That's cool.
Let me try again.
I think basically I am saying that status and social standing -- culture -- is half of the addiction equation. We can agree there, right? Nature and nurture play a role. Part of our culture is that the wide-spread dependency on alcohol isn't looked at, or hasn't been taken seriously. Just think about how much this is streamlined into courtship. How much damage it does in the form of domestic violence, and yet, men and women still cling to it. Think about #metoo. It's rarely ever mentioned as a driver. It is a cultural blindspot.
Even therapists -- addiction specialists -- don't understand what a bad idea it is for a addict -- someone whose brain has been permanently altered -- to moderate. And moderation half the time is just active addiction. What else is two beers a night? We can probably agree on that. There is a lot of BS there.
The thing is, these "moderators" often view alcohol, or other status drugs like cocaine, weed, maybe mdma, differently than crack, or meth and the other dirty street drugs they don't consume. So I went to the rave, had some MDMA. Imagine this same suburban brat saying, so I went to the rave, had a hit of crack. Crack on the other hand is a drug of hopeless addiction and criminality, never mind more people die from booze and more crimes are committed with alcohol than crack. The result? Take the Reagan era crack nonsense. A generation of prisoners, while Wall Street enjoyed its coke in moderation. Alcohol is a drug of moderation. MDMA experience. Ketamine and Adderall psychiatry.
So what happens if you take away the status of the moderate from the drinker, or weekend line sniffer, and say, well, actually, there is no difference between you and a junky. You sir are just another addict enabled by the rituals of your class. Your 'moderation' is merely a smokescreen. Alcohol isn't special, remy martin or fancy bourbon, Giorgi -- it's basically liquid crack, and you get high on it for like two hours everyday, longer than you engage in reading, playing with your kids sober, exercising. And hey, look over here, the same as you, these people living lives as functional meth and heroine users. These kids take high doses of meth salts every day just to function in the brutal misery of this mystification of the learning process we have going on -- just like car mechanics take a hit of meth in the morning just to function.
How dare I suggest such a thing! My child's Adderall is the same as meth? Well it is, sorry. Give Adderall to an addict and he will go to town. But it's proscribed, you see? It is used in a permissive cultural climate, unlike meth, which is used as another excuse to jail people.
What I'm saying is that once the status distinction is leveled, the thing loses its strength. The status issue is exposed as the issue. Why do people drink Scotch and sour crap wine? Status. Why do they jail inner city crack users? Status. Why do alcoholics think alcohol is cunning baffling and powerful? Because over here, you have these deluded people telling them to learn to moderate.
The status and self evasion is a human connection issues, the things that keep us from loving each other, building a better society, drinking our Scotch, ignoring our kids, telling ourselves 'we are moderate drinkers' while jailing meth addicts, like the people that my father used to hang out with in the East Bay.
This isn't not keeping it simple. It is an avenue toward making something clearer by deconstructing it. The hope is that the edifice of fear crumbles just a little bit so that maybe there becomes more venues to recognize our own BS, the broken down addict can see that the only difference between him and the rich wine snob is status, people find other places to congregate other than bars because Belgian Ales start to seem just a little bit lame and it becomes just a little bit lame to be such a chicken that you need a drink to perform all of life's passages. The whole thing loses its appeal. The fetish of moderation loses its steam.