Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers? I Have a Better Question.

A hat tip to Healing Imperfectly for bringing to my attention the recent Time Magazine article that asks Why Do Heavy Drinkers Outlive Nondrinkers? The study that suggests that heavy drinkers outlive abstainers has been widely promoted on the net as proof that drinking is “good” for you. Not to rain on the parade of alcohol advocates by pointing out the obvious pitfalls of statistics, I say let those that so crave justification for their actions have it- but I would like to see Time do a follow up question.

How much harm do these heavy drinkers inflict upon society during their lengthy tenure?

I’ll start you out with a short list:

• Alcohol availability is closely related to violent assaults. Communities and neighborhoods that have more bars and liquor stores per capita experience more assaults.

• Alcohol use is frequently associated with violence between intimate partners. Two-thirds of victims of intimate partner violence reported that alcohol was involved in the incident.

• In one study of interpersonal violence, men had been drinking in an estimated 45 percent of cases and women had been drinking in 20 percent of cases.

• Women whose partners abused alcohol were 3.6 times more likely than other women to be assaulted by their partners.

• In 1997, 40 percent of convicted rape and sexual assault offenders said that they were drinking at the time of their crime.

• In 2002, more than 70,000 students between the ages of 18 and 24 were victims of alcohol-related sexual assault in the U.S.

• In those violent incidents recorded by the police in which alcohol was a factor, about nine percent of the offenders and nearly 14 percent of the victims were under age 21.

• Twenty-eight percent of suicides by children ages nine to 15 were attributable to alcohol.

• An estimated 480,000 children are mistreated each year by a caretaker with alcohol problems.

The numbers just get worse when you look into the percentage of all violent crime, incarceration, accidents, and health care costs. What may even be a better question is the abstinence-what-if of all of this issue. What if the father wasn’t an abusive drunk, what if the wife wasn’t killed by a drunk driver, what if the student would have stayed in school; What if they all lived a much better life, would it matter if a minor, limited study of dubious merit concluded it was slightly shorter?

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Alcoholism: Drinking Alone is not a Sure Sign

Requested from the 07 archives.

They say one of the surest signs of alcoholism is drinking alone. No doubt this can be a sign of problem drinking, yet you have many people that do most of their drinking alone but are considered safe, “normal” drinkers.

So what’s the difference?

Well it’s not so much the drinking alone that’s the real problem here; it’s why the alcoholic will drink alone. Shame, embarrassment, and secrecy are all contributing factors but the overwhelming reason an alcoholic will isolate their self from others is their inability to face reality. Total dependence upon alcohol means that all things in life are now derived from drinking. Joy, sadness, courage… everything comes from the bottle until the very substance that provides life takes away the ability to live it.

At least for me, the facade of normalcy was no longer possible when the bartender asked if I needed help or when a convenience store clerk commented on the way my hand shook or how it was awful early for a beer. Even associating with other drunks, those considerate of our common plight became too painful a reminder of my sad state. Any contact with the real world made me painfully aware that I was no longer the master of my own destiny, and the very substance that gave me the strength to face the day also insured I would too debilitated to follow through.

It wasn’t the drinking alone that was the problem, it was why I was drinking alone.

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