DRUNK AND OUT OF CONTROL

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Chaos erupts in Los Angeles after the Lakers win the
N.B.A. basketball championship. Mayhem follows the National Puerto Rican Day
Parade in Manhattan. All hell breaks loose in the aftermath of a European
soccer match in Belgium. Buildings are vandalized, women assaulted, streets
stormed, all in the last two weeks. We have seen this enemy time and again,
and the only thing more troubling than its savagery and frequency is our
reluctance to call it by its proper name: booze. We dance around the word;
we refer to it in asides, point to its second cousins. Experts in Los
Angeles nod to racial tensions. In New York and London, fingers wag at mob
psychology and inadequate law enforcement.

The cousins may be participants, but to focus on them is to obscure the head
of the family, the gatekeeper who opens the door and lets the rest of the
inner demons roam free. In stark terms, these incidents are about alcohol.

These particular news stories -- celebrations marred by violence -- make me
recall the particularly potent marriage between alcohol and anger, a feature
of drinking you'll never see depicted in the glossy, fun-filled ads for
Stoli or Bud. Alcohol dilutes inhibition, washes away constraint. Most of us
know the pleasant side effects of this, the way a few drinks loosen the
tongue, make you feel more open and carefree. The episodes in Los Angeles
and Manhattan expose, in gruesome Technicolor, the other side of that
psychic coin. At least as often, alcohol unleashes ugliness and aggression
and rage.

Many drinkers know this all too well. I am a small and rather timid woman,
averse to conflict and hesitant to make waves. Drunk, I could be half-crazy
with rage, a hellion, a person who screamed vicious things and sent objects
hurling across rooms. Imagine this combination -- fury and booze -- in male
form. Men are bigger, their rage closer to the surface and more apt to be
directed outward than inward (as the common wisdom has it, men get guns;
women get eating disorders).

The sources of that rage may be endlessly complex -- a stew of nature,
nurture and culture -- but the liberator of the anger is not; alcohol is the
match perpetually poised at the powder keg.

It's also the elephant in the center of the living room, cunning in its
ability to avoid notice. While thousands of drunk young men stormed the
streets and torched police cars in Los Angeles, countless Americans acted
out much more private versions of this liquor-laced drama in their own
hometowns.

Alcohol is a factor in a third of all rapes and sexual assaults and more
than a quarter of aggravated assaults, according to the Justice Department.
In half of all homicides, alcohol is found in either the offender or the
victim, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

While clusters of drunken assailants attacked women in Central Park,
countless more women were slapped and humiliated in their own homes: alcohol
is a factor in two-thirds of domestic violence cases.

These are just numbers, hard to wrap the mind around, which is why the
images from the last few days are important to acknowledge and to study. See
the terror in a young woman's eyes as she clutches her torn blouse to her
breasts, the men around her chanting, "Go, go, go! Get her!" See the horror
on a shop owner's face as a mob shatters his store windows. Now narrow the
lens: see your own street, your neighbors' homes. See a man's fist clenched
in anger; see a woman's blackened eye.

Tobacco has been vilified in this culture. The war on drugs is waged on
illegal narcotics: crack, heroin, cocaine. Ecstasy is now enjoying its place
in the spotlight, the social ill du jour. Alcohol, meanwhile, is abused by
some 14 million Americans and contributes to the deaths of 100,000 each
year. Our culture bottles it, buys it, uses it, glamorizes it, needs it.
Perhaps we should start being honest about it, too.