In 1830, when American liquor consumption hit its all-time high, the average adult was going through more than nine gallons of spirits each year. Most of this was in the form of whiskey (which, thanks to grain surpluses, was sometimes cheaper than milk), and most of it was drunk at home. And this came on top of early Americans’ other favorite drink, homemade cider. https://ecosoberhouse.com/ Many people, including children, drank cider at every meal; a family could easily go through a barrel a week. In short, Americans of the early 1800s were rarely in a state that could be described as sober, and a lot of the time, they were drinking to get drunk. The social context of drinking turns out to matter quite a lot to how alcohol affects us psychologically.

In the 20th century, you might have been able to buy wine at the supermarket, but you couldn’t drink it in the supermarket. Now some grocery stores have wine bars, beer on tap, signs inviting you to “shop ’n’ sip,” and carts with cup holders. Distilled alcohol is recent—it became widespread in China in the 13th century and in Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries—and a different beast from what came before it. Fallen grapes that have fermented on the ground are about 3 percent alcohol by volume. At these levels, unless people are strenuously trying, they rarely manage to drink enough to pass out, let alone die. Modern liquor, however, is 40 to 50 percent alcohol by volume, making it easy to blow right past a pleasant social buzz and into all sorts of tragic outcomes.

Social Drinking vs. Problem Drinking

Prohibition did, in fact, result in a dramatic reduction in American drinking. In 1935, two years after repeal, per capita alcohol consumption was less than half what it had been early in the century. Rates of cirrhosis had also plummeted, and would remain well below pre-Prohibition levels for decades. Americans may not have invented https://ecosoberhouse.com/article/social-drinking-and-drinking-problem/ binge drinking, but we have a solid claim to bingeing alone, which was almost unheard-of in the Old World. During the early 19th century, solitary binges became common enough to need a name, so Americans started calling them “sprees” or “frolics”—words that sound a lot happier than the lonely one-to-three-day benders they described.

The new country was on a bender, and its drinking would only increase in the years that followed. By 1830, the average American adult was consuming about three times the amount we drink today. An obsession with alcohol’s harms understandably followed, starting the country on the long road to Prohibition. After more than a year in relative isolation, we may be closer than we’d like to the wary, socially clumsy strangers who first gathered at Göbekli Tepe. What’s more, as Christine Sismondo writes in America Walks Into a Bar, by kicking the party out of saloons, the Eighteenth Amendment had the effect of moving alcohol into the country’s living rooms, where it mostly remained.

Signs of problem drinking

People with unhealthy alcohol use (also called alcohol use disorder or AUD) can’t always predict how much they will drink, when they will stop, or what they will do while drinking. And it can be common for people with alcohol use disorder to deny the negative effects of drinking or that they even have a problem. Rorabaugh argued that this longing for oblivion resulted from America’s almost unprecedented pace of change between 1790 and 1830.

• This is one reason that, even as drinking rates decreased overall, drinking among women became more socially acceptable.
• Modern liquor, however, is 40 to 50 percent alcohol by volume, making it easy to blow right past a pleasant social buzz and into all sorts of tragic outcomes.
• Some suggest that it must have had some interim purpose it’s since outlived.
• Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve’s apex for an extended time.

Sometimes a drinking problem is triggered by major life changes that cause depression, isolation, boredom, and loneliness. Last August, the beer manufacturer Busch launched a new product well timed to the problem of pandemic-era solitary drinking. “You’ll never drink alone again,” said news articles reporting its debut. But this doesn’t explain why Americans have been so receptive to the sales pitches. Some people have argued that our increased consumption is a response to various stressors that emerged over this period.

America Has a Drinking Problem

Intoxicants, he pointed out in passing, offer a chemical shortcut to wu-wei—by suppressing our conscious mind, they can unleash creativity and also make us more sociable. Right now we are lurching into another of our periodic crises over drinking, and both tendencies are on display at once. Since the turn of the millennium, alcohol consumption has risen steadily, in a reversal of its long decline throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Before the pandemic, some aspects of this shift seemed sort of fun, as long as you didn’t think about them too hard.

This is one reason that, even as drinking rates decreased overall, drinking among women became more socially acceptable. Public drinking establishments had long been dominated by men, but home was another matter—as were speakeasies, which tended to be more welcoming. Around the same time, Slingerland published a social-science-heavy self-help book called Trying Not to Try. In it, he argued that the ancient Taoist concept of wu-wei (akin to what we now call “flow”) could help with both the demands of modern life and the more eternal challenge of dealing with other people.

How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking

Although we tend to think of alcohol as reducing anxiety, it doesn’t do so uniformly. As Michael Sayette, a leading alcohol researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, recently told me, if you packaged alcohol as an anti-anxiety serum and submitted it to the FDA, it would never be approved. He and his onetime graduate student Kasey Creswell, a Carnegie Mellon professor who studies solitary drinking, have come to believe that one key to understanding drinking’s uneven effects may be the presence of other people. But a family history or current family alcohol or drug abuse problems may influence the start of personal drinking problems.