Alcoholism is the third leading cause of death in America. Alcohol contributes to half our auto fatalities and serious car accidents and is the leading cause of death among young people. Alcoholism costs business and industry $65 billion a year through absenteeism, health costs, property damage, medical expenses, and lost production.
According to the National Council on Alcoholism, over 80 percent of fire deaths, 65 percent of drownings, 25 percent of home accidents, 77 percent of falls, and 55 percent of arrests are linked to the use of alcohol. Violent behavior attributed to alcohol use accounts for 65 percent of murders, 40 percent of assaults, 35 percent of rapes, 30 percent of suicides, 55 percent of fights or assaults in the home, and 60 percent of the cases of child abuse. Alcoholism also plays a critical role in the staggering divorce rates in America.
Some contributors to this book, because of their personal experiences, are frustrated with what they see: Rather than confront alcoholism, Americans still avoid it as an embarrassment and deny its impact on all of us.
I don't know if society will ever change its opinion about alcohol. I'm worried. The debts, the crime, the accidents, the injuries, the suicides—so many of those stem from the use or abuse of alcohol.
It's become obscene to me. If you look up the meaning of obscene in a dictionary, you will find very graphically outlined what Don Newcombe thinks about society and its purview of alcohol and alcoholism, and about what alcoholism has done and is going to do to so many people. Yet we totally accept it, except those of us who have been involved in it. We are the two-headed ogres in this situation. We are looked upon as if we're outcasts or lepers. "You did it to yourself. You poured the alcohol down your throat. You are supposed to be just what you are, an alcoholic." Society still misunderstands alcohol, alcoholics, and alcoholism, as it has for years. I see it in the school system. I see it in the work force. I see it in the military. I see it in sports. I see it in all society.
Society refuses to accept alcohol as a serious drug, like cocaine, marijuana, Quaalude, Valium, Darvon, Miltown, and all those other exotic drugs. People really don't think alcohol is a drug, even though it has more potency than all those other drugs put together.
Our culture loves and hates alcohol at the same time. Alcoholics learn to deny their alcoholism, not because they invented denial, but because they learned it from the culture. There is shame associated with drunkenness, not just for alcoholics. Most people who get drunk feel ashamed of what they did.
Drunkenness may bring out in us aspects of our nature that we'd all like to deny—the extremes of dependency, the extremes of defiant independence, the extremes of grandiosity or inferiority. We'd all like to make believe we were born well adjusted and we've always been that way. We hate drunks and the way they act. We can't handle that. None of us has faced up to the immaturity in ourselves. We have covered it up. Most of us drunks, not just alcoholics, regress and behave childishly and inappropriately. I feel ashamed for you, or you feel ashamed for me. We don't want to talk about it. That is the universal aspect of the denial, not just for the alcoholic, but for the whole culture.
We hate to see our beautiful socialized control stripped away. We don't want to see that in ourselves. I get drunk and meet some people at a party and I pat some professor's wife on the butt. The next morning I say, "Oh, my God, that's worse than robbing a bank."
Most of us thought the terrible problem for alcoholics was guilt. It's not guilt. They would just as soon feel guilty because then they can blame themselves. It's shame.
I drove home on a Friday night about ten o'clock. It was like being in some kind of a bizarre movie, because about ten other cars were in various positions around me on the freeway, and not one of those drivers wasn't medicated. It was horrifying, the fact that that many people were that loaded. I was worried about their getting home. Everybody was weaving around on the road, and I was weaving to try to avoid the weaving, and we were all lurching around. There are a lot of people out there medicated. Hashish and marijuana and uppers and downers and sideways and alcohol—or any imaginable combination of these.
Everybody was educated to believe that an alcoholic is a bum. Brown paper bag, Sterno, canned meat, Vitalis, Yardley's, starting to drink at seven in the morning, living in a flophouse. That's what we were taught. Now we have to grow up. A person turns twenty-five and is an alcoholic and doesn't identify with that. A lot of work has to be done.
Four guys who were doing Miller Lite commercials talked to me about their own alcohol abuse. I think a couple of them are bona fide alcoholics. But if you are offered the kind of money they are offered to make the commercials, it's pretty hard to turn it down. One of them, who had the toughest reputation of all the athletes in those commercials, collared me one day in Florida, backed me into a corner, and started talking with me. He said, "How do you say no to a drink?" So I asked him, "Why would you want to know that?" He said, "When I go out there to do the commercial I don't want to drink. I can't handle it anymore. That's not what I want to be anymore." So I said, "Well, just tell them you don't drink anymore, that you decided to try it the other way for a while." Here is a guy who, for the money, is going against how he really feels about the whole thing.
Let's turn it around so that the stigma goes on the ones who are the drunks instead of stigmatizing the sober people. The square thing, the dumb thing is to be a juicehead. You get on an airplane at 9:00 A.M. and they want to know if you care for champagne or orange juice. I'm talking 9:00 A.M.! You sit next to some guy who just kissed his wife good-bye, has his little briefcase and his nice pressed suit. He sits down in first class, and they come by with the liquor cart. I see it day in and day out. The guy sits there. "Oh, yes, I'll have a bloody mary, two vodkas." You have a five-hour plane flight, and by the time the guy gets off, he's had four or five of those little bottles at least. He's had wine with his meal. He's had an after-dinner drink. And maybe some food. He has a flushed complexion from high blood pressure to top it off. We're about to land at the airport, and he has fallen asleep in a drunken stupor and missed his chocolate ice cream sundae. In the glide path coming in, he gets the stewardess to give him his ice cream.
He gets off and goes to his meeting with somebody in San Diego, or wherever the hell he is. They go out to lunch or dinner. The guy has two or three beers, a martini, or something. He gets back to his hotel and says, "Aw, what the heck, I don't think I feel sleepy." Why would he feel sleepy? His heart is all pumped up from alcohol at that point. Now he's going to have something to cool down, so he might have a couple of beers and a vodka or a scotch. This is considered normal.
That man should be stigmatized. He should have a red D painted on his forehead, which stands for Drunk. This son of a bitch is going to have a heart attack and wonder, "Why did this happen to me?" God, I feel like grabbing that guy and saying, "You big fat turd, how soon do you want this heart attack? Would you like to have it today? Would it make you feel better?" God, you look at him and you just wonder. And when he does have his heart attack, everyone is going to say, "Poor Freddie. I can't understand it. He golfed, he played tennis, I saw him at the country club Saturday night. He looked fine to me."
Poor Freddie, my ass. He had it coming to him. Somehow we have come to say that this behavior is normal. Go to any country club in the United States on a Saturday night and look at what they call normal. And tell me I'm abnormal. If that's normal, I want to be abnormal.
A lot of guys are out there working, and they think they're doing just great, but they are all a goddamn bunch of alcoholics. There are not 15 million, there are 50 million alcoholics in this country. That's closer to the true figure. We're talking about half of the adult population. Just look at a professional football game. Ninety thousand drunks are sitting there, and they all go to work the next day.
I don't think we're getting anywhere. The President appoints a commission, and the same doctors he puts on the Commission on Alcoholism are pushing Valium every day. And saying it's an entirely different thing. Education is a long way from being there. How in the hell can you admit alcohol is a problem when its use is so widespread?
We lock up a kid who has a half ounce of marijuana, but if he gets caught with a fifth of booze in his hand, we laugh it off.
Parents make more alcoholics out of kids than anyone else because they're so scared of drugs. They don't realize that alcohol is a drug. They say it's fine if you drink but don't use marijuana. When I was in treatment at Long Beach, we had a couple of people who were heavy marijuana users. They weren't as screwed up as a hard drinker.
Where did yesterday's heroes go? The adolescent of today looks up to two groups of heroes—professional athletes and people in the entertainment world. Yet these two groups have a tremendously high rate of alcoholism and other drug addiction. What's happening today is an epidemic among the adolescents. The kids of today are drug users because their heroes are drug users. There is no question what's going to happen in 1990. By 1990 alcoholism and drug addiction will have surpassed cancer and heart disease as the number one health problem in this country. If America isn't walking or trotting or running, it's galloping into the chemical culture. All Americans are being taught that any kind of discomfort, either physical or emotional, is unacceptable because there is a pill, shot, powder, or needle that will take care of it.
The young people of today are turning to chemicals for instant relief. We are paying the price, and the price is addiction. Alcoholism, Valiumism, Libriumism, cocainism, Quaaludism, am-phetiminism, marijuanism, or THC-ism. We're seeing the surfacing of professional athletes and entertainment people with tremendous alcohol and drug problems.
Somebody asked me, "What would you do to turn around alcoholism and drug addiction in this country?" I said, "If I could do one thing with a magic wand, it would be to blow up every TV set in the country. It has destroyed family communication, family togetherness, and love." We've forgotten how to communicate and love, and we're looking for instant artificial release of emotions and instant chemical relief of pain. This is what has gotten the young people of today into such a mess and why I'm so concerned about alcoholism and drug addiction's being so rampant in the entertainment world and the world of professional athletes.