THE DRUG THAT PRETENDS IT ISN'T

Car accidents, date rapes, domestic violence and it goes so well with
Chinese food and pizza!

Spring break in Jamaica, and the patios of the waterfront bars are so
packed that it seems the crowds of students must go tumbling into the
aquamarine sea, still clutching their glasses.

Even at the airport one drunken young man with a peeling nose argues
with a flight attendant about whether he can bring his Red Stripe,
kept cold in an insulated sleeve, aboard the plane heading home. The
giggle about Jamaica for American visitors has always been the
availability of ganja; half the T shirts in the souvenir shops have
slogans about smoking grass.

But the students thronging the streets of Montego Bay seem more
comfortable with their habitual drug of choice: alcohol.

Whoops! Sorry! Not supposed to call alcohol a drug. Some of the people
who lead anti-drug organizations don't like it because they fear it
dilutes the message about the "real" drugs, heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

Parents are offended by it; as they try to figure out which vodka
bottle came from their party and which from their teenager's, they
sigh and say, "Well, at least it's not drugs." And naturally the
lobbyists for the industry hate it. They're power guys, these guys:
the wine guy is George W's brother-in-law, the beer guy meets
regularly with House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. When you lump a cocktail
in with a joint, it makes them crazy.

And it's true: booze and beer are not the same as illegal
drugs.

They're worse. A policy-research group called Drug Strategies has
produced a report that calls alcohol "America's most pervasive drug
problem" and then goes on to document the claim.

Alcohol-related deaths outnumber deaths related to drugs four to one.
Alcohol is a factor in more than half of all domestic-violence and
sexual-assault cases.

Between accidents, health problems, crime and lost productivity,
researchers estimate alcohol abuse costs the economy $167 billion a
year. In 1995 four out of every 10 people on probation said they were
drinking when they committed a violent crime, while only one in 10
admitted using illicit drugs.

Close your eyes and substitute the word blah-blah for alcohol in any
of those sentences, and you'd have to conclude that an all-out war on
blah-blah would result.

Yet when members of Congress tried to pass legislation that would make
alcohol part of the purview of the nation's drug czar the measure
failed. Mothers Against Drunk Driving faces opposition to both its
education programs and its public-service ads from principals and
parents who think illicit drugs should be given greater priority.

The argument is this: heroin, cocaine and marijuana are harmful and
against the law, but alcohol is used in moderation with no ill effects
by many people.

Here's the counterargument: there are an enormous number of people who
cannot and will never be able to drink in moderation. And what they
leave in their wake is often more difficult to quantify than DWIs or
date rapes. In his memoir, "A Drinking Life," Pete Hamill describes
simply and eloquently the binges, the blackouts, the routine: "If I
wrote a good column for the newspaper, I'd go to the bar and
celebrate; if I wrote a poor column, I would drink away my regret.

Then I'd go home, another dinner missed, another chance to play with
the children gone, and in the morning, hung over, thick-tongued, and
thick-fingered, I'd attempt through my disgust to make amends." Hamill
and I used to drink, when we were younger, at a dark place down a
short flight of stairs in the Village called the Lion's Head. There
were book jackets covering the walls, jackets that I looked at with
envy, books by the newspapermen and novelists who used to drink there.

But then I got older, and when I passed the Head I sometimes thought
of how many books had never been written at all because of the drinking.

Everyone has a friend/an uncle/a co-worker/a spouse/a neighbor who
drinks too much. A recent poll of 7,000 adults found that 82 percent
said they'd even be willing to pay more for a drink if the money were
used to combat alcohol abuse.

New Mexico and Montana already use excise taxes on alcohol to pay for
treatment programs.

It's probably just coincidence that, as Drug Strategies reports, the
average excise tax on beer is 19 cents a gallon, while in Missouri and
Wisconsin, homes to Anheuser-Busch and Miller, respectively, the tax
is only six cents.

A wholesale uprising in Washington against Philip Morris, which owns
Miller Brewing and was the largest donor of soft money to the
Republicans in 1998, or against Seagram, which did the same for the
Democrats in 1996, doesn't seem likely.

Home schooling is in order, a harder sell even than to elected
officials, since many parents prefer lessons that do not require
self-examination. Talking about underage drinking and peer pressure
lets them off the hook by suggesting that it's all about 16-year-olds
with six-packs. But the peer group is everywhere, from the frogs that
croak "Bud" on commercials to those tiresome folks who behave as if
wine were as important as books (it's not) to parents who drink to
excess and teach an indelible life lesson.

Prohibition was cooked up to try to ameliorate the damage that
drinking does to daily life. It didn't work. But there is always
self-prohibition. It's not easy, since all the world's a speakeasy.
"Not even wine?" Hamill recalls he was asked at dinner parties after
he stopped.

Of course children should not drink, and people who sell them alcohol
should be prosecuted. Of course people should not drink and drive, and
those who do should be punished. But 21 is not a magic number, and the
living room is not necessarily a safe place.

There is a larger story that needs to be told, loud and clear, in
homes and schools and on commercials given as much prominence and paid
for in the same way as those that talk about the dangers of smack or
crack: that alcohol is a mind-altering, mood-altering drug, and that
lots of people should never start to drink at all. "I have no talent
for it," Hamill told friends.

Just like that.