have the craving.
When you stop putting a poison like alcohol into your body, it literally breathes a sigh of relief.
I have mentioned that the physical and psychological slavery of drug addiction is bad enough for the victims themselves but there is one area that is rarely mentioned or addressed. It is the people who suffer daily from the very harmful effec
ts of …
Passive Drinking
We are always being told about the effects of passive smoking and frequently we hear about the crimes committed by heroin addicts, the houses broken into so they can fund their habit and the drug related shootings. But what about the daily misery that many people suffer as a result of passive drinking?
The late Roy Castle highlighted the effects of passive smoking. He contracted lung cancer as a direct result of other people’s smoke. I am here to highlight the effects of a new phenomenon, one which causes more harm than passive smoking ever has done or ever will do and it’s passive drinking. The sad truth is that there is hardly a single person who hasn’t suffered or isn’t suffering right now from the very dangerous consequences of passive drinking. This is the harm caused to someone as a direct result of another’s drinking.
We often judge the person who drinks from morning till night on the harm they inflict on their family and others around them. There are support groups set up for the families who fall victim to passive drinking; the families who live with what society has labelled ‘an alcoholic.’ However, what we often fail to realise is the effect that all drinking has on other people. This includes the beatings, divorces, violence, neglect, the emotional as well as the physical hurt, sexual abuse, suicides, murders, stabbings, mood swings, outbursts, arguments, unwanted pregnancies, financial ruin, not to mention the pain, anguish and misery all caused by the effects of passive drinking which are second to none.
I once treated a young man for alcohol addiction. He had also been sold the idea that he was an alcoholic and was desperate to stop drinking. One of his reasons for wanting to quit was that he had beaten up his own father while under the influence only a few weeks earlier. He could hardly recall the incident and clearly would never have done it had he not been drinking. The reason for this was that it just wasn’t him. He had been ‘under the influence’ of something that was controlling what he did and what he said. He was due to appear in court three days before Christmas. His father was not drinking but had suffered at the hands of somebody who had been – his own son. Not only had he suffered the physical harm but also the emotional hurt caused by his child because he was a victim of passive drinking.
A teenage boy woke up to find his best friend lying next to him in a pool of blood. He had stabbed him the night before but could not recall a thing. The boy was just eighteen at the time and had only been on a lads’ night out. He blacked out because of the alcohol and is now serving a life sentence for murder. Was the murder drug related or was it even murder? Did he know what he was doing? He was not in control of mind or body as he was under the influence. Is this a true story? Yes. Is this a one off accident? No. Incidents like this are happening every day all over the world.
How many other people are now suffering from the effects of passive drinking because of this one incident caused directly by alcohol? First there are the families of both victims. The dead teenage boy and the boy who killed him are also victims. Their families’ grief, sorrow and anger will be there every day until the day they die. The friends who have lost their companions and the people who lost their staff or colleagues also suffer. The paramedic who found the teenager’s dead body would have to live with that image for the rest of his life and the boy who committed the ‘murder’ will suffer every day for the rest of his life. He will wake up each morning having lost his best friend and knowing that he killed him. Then there is the cost to the state of keeping him in an overcrowded prison for a crime he can’t even remember committing. All this pain and suffering came about as a result of two boys wanting a fun night out. What possible harm could that do?
You may think that this is a very dramatic example and argue that in such situations there are many other factors, like the boy’s personality, for example. Some people believe that you have to be ‘that way inclined’ in the first place; that you cannot simply blame such behaviour on alcohol. Yes you can. If someone commits a crime while on crack cocaine or heroin, people immediately say it’s because of the drug and the perpetrators are offered help. However, if it’s alcohol they get a prison sentence.
When somebody on LSD jumps from a roof believing they can fly, do we assume that it is in their nature to jump from roofs or is it more likely to have resulted from taking the drug? I have said and done many things that I would never normally do when ‘under the influence’ and so has every single person who has ever drunk alcohol. That is the nature of the beast. When you say things you would never normally say or do things that you would never normally do as a result of alcohol, inevitably, somebody close will suffer the effects of passive drinking. It is difficult to know just how many people are affected by this phenomenon.
Sarah Collins suffered so much from passive drinking that she took her own life because of it. Sarah is the unfortunate mother who committed suicide three years after a wine drinking session ended with the death of her daughter. She never recovered from the guilt of her six-year-old daughter drinking the wine that killed her. Stacey (her daughter) had so much alcohol in her body that her blood alcohol level was more than twice the drink-drive limit. This may sound shocking; you may even find yourself judging Sarah for what she did, but I was given wine with a meal as a child. In France it’s seen as normal to give children a little taste of wine with dinner, albeit watered down. Sarah who was ‘under the influence’ at the time, was simply not aware that Stacey was going into the kitchen every five minutes to have some more wine, copying her mother, as children do.
The sad reality is that little Stacey would have suffered from the effects of alcohol long before she even took that first fatal drink. People are fooled into thinking that it’s only alcoholics who neglect their families and cause heartache. However, the truth is that everybody who has ever drunk alcohol has caused other people either physical or emotional harm as a direct result of their drinking. Most of the time they will not even be aware of the distress they have caused but, in each case, the third party has fallen victim to passive drinking.
Children suffer all the time from the effects of passive drinking. They are frequently left to wait in the car with a Coke and straw while the adults go into the building for grown-ups only. They suffer the embarrassment of seeing their parents get overemotional, falling over or being sick. They see them getting loud, argumentative, aggressive or abusive to each other or towards them. They feel upset as they lie in bed at night, listening to alcohol fuelled rows or hearing the sound of physical abuse; memories that can affect their entire lives. There are the feelings of neglect and hurt when they cannot communicate properly with their drunken parents. They may desperately wish that they would return to normal so that they could talk to them and not to these ‘other people’ who they wish would go away. Children frequently suffer verbal abuse as a result of a parent’s hangover and wonder what they have done to cause it. They miss outings because their parents have been drinking or have run out of money because of the cost of taking their regular drug.
Children suffer all the time from the effects of passive drinking.
All children hate seeing their parents drinking, I know I did. There is nothing more embarrassing and upsetting to a child than their mother or father drunk. If you did manage to talk to your parents in their drug induced state, then you might either have them telling you how much they love you every two seconds or have them shouting abuse, blaming you for everything that has ever gone wrong in their lives. What’s wrong with the first scenario? What is wrong with somebody letting you know how much they love you? If you have been there you will know exactly what is wrong with it; they are not telling you they love you because it’s not really them. They are under the influence of a drug. This is not true affection, it’s the drink talking and it’s hurtful and embarrassing.
The majority of reported child abuse cases are directly related to alcohol. If a child has a parent on whom they depend and that parent is dependent on alcohol, then who can that child depend on? Obviously it’s not just
the children who suffer from passive drinking; the whole family feels the physical, mental and financial burden of having an addict in the family. These are just examples of people who suffer inside the home; there are many other people who are affected by passive drinking. Fifty per cent of all adult pedestrians killed in road accidents are twice over the drink-drive limit. That’s not the driver, it’s the pedestrian. The driver who knocks them down has to suffer for the rest of his or her life, blaming himself and desperately wondering what could have been done to avoid the pedestrian. They spend a lifetime suffering terrible guilt and regret even though they were not to blame. The accident and emergency staff suffer, not only through treating the patients who have been injured as a direct result of alcohol but also from the physical and mental abuse they receive from drunk patients who are the very people they are trying to help. Many hospitals now find it necessary to recruit extra security on Friday and Saturday nights. Ninety-eight per cent of physical abuse aimed at doctors and nurses is alcohol fuelled and the police also have to cope with an extra workload at weekends as a result of alcohol related incidents.
Then there are the victims of drunk drivers who suffer daily because of the effects of passive drinking. As well as the person injured or killed outright, families, friends and colleagues will be affected for the rest of their lives because of the tragedy. Then of course there are the other victims, the drivers themselves. The driver may wake up night after night in a cold sweat, reliving the moment over and over again and wishing every day that they could just turn back the clock.