Benjamin Franklin was right: “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Well said. Beer, of one sort or another, has been a basic food staple of humanity since the dawn of civilization. Beer, together with bread, has been the nutritional fuel of civilized people for millennia. Beer and bread were the essential diet of Western humanity for centuries.
Our wise forebears understood something that certain snippy schoolmarms cannot grasp: beer is a food! There are only four substances in nature that the human body can use as fuel: protein, fat, carbohydrates. . . and alcohol. The witless notion that alcohol is a drug like cocaine or opium or nicotine, and therefore should be burdened with “sin taxes,” is the brainchild of the New Prohibitionists. Beer is, in truth, a fat-free amber beverage containing health-enhancing substances. It can be demonstrated that beer is better for you than bacon, ice cream, or cheeseburgers. The modern American diet tends to gum-up the human circulatory system. Beer, to its everlasting credit, works to cleanse our arteries while imparting sensations of well-being.
In 1992 the American Journal of Epidemiology published a study by a group of researchers who sought to prove that drinking alcohol causes heart attacks. After much effort, they concluded that “contrary to previous speculation, alcohol consumption may acutely reduce coronary heart disease risk.” The following year the same publication published another study that revealed the fact that moderate and heavy consumers of alcohol maintained better mobility in old age than did non-drinkers. Tobacco use and a couch-potato lifestyle were the worst immobilizers. A 1994 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association made crystal clear that drinking a few beers is the most pleasant way to help prevent a heart attack. Beer consumption generates higher levels of tissue-type plasminogen activator, which is very heart-friendly.
Dozens of studies support the fact that drinkers enjoy better long-term health than non-drinkers and it’s easy to see why. Heart disease causes half of all deaths in America each year. Anything that would diminish heart disease would greatly reduce these deaths. So raise a glass of healthful frothy beer, increase your levels of tissue-type plasminogen activator and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and relax. One math genius calculated that if Americans were deprived of all alcohol an additional 85,000 Americans would die each year from heart disease. That’s over twice the number of deaths attributed to alcohol abuse. To keep these numbers in perspective you should know that each year about 300,000 Americans die from fat, carbohydrate and protein abuse: they eat themselves to death.
Mankind’s ancient accommodation to alcohol took a turn for the worse in the late 1800s when the first automobiles appeared on public roads. The invention of technologies that would allow agents of government to determine the blood alcohol content of automobile operators kicked off a long and deceitful debate over just how much drink it takes to render a driver unfit to drive. The current standard for intoxication is a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.10 percent. This standard is written into law in 49 states. In California, the standard is 0.08 percent. There is a movement afoot to lower the standard to 0.08 percent everywhere in America. To promote this cause, the anti-alcohol do-gooders are using frightening and false statistics. We are told that 41 percent of 42,000 annual automobile crash fatalities were “alcohol related.” This statement has no place in the driver-intoxication debate unless it means that 41 percent of the drivers in these 42,000 crashes were drunk; but it doesn’t mean that. The anti-drink schoolmarms are not above using falsehood to promote their crusade.
Here’s the truth: only 19 percent of the drivers in those 42,000 crashes had a blood alcohol content above 0.10 percent, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The bogus stats used by the schoolmarms include any blood alcohol content above 0.01 percent, or a mere one-tenth of the amount that the law considers the threshold of intoxication. The full mendacity of the temperance lobby is revealed when we discover that their statistics include those cases where a stone-cold sober motorist accidentally struck a drunken pedestrian or a bicyclist full of booze. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, many cyclists and fully a third of the pedestrians who are killed by motor cars were legally drunk. These statistics have no proper place in any honest debate about drinking and driving.
After the walking and peddling drunks are removed from consideration, only 6.2 percent of drivers involved in fatal accidents had a blood alcohol content below 0.10 percent. Among this group of light drinkers, those with higher blood alcohol levels did not cause more fatalities than those drivers with lower blood alcohol levels: fatalities were spread pretty evenly across the entire range of blood alcohol content. This suggests that lowering the legal standard to 0.08 percent would criminalize a legion of responsible social drinkers for no reason other than to put a little fear into the hearts of a few reckless boozehounds. That’s a lousy use of legislation. Experience has demonstrated that the sort of person who would drive a motor vehicle while skunked is pretty much immune to threats or reason. Those motorists whose car-handling ability is so poor as to attract the attention of the police usually have blood alcohol levels well above the current legal standard of 0.10 percent, so lowering the legal limit would do nothing to ensnare more of these reckless drunks. The 1996 National Roadside Survey revealed that 13 percent of drivers tested had a BAC of between zero and 0.099 percent. This is the group that accounts for only 6.2 percent of fatal accidents. That’s not a bad record. Perhaps a cold frothy stein of healthful nutritious beer helped them to relax and drive better. (I am not recommending this.)
Behold the Schoolmarms
Preeminent among our contemporary American neo-prohibitionists is a group calling itself
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). These
angry moms have a national website and a host of
state-based websites whereon they spend a
prodigious amount of energy fretting about blood
alcohol concentrations far below the legal definition
of intoxication and well down into the range where
there is no correlation between alcohol consumption
and vehicular accidents. They are, in essence, a
temperance union, a band of latter-day Carrie Nations
who have traded in their hatchets for computer
keyboards.
The national MADD website is a haphazard collection of uncritically accepted statistical nonsequiturs blended with weird eugenic footnotes. Where else would we be told that “for Native Americans, nearly 90 percent of all pedestrian fatalities are alcohol-related”? Or that “Traffic deaths [of Native Americans] account for a larger portion of total injury deaths than for any other group.” How about this tidbit: “For Native Americans, more than 50 percent of child pedestrian fatalities (6-15 years old) are also alcohol-related and half of those fatalities involve children who have been drinking.” Wow, that’s certainly not how the MADD moms are raising their children.
How about these shocking MADD-mom factoids:
“Of the students who had ridden a motorcycle in the past year, Hispanic students were less likely to have worn a helmet than White students.” Are Hispanics just stupid or are they carefree, independent and high-spirited? The moms don’t venture a guess.
“Hispanic drivers are more likely than White or African American drivers to consume more alcohol more frequently.” And “Hispanics were shown to be more likely than Whites to drive with blood alcohol concentration levels over .05, according to the 1996 National Roadside Survey.” So what? Point-zero-five is nowhere near the legal threshold of intoxication. The fact that the Hispanic population has a younger average age than the population of white folks goes a long way toward explaining why they behave more like young people, but the moms are mum on this point.
“In terms of overall mortality rates, rates of death due to motor vehicle crashes are higher among Hispanics than among Whites and African Americans.” Again, so what? This is just another weird hanging factoid. Alcohol is not mentioned. Comparing the white and Hispanic populations is problematic because the average age of the white population is higher than the average age of Hispanics. Younger drivers tend, as a group, to be a reckless lot. Blacks, as a group, also have a lower average age than whites. Could it be that younger Hispanics spurn seatbelts in the same carefree spirit that they spurn motorcycle helmets?
“Hispanic and White students were more likely than African American students to drive a car after drinking alcohol.” Could it be that black urban students are less likely to own a car than other students in other campus environments? If you don’t have a car, then you are less likely to drive one, drunk or sober. Perhaps blacks are more inclined to drink at home, while other groups prefer to drive to bars or gatherings.
“The number of Hispanics on the road at night has increased, their amount of drinking has increased, and blood alcohol concentrations are higher.” Warning from MADD: be on the lookout for hopped-up night-riding Hispanics! Actually, all these “symptoms” might suggest that Hispanics are enjoying a new-found prosperity and mobility, as we shall see.
Our black countrymen also take a pretty good shellacking from the severe and sober moms:
“Despite the fact that they are somewhat over-involved in alcohol-related crashes, when asked about their drinking and driving, African Americans participating in telephone surveys are less likely to report that they drive after drinking too much.” In other words, blacks are more likely to lie to snoopy strangers who pester them with telephone surveys at dinner time.
“African American and Hispanic male teenagers (aged 13-19) also had substantially higher death rates than white or female teenagers when considering miles traveled.” A recent study also suggests that blacks are more inclined to speed. Do Hispanics also tend to speed? Do they spurn seat belts? What has any of this got to do with the debate over driver intoxication? If each ethnic group has a different average age as well as its own sense of caution, and if women are more cautious than men within each ethnic group, then the role of alcohol in accidents may be secondary to the ethnic and gender predispositions of those motorists with blood alcohol contents below 0.10 percent.
“According to a NHTSA national survey, observed seat belt use among African Americans is more then 10 percentage points lower than the average.” Those reckless black folks!
“Findings from the National Roadside Surveys for 1973, 1986, and 1996 show that in each year African Americans were more likely than Whites to have blood alcohol levels above .05 and .10.” So black culture has a more relaxed attitude about alcohol consumption and blacks are less likely to use seat belts. This means that blacks, as a group, are more of a threat to themselves and to society at blood alcohol concentrations above 0.10 percent. It’s an interesting factoid, but it doesn’t justify lowering the legal limit to 0.08 percent.
“Between 1989 and 1993, almost three times as many African Americans as white children aged 5-12 died in motor vehicle crashes when rates were calculated on the basis of miles traveled.” This is to be expected. If blacks, as a group, get drunk more often, speed more often, and use safety devices such as seat belts less often, then their children will die more often. Changing the legal alcohol limit won’t change such behavior; only a sweeping reformation of ingrained attitudes among blacks will reduce their death rate.
“African Americans are at a considerable risk for experiencing motor vehicle crashes and associated high rates of injuries and fatalities. Their rates usually equal or exceed those of white Americans, although they are generally lower than rates for Latino and Native Americans.” From which we are left to infer that whites are more cautious than blacks and that Latinos and Indians are downright reckless. Those pesky minorities just won’t buckle up, and those darn Injun kids can’t hold their firewater.
This factoid from the MADD website deserves special attention:
“Heavier drinking and its risks may be intensified by the rise in specific advertising campaigns targeting young African American males for consuming 40-ounce containers of high alcohol content malt liquor.” The word targeting suggests a deer in the crosshairs, it’s a sly anti-capitalist message; those evil brewers have singled out young black males for destruction by malt liquor.
Let’s be candid: the moms are talking about advertisements for Colt 45 and Old English 800. The stuff is crap; it’s dog shampoo. Nonetheless, these products are supported by an enthusiastic consumer base; a certain segment of the black population likes Old English 800. Parole violator Rodney King and his buddies were sucking down 40-ounce bottles of the stuff the night Rodney led the cops on a breakneck chase through the streets of Los Angeles. Today he’s a millionaire and still acting like a jerk.
The truth is that after years of trying to sell Old English 800 to all of America, the brewers had to admit that they were wasting their money trying to sell the stuff to anyone other than those folks who had proven themselves to be its loyal consumers: black male Americans. This is not an unusual story. Back in the 1960s Newport cigarettes, with added menthol, were aggressively advertised on television, in print media and on billboards across America. Every person in these advertisements was White; white folks were the big market that Newport and Kool cigarettes hoped to capture. Many years and millions of advertising dollars later, the tobacco peddlers woke up to the fact that white cigarette smokers were indifferent to mentholated cigarettes, but black smokers had a taste for menthol. Who could have anticipated such a thing? Why do Frenchmen and women prefer sweet wines? Why do English and American men prefer dry wines? How can Jews stand those super-sweet table wines? It’s all a mystery. Black activists in search of a fat payday are now claiming that the makers of mentholated cigarettes are “targeting” black neighborhoods. It’s nonsense. The capitalists have found their loyal consumer base. When the MADD moms suggest that businesses are doing something sinister by “targeting” young blacks with malt liquor ads, they are talking rubbish; these companies are simply not wasting their money chasing after people who don’t like their product.
The Mothers Against Drunk Driving gave birth to a final bit of nonsense when they announced that “White males drink far more than any other group, averaging more than nine drinks per week.” (The Germans would call this rate of consumption teetotaling.) Is this a bad thing? From the University of Calgary, in far away Canada, comes word that a diligent researcher named Christopher Auld has confirmed that light drinkers (once a month or less) and teetotalers earn about 10% less than moderate and heavy drinkers. His study controls for age, education, occupation, region and health. Professor Auld says his finding confirms similar studies using data from the United States and Britain. This is not to suggest that drinking will make a person more successful, but rather that successful people tend to consume more alcohol. Perhaps successful people live more stressful lives and use alcohol to help themselves relax. Says Professor Auld, the “alcohol-income puzzle” has been “well-known amongst economists for a decade.” Perhaps the increasing consumption of alcohol among minorities is an indicator of their increasing success. Who knows?
Like most well-meaning Utopians, the anti-drink moms will never know when to stop. After achieving reasonable legal drinking limits for motorists, they will strive for ever more unreasonable limits; they will seek to criminalize even prudent behavior. Utopians cannot accept the fact that random disaster will always be with us; we are forever haunted by our own imperfections; the highways will always be the scene of tragedies. For the Utopians the current crusade to reduce the legal limit to 0.08 percent is just a stepping stone to even lower limits. The anti-drink zealots are hooked on the idea of human perfectibility; they believe in human uplift. We should all repent and henceforth share their values and their vision of our future. If you don’t repent, then they’ll criminalize your harmless backsliding lifestyle.
Silly people are never idle. The MADD website crows that 2,300 anti-drunk driving laws have been passed since 1980, but frets that drunk-driving fatalities remain constant. They cannot accept the thought that our ever more congested highways will always be the scene of a large and irreducible number of collisions. They want ever more stringent laws to ensnare the wrongheaded and the culturally deficient. What these moms need is a loving slap on the wrist.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hankering for a cold frothy amber nutritious health drink.
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Copyright 2002
Thomas Clough