1200 word argument essay

Chapter 1: Alcohol: A Socially Accepted Drug

Teenagers in the United States use alcohol more often than any illegal drug. In 2010 the National Institute on Drug Abuse released statistics that showed 71 percent of teens had tried alcohol by the time they reached the twelfth grade even though they were not yet twenty-one, the legal drinking age in all fifty states. The institute also reported that 65.2 percent of teens had drunk an alcoholic beverage within the past year. Such widespread use of alcohol compared to 43.8 percent of teens who had experimented with marijuana by the twelfth grade, 9 percent who had tried inhalants, and 8.6 percent who had ingested hallucinogens. In their book about teenage drug use, Katherine Ketcham and Nicholas A. Pace explain that one reason so many teens try alcohol is that they mistakenly believe it is harmless compared to drugs like cocaine that are illegal for adults as well as teens. Ketcham and Pace write: “MYTH: Alcohol isn't really a drug—at least it's not as bad as LSD, cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, or heroin. FACT: Alcohol is a toxic, potentially addictive drug that causes more damage to the individual and society than all illegal drugs combined—in fact, alcohol kills nearly seven times more young Americans than all illegal drugs combined.”8

The dangers alcohol poses to everyone—adults as well as teenagers—include being killed in a drunk driving accident as either a driver or passenger and dying from alcohol poisoning if a person consumes too much during a binge drinking session. In addition, alcohol is often cited as a factor in suicides and homicides. It can also lead drinkers to engage in risky behavior that can harm or kill them, like car surfing, which involves

riding on the hood of a car. Because their bodies and brains are not yet fully developed, however, teenage drinkers face several risks that adults do not. Alcohol can damage teenage brains because they are still changing and developing. And people who start drinking in their teens face a higher risk of becoming an alcoholic than those who wait to drink until they are older.

Many teens see nothing wrong with underage drinking, especially since alcohol use is such a part of American society.

Ignorance about the dangers of drinking makes it easy for teenagers to believe alcohol is a benign drug. However, teenagers also have trouble understanding the dangers of alcohol because of society's nearly universal acceptance of drinking, even heavy drinking on special occasions like birthday parties or weddings. This is especially true if their parents or other relatives drink. In A Six-Pack and a Fake I.D., Susan and Daniel Cohen explain that the approval society gives to using alcohol makes it hard for teenagers to believe they are doing anything wrong when they drink, even though they are not old enough to do it legally:

Alcohol is a drug that is woven into the very fabric of our society. Drinking is part of our history and heritage. It's not going to go away. Since drinking is legal, and what is more important quite acceptable to the vast majority, the social context in which drinking takes place is vastly different from that in which other drugs are used. And that is a vital difference between alcohol and other drugs. 9

Society's acceptance of drinking is so strong that Gail Gleason Milgram, an expert on alcohol abuse, says, “Alcohol is the drug of choice for most Americans.”10 This positive attitude toward drinking is rooted in the historic use of alcohol, which extends back thousands of years.

ALCOHOL'S HISTORIC ROOTS

Ethyl alcohol is the chemical in alcoholic beverages like beer, wine, and whiskey that intoxicates people. Alcohol is produced by fermentation, a chemical reaction that occurs when yeast reacts with food that contains sugar, such as fruits, berries, and grains. Fermentation occurs naturally because yeast can be microscopic and float freely in the air. When ancient humans consumed accidentally fermented berries and became drunk, they must have been mystified as to why berries they normally ate for sustenance made them feel so strange.

No one knows when or how people first discovered how to make alcoholic beverages. The earliest evidence of alcoholic drinks is from jars found in China that date back to 7000 B.C.,

which means people have been consuming alcoholic beverages for nine thousand years. The Chinese jars had traces of an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting rice, honey, and fruit. The most widespread early alcoholic drink was beer. Clay tablets found in the ruins of ancient Babylon that are seven thousand years old are the earliest written record that prove people drank beer. Evidence also exists that Egyptians brewed beer thousands of years ago. They called the beverage hek. They made it by crumbling barley bread into jars, covering it with water, and allowing the yeast in the bread to ferment naturally.

Beer and wine produced through natural fermentation have low alcohol contents, about 5 to 8 percent for beer and 12 percent for wine. People living in virtually every part of the world have consumed such drinks for thousands of years. Brandy, whiskey, and other distilled beverages, which are called spirits, have a much shorter history. Distillation was discovered first in Arabia in the eighth century and then in Europe in the twelfth century. Distillation produces concentrated alcohol and allows beverages to have alcohol contents ranging from 20 percent to 60 percent, far higher than naturally fermented beer and wine. The higher alcohol content in spirits enables people to become drunk by drinking much smaller portions of them than beer or wine.

There were many reasons alcoholic beverages became a normal part of everyday life. Many people enjoy consuming alcohol because it can change their mood and usually make them feel happier. Centuries ago people also drank alcoholic beverages because so many sources of water and milk were contaminated that people risked getting diseases like cholera if they consumed them. For example, President Abraham Lincoln's mother died after drinking milk from a cow that had eaten a poisonous weed.

Alcoholic beverages were also an important food source for people with limited diets that were low in calories. This was especially true in Europe, where widespread poverty made it hard for people to buy enough food. In 1551 historian Johann Brettschneier described how average people depended greatly on beer for nourishment: “Some subsist more upon this drink than they do on food. People of both sexes and every age, the hale and

The making of alcohol has always been a part of human life. In this painting from an Egyptian tomb from the fifteenth century B.C. workers are shown brewing beer.

the infirm alike, require it.”11 Because alcohol has a sedative effect that can ease pain from injury, illness, and hard labor, employers gave alcohol to workers to help them work harder and longer. Sailors and soldiers, for example, received daily rations of rum.

In ancient times alcohol was also used for many medical purposes, such as dressing wounds and fighting fever. The

medicinal qualities of wine were held in such high regard that the Talmud, the main religious text of Judaism, claims, “Wine taken in moderation induces appetites and is beneficial to health. Wine is the greatest of medicines.”12 And the Christian Bible's New Testament advises readers to “no longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.”13 Wine even plays a central part in Christian worship—when people receive Communion, they usually take a sip of wine.

AN ALCOHOLIC REPUBLIC

When English colonists immigrated to the land that would become the United States, they brought such favorable attitudes about alcohol and drinking traditions with them. On May 14, 1607, the first British colonists arrived in North America and established Virginia, the first of thirteen colonies that would eventually break away from England and become the United States. Thirteen years later, on December 21, 1620, the Pilgrims landed off the coast of what would become Massachusetts. The importance of alcoholic beverages to the Pilgrims is evident; among the supplies the 102 passengers brought to the New World were 12 gallons (45L) of distilled spirits and 10,000 gallons (37,854L) of beer. Beer was considered vital because in seventeenth-century England the average person, even a child, drank about 3.2 quarts (3L) of beer per day. Children, however, drank beer whose alcohol content was lower than the beer adults drank.

Increase Mather, a prominent minister in Boston in the early 1700s, famously stated the positive attitude colonists had toward alcohol when he wrote that it was “the good creature of God [and was] to be received with thankfulness.”14 Alcohol even played an important role in the nation's founding. In The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, W.J. Rorabaugh writes, “Patriots [colonists who opposed British rule] viewed public houses [taverns] as the nurseries of freedom” and even claimed they were “certainly seed beds of the Revolution, the places where British tyranny was condemned, militiamen organized, and independence plotted.”15 Conversations over mugs of beer and

Prominent Boston minister Increase Mather wrote about the positive attitude of American colonists toward alcohol in the early 1700s.

sips of whiskey helped spark the American Revolution, the war that resulted in the establishment of the United States in 1783 when colonists won their freedom by defeating the British.

Residents of the new nation drank even more after the war. By the 1830s the average American aged fifteen or older consumed 7 gallons (26.5L) of pure alcohol (100 percent alcohol) annually. That figure is more than twice the 2007 alcohol consumption rate of Americans fourteen or older, which was 2.31 gallons (8.74L). Per capita annual consumption in the 1830s included 9.5 gallons (35.96L) of spirits, 1 to 2 gallons of wine (3.79L to 7.57L), and 27 gallons (102.2L) of beer each year. Historian Thomas R. Pegram describes the young nation's lenient attitude toward drinking:

Although community scorn and the power of law was brought to bear on drunkards, everyone was expected to consume alcoholic beverages as dietary staples, and over-indulgence was tolerated at weddings, funerals, militia musters, and on holidays. Women drank in the home; men drank more frequently and more copiously at home, in the fields or the shop, and at taverns and during public events such as elections; solicitous parents shared beer with children at meals, and encouraged boys to develop a taste for distilled spirits. 16

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FAVORED BEVERAGE

“The levels of [alcohol] consumption in colonial America have never been surpassed [by Americans in any other period of its history]; for eighteenth-century Americans alcohol was considered safer and healthier than water.”—James B. Jacobs, author and professor of constitutional law and the courts at New York University

James B. Jacobs. Drunk Driving: An American Dilemma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 5.

The increasingly high drinking levels of many Americans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to public

drunkenness becoming common, incidents of violence, and other social problems. Such alcohol-related problems created a backlash against drinking and spurred attempts to limit and even ban its consumption.

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Liquor for Soldiers

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, employers often gave their workers alcoholic beverages during the workday because they believed the energy workers received from the calories in beer and alcohol would make them more productive. Farmers gave workers jugs of rum or brought beer to them while they were working in fields planting or harvesting crops. Even Roman Catholic nuns were given a ration of alcohol each day. Those receiving daily rations of alcohol also included soldiers and sailors. George Washington led colonists to victory during the Revolutionary War and afterward became the nation's first president. Historian Eric Burns claims Washington firmly believed alcohol made his soldiers better fighters:

During the Revolutionary War, George Washington insisted on alcohol for his men, and once, when a shipment was delayed, he wrote an anguished letter to the president of the Continental Congress: “The benefits arising from the moderate use of strong Liquor,” Washington stated, “have been experienced in all Armies and are not to be disputed.”

Quoted in Eric Burns. Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, p. 16.

AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED

Although most people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drank alcoholic beverages at home as a source of food or because water was unsafe, many people began drinking in public houses, the British name for businesses serving alcohol. Many public houses—Americans were soon calling them taverns, saloons, and bars—became centers of criminal activity like gambling and prostitution. Even taverns free of such vices were criticized because their owners encouraged patrons to engage in heavy drinking. There were so many public houses in Philadelphia in 1744 that a grand jury studied the situation. The report

claimed public houses were “little better than Nurseries of Vice and Debauchery, and tend to increase the Number of our Poor.”17 Most taverns in Philadelphia were located in a part of the city that became known as Hell Town because of the trouble drunken patrons caused.

In 1826 Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher helped found the American Temperance Society in Boston. Beecher claimed drinking was dangerous because too many people could not stop once they began: “Much is said about the prudent use of spirits, but we might as well speak of the prudent use of the plague—of fire handed prudently round among [gun]powder—of poison taken prudently every day.”18 In its first five years, the society established 2,220 local chapters throughout the United States and attracted 170,000 members who pledged to quit drinking; within a decade the society had over 8,000 groups and more than 1.5 million members.

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THE SALVATION OF SOCIETY

“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and turn jails into storehouses and corn-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children will laugh.”—The Reverend Billy Sunday's prediction when Prohibition became law

Quoted in Eric Burns. Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004, p. 187.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, more militant groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the Woman's Christian Temperance Union staged public protests against drinking. The demonstrations often included attacks on saloons by ax-wielding protesters like Carry Nation, who smashed barrels of beer and whiskey. In 1846 Maine passed a law prohibiting the sale of alcohol. Few other states, however, did much to regulate alcohol. Concern about the problems drinking caused kept growing, and on June 29, 1919, the nation ratified the Eighteenth Amendment

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Was Prohibition a Failure?

The Eighteenth Amendment banning the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages went into effect on January 16, 1920, and lasted until December 5, 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed it. Prohibition drastically reduced alcohol consumption, but millions of Americans continued to drink despite the fact that it was illegal. Even though Prohibition ended because a majority of Americans demanded the right to drink, historian Robert Kelley claims Prohibition had some beneficial effects. He writes that notorious saloons in big cities that were homes to vice were closed during Prohibition and that after Prohibition, government officials regulated such businesses more closely. Kelley also says Prohibition changed the nation's drinking habits:

Drinking in America had been fundamentally changed by the Prohibition experiment. Cheap liquor would never be available again so readily as in the past. Drinking to excess in public, so common before Prohibition, had lost much of its macho appeal. [And a new] general ethic of moderation in drinking would mean that repeal, when it finally came in 1933, would see not a revival of the old, but entry into a new national relationship with alcohol.

Robert Kelley. The Shaping of the American Past: 1865 to Present. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 576.

Revenue agents show off confiscated liquor from a raid on a Prohibition-era speakeasy. By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933 Americans had developed a new relationship with alcohol.

to the Constitution. The amendment prohibited making or selling any beverage with more than 0.5 percent alcohol, a level so low that it would not make people drunk.

Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920, but quickly proved to be a failure. Criminals like Chicago's Al Capone became millionaires by supplying beer and liquor to people who chose to break the law and drink anyway. The law was so openly ignored and generally hated that in 1933 Congress adopted the Twenty-First Amendment to repeal the Eighteenth. On December 5, 1933, Utah became the last state needed to approve the amendment, and it once again became legal to drink in the United States. Although Prohibition failed nationally, states began more closely regulating the sale and consumption of alcohol.

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PROHIBITION WILL NOT SAVE US

“Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure or even diminish it.”—Mark Twain, who did not live to see Prohibition but firmly believed any attempt to stop people from drinking would fail

Quoted in Paul Sann. The Lawless Decade: A Pictorial History of a Great American Transition: From the World War I Armistice and Prohibition to Repeal and the New Deal. New York: Bonanza, 1957, p. 92.

TEENS AND ALCOHOL

Until Prohibition, there had been few restrictions on drinking and no age limits, which meant teenagers could drink. This was partly because until the twentieth century, many teens began working, marrying, and leaving home to live alone at earlier ages than today. When Prohibition ended in 1933, most states set the drinking age at twenty-one, which was also the voting age at the time. There were some exceptions: Ohio set the drinking age at sixteen before raising it to eighteen in 1935, and Wisconsin and a few other states allowed eighteen-year-olds to drink beer. The differing drinking ages in neighboring states sometimes led young

people to cross state lines to drink, often with disastrous results because they had to drive long distances to drink.

In the 1960s Judy was one of seven teenagers who drove more than 100 miles (161km) from Chicago, Illinois, to a community near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so they could drink; the drinking age in Illinois was twenty-one, but it was only eighteen to drink beer in certain Wisconsin counties. She explains what happened: “Going home the guy driving lost control of the car and we wound up in a ditch. The driver was drunk but we [the passengers] didn't care. We were all pretty much tipsy. No one was injured but we all got arrested and taken into jail. My mother had to come and pick us up.”19 Although Judy and her friends got off lightly, many teens who crossed borders to drink were severely injured or killed in such crashes.

The nation's involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s led the nation to amend the U.S. Constitution in 1971 to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. That was because so many young men aged 18 to 20 were fighting and dying for their country. The same reasoning led some thirty states between 1969 and 1976 to lower their drinking ages to 18. Alex Wagenaar, a University of Florida professor who is an expert on alcohol-related issues, explains, “The argument became: If 18 year-olds can fight and vote, then they should be able to have a drink.”20 The decision to allow teens to drink, however, proved disastrous.

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ALCOHOL PROMOTES MORAL IMPAIRMENT

“Spirits impair the memory, debilitate the understanding, and pervert the moral faculties… produce not only falsehood, but fraud, theft, uncleanliness, and murder.”—Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence

Quoted in C. Furnas. The Life and Times of the Late Demon Rum. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1965, p. 111.

Between 1970 and 1975 there was a 15 to 20 percent increase in alcohol-related automobile accidents involving teenagers, and

In 1984 President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that raised the national drinking age to twenty-one.

the estimated number of teens who died in such crashes rose from 7,797 to nearly 9,000. The increased danger to teens led eleven states to raise their drinking ages again. The actions by those states to protect teenagers did not completely solve the problem. Again, many teens simply drove across states lines to drink in states where the age was lower. In the end it would require action by the federal government to solve the crisis of teenage drunk drivers.

THE NATIONAL MINIMUM DRINKING AGE ACT

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan established a commission to study the nation's drunk driving problem. On April 5, 1983, Reagan said the commission had formulated thirty-nine proposals to reduce drunk driving, one of which was to establish a uniform drinking age of twenty-one. Reagan said, “Because of the correlation between the number of drunk driving fatalities and liberal drinking-age laws, the Commission has recommended that every State set twenty-one as the minimum legal age for drinking alcoholic beverages.”21 On July 17, 1984, Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act to require all states to make age twenty-one the minimum age for purchasing and publicly possessing alcoholic beverages. The act was not mandatory. As an incentive to make states honor the law, the government said it would reduce federal highway funds by 5 percent for any state that did not increase the drinking age by September 1986.

Most states immediately changed their legal drinking age to twenty-one. In January 1985 governors from six northeastern states met in Danbury, Connecticut, and committed themselves to honoring the federal law. New York governor Mario Cuomo explained why he believed a higher drinking age was necessary: “We have people pouring over the borders now from Pennsylvania and the other states [where the age already was twenty-one] coming to us to get a drink because we have 19. That's causing deaths and injury.”22

Although some states were reluctant to make the change, by 1988 all fifty states had complied with the law and increased their drinking age to twenty-one. One of the strongest public groups backing the change had been Mothers Against Drunk

MADD president Wendy Hamilton (pictured) speaks to the press on the twentieth anniversary of the national law raising the drinking age to twenty-one. Hamilton says the law has saved twenty thousand teens from dying in drunk driving automobile accidents.

Driving (MADD), an organization that has worked hard to make the nation's roads safer by curbing drunk driving. On the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the national age law, MADD president Wendy J. Hamilton praised the effects of the bill. Hamilton said, “Today, 20,000 kids are still living because of that life-changing law. But we can't put the period there. Alcohol is still the number one drug for today's youth.”23

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2012 Gale, Cengage Learning

Source Citation

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Uschan, Michael V. "Alcohol: A Socially Accepted Drug." Teens and Alcohol, Lucent Books, 2012, pp. 11-26. Hot Topics. Gale Health and Wellness, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX2572600008/HWRC?u=lincclin_tcc&sid=HWRC&xid=5effd68d. Accessed 22 Nov. 2019.