Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

A lovely choice for an odd book award: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.

Sydney

Clotheslines are banned or restricted for about sixty million Americans?! What kind of repressive country is this? Unfortunately, I don’t think I live in a neighbourhood that bans clotheslines, because I would really like to put up a forbidden clothesline right about now. With a couple of crowing roosters running around underneath it (those are also banned in many neighbourhoods).

Sydney

I guess that takes the pressure off Sydney to get out there and plant his garden!

The bathroom looks very pretty with blue-and-white tiles neatly laid all over the floor.  But we can’t walk on it for a few days, so I have to admire from afar.

May I just say, I love English!  As Sydney hauls in a briefcase-full of papers to school, I’m hauling big fat books that I am required to polish off each week.  Such wonderful satisfaction in seeing my books pile up throughout the term! 🙂  Yup, I’m a book junkie.

Erin

Sydney and I will be in and out a bit more than usual in the next few days.  Our bathroom is being tiled and, since the bathroom is the room that connects bedroom and living room (the only two other rooms of the house), we can’t just hide out in another part of our apartment.  You’ll have to come visit to get a real sense of how compact our place is, but if the bathroom doors are open, I can look from my computer straight through the bathroom to the back wall of the bedroom.  As my mom says, “It’s a good thing you and Sydney love each other, because your place offers nowhere to banish the other or hide out.”  Yup, I echo that.

We’re spending lots of time at school, Sydney’s borrowing my computer to work on a presentation, and I’m wandering computerless most of the time.  Lauren and Lisa, I’ll write you glowing and lengthy emails in just a few days!  Too bad being without computer doesn’t mean I’m unable to work, but books need neither bathroom nor computer to demand my attention.

Erin

Well. Never mind tobacco, alcohol, and so on. The real killer is salt, at 150,000 American deaths annually, according to the CSPI. Does anyone know what happened/is happening to the CSPI’s lawsuit?

Sydney

P.S. I promise the next post will not be about substances that kill people.

Once again Sydney and I arrived home from church and spent the next half hour “finishing up” our conversation about the sermon . . . while still sitting in the car. We finally got out when our housemate stepped out of her house and we realized it might make sense to adjourn to our living room!

Erin

The previous discussions about alcohol on this blog have prompted me to wonder how we are supposed to keep reasonable about the issue. It seems everyone’s invested in it for various reasons, which makes it a lot more difficult to discuss openly. My mom has noted recently that I’m becoming more and more set against alcohol in general, and though she’s right to curb my judgmental tendencies, I think by now I have some reason for my view.

I’m looking at an entire lifetime of observing the freshman pattern. All freshmen get worn out and fade over the course of the fall semester. I’m quite happy by December to send them home to their parents for rest and good food. But those who really get into alcohol drop like a brick, appearing only erratically and full of distraction and often duplicity. I think we all take a deep breath and hope for guidance when rush season starts for fraternities in the spring, because it’s never pleasant.

When I then attend parties with fellow grad students and faculty, there’s a lot of conversation about alcohol, and a fair amount of imbibing. The discussion is all about how the young ones effectively don’t know how to control themselves. I can’t help but think, “Pot calling the kettle . . .” in a lot of those situations. For our students, alcohol’s something they lack the skill to use, and for adults it’s a sign of maturity and culture. After working department parties as an undergrad and observing that culture, I decided I’m most definitely out of it, and happy to be so. Furthermore, I don’t know why we wouldn’t set the “culture” next to the “youthful stupidity” and think that, perhaps, the culture’s simply not worth it. To me this issue is different from driving privileges or voting rights: with those we hope there’s some gain, but is there enough here to warrant the trouble that comes along with it? Ideas?

Erin

Sydney was busy talking away to family on the phone in Low German, which I easily tuned out, until he turns to me mid-conversation with that question.  Hehe, he’ll not be living this down for awhile 🙂  You’d think that my research hound could at least have looked it up!

Erin

Note that the following countries were neither picked as being representative nor randomly. Rather, they are the ones that have often been cited in conversations that I’ve had. All the data comes from two WHO reports: ‘Global Status Report on Alcohol 2004‘ and ‘Neuroscience of Psychoactive Substance Use and Dependence‘.

United States

1. Minimum drinking age (MDA): 21
2. Heavy episodic drinkers (5 or more drinks on one occasion at least once in the past month) among youths (>20): 10.7%
3. Heavy episodic drinkers among male adults: NA
4. Heavy drinkers among male adults who drink: 6.4%
5. Alcohol dependence or abuse among male adults: 10.8%

France

1. MDA: 16
2. Heavy episodic drinkers (5 or more drinks on one occasion three times or more in the past month) among youths (>20): 12%
3. Heavy episodic drinkers among male adults who drink: 27.9
4. Heavy drinkers among male adults who drink: 16.6%
5. Alcohol dependence among male adults: 13.3%

The United Kingdom

1. MDA: 18
2. Heavy episodic drinkers (5 or more drinks on one occasion three times or more in the past month) among youths (>20): 30.0%
3. Heavy episodic drinkers among male adults: 24.0%
4. Heavy drinkers among male adults who drink: 39.0%
5. Alcohol dependence among male adults: 7.5%

As usual, there are difficulties with comparing data from different countries, thanks to different definitions and so forth. I have tried to indicate important such differences by using italics above. Note that in both relevant cases, taking these different definitions into account ends up putting the U.S. into even more favourable light (e.g., #5 for the U.S. and France or #2 for all three countries).

What’s the point? Well, people who are trying to convince me that lowering the MDA will reduce binge drinking and other such vices will need to find better examples than France and the United Kingdom.

Four more data:

1. Deaths among Europeans aged 15-29 for which alcohol was responsible in 1999: over 55, 000
2. WHO estimate for number of deaths caused by alcohol globally in 2002: 1.8 million
3. Alcohol’s contribution to the global burden of ill health in 2000: 4.0%
4. Tobacco’s contribution to the global burden of ill health in 2000: 4.1%

Somehow we manage to be a great deal more concerned about smoking around here than about drinking. Then again, practical rationality and consistency are perhaps not humanity’s strengths.

Sydney

There have been a few reports recently about the increase in binge drinking among college students (here’s a sample piece). Apparently half of American college students now meet the criteria for alcohol/drug dependencies. Here at Cornell about a third of the students binge drink, with much higher rates for certain parts of the population (e.g., 72% of sorority women).

Tragic as the situation is, this is not what really disturbs me right now. Rather, what really disturbs me is that it seems to be common wisdom around here that we have this problem because the legal drinking age is 21. As the argument goes, if we lowered the age limit, we wouldn’t have problems with binge drinking because kids would learn to drink responsibly from their parents. Often this argument comes with the claim that in Europe binge drinking isn’t so much of a problem because kids start drinking earlier. I’ve heard this argument over and over again in countless contexts, from undergraduates, from my graduate student colleagues, from faculty members, in the papers, etc., etc. Now perhaps the argument isn’t utterly absurd on the surface, though it does strike me as betraying a serious lack of understanding of human psychology. But you don’t have to look at much evidence to realize that there might be some problems with it.

Let’s start with the claim that binge drinking isn’t as much of a problem in Europe. Why is alcohol poisoning one of the leading causes of death in Europe then (in some Eastern European countries it’s been the leading cause for young men)? Why is the life expectancy in parts of Glasgow lower than it is in, say, Iraq, Algeria, and Vietnam? As far as I can tell, every piece of actual research is going to tell you the opposite of what standard wisdom says.

I find this amazing capacity that humans have to confidently believe things that fly in the face of all the evidence rather worrisome. How are we ever supposed to be able to make intelligent, informed decisions about genuinely complicated social and political matters if we can’t even get the most obvious things right? In my time at Cornell, I’ve only heard one person question the received wisdom about binge drinking and age limits. And he was an old professor whose views on these sorts of matters are generally dismissed with a few jokes and some laughing. So much for the purported ability of intelligent people to avoid being deceived by ludicrous falsehoods.

Sydney