OUR LOVE OF THE ILLICIT

Why alcohol won't let go of Seattle

A few months ago, when Seattle city government was enmeshed in the
discussion of Alcohol Impact Areas -- legislation designed to reduce the
sale and availability of cheap booze in specified purlieus of our
municipality -- I was struck with a profound sense of irony.

At the downtown intersection of Second Avenue and Pike Street, a large
elevated billboard featured a comely blond woman, recumbent in a sable gown.
She reclined by a bottle of fine whiskey.

This advertisement was not intended to dissuade anyone from purchasing and
consuming alcohol.

Implicitly and seductively, the billboard was meant to tantalize, to suggest
the glamor, the classy lifestyle that might accrue to anyone who would
purchase this hard liquor.

It just so happens that the junction of Second and Pike has for years teemed
with troubled citizens whose lives have been ravaged by drugs and alcohol:
the very people who are the focus of the city's debates.

It was another instance of the widespread hypocrisy in our society when it
comes to any public discussion of intoxication and its ramifications.

Humanity's relationship with a panoply of chemicals that cause inebriation,
ecstasy, anesthesia, alertness, agitation, drowsiness, relaxation,
hallucination, healing, and addiction is an ancient one, a spoor lost in the
mists of prehistory. Drugs and alcohol have had an intimate role in the
cultural and symbolic evolution of everything from religion to music and all
the arts. Today, the pursuit of chemically induced intoxication and altered
states of mind continues to be a pervasive and persistent feature of our
society.

Alcohol and tobacco industries are commercial and political heavyweights.
For billions of people around the world, caffeine consumption is an
indispensable daily regimen.

According to the United Nations, the global trade in illicit drugs generates
$400 billion annually; that's 8 percent of all international trade.

Thus the illegal underground pharmaceutical industry is on par monetarily
with tourism and oil.

The literary landscape of Europe would be rather different, we can assume,
if the opium eating of DeQuincey, and the chemical explorations of
Baudelaire and Coleridge had never occurred.

James Joyce consumed copious quantities of white wine, which he likened to
"electricity." Other accomplished Irish writers who were well acquainted
with the tumult of temulence were Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanaugh, and the
irrepressible Brendan Behan. Welshman Dylan Thomas's involvement with
alcohol was protracted and eventually lethal.

Literate drunks are thick in the American arena of belles letters.

Edgar Allen Poe is the first in a long and celebrated tradition of bibulous
American penmen.

In fact, of the seven native-born Americans to be awarded the Nobel Prize
for their literary accomplishments, five were alcoholics: Sinclair Lewis,
Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck. In
praising the cultural scribe James Gibbons Huneker, H.L. Mencken, himself no
stranger to drink, extolled his friend as much for the flood of pilsner beer
he could imbibe as for his journalistic acumen.

The pervasiveness of alcoholism among American writers of all stripes in the
first part of the 20th century has been likened to an "epidemic" by Dr.
Donald W. Goodwin of the University of Kansas Medical Center. Goodwin, a
respected authority on many aspects of alcoholism, once conducted his own
30-minute exercise in which, off the top of his head, he made a list of
deceased American writers who were alcoholics. He came up with 48 names;
only Poe was not of the twentieth century.

Also noted were Jack Kerouac, Stephen Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Raymond Chandler, and others known to all who have sat through a typical
high school or college English class.

Alcohol is not the only mind-altering substance to inform American
literature. Writing in his 1850 novel White Jacket of the tedium that beset
the crew of the man-of-war "Neversink" as the ship lay lazily in the harbor
of Rio de Janero, Herman Melville stated that many sailors would often fly
"to the bottle to seek relief from the intolerable ennui of nothing to do,
and nowhere to go." Melville also mused that "if opium were to be had, many
would steep themselves a thousand fathoms down in the densest fumes of that
oblivious drug."

In 1857, The Hasheesh Eater, a book by the fascinating nineteenth-century
psychonaut Fitz Hugh Ludlow, would become a best seller.

Ludlow would die in 1870 at the age of 34, a victim of opium addiction; but
not before he would advocate for shelters for the homeless adult male
alcoholics and other drug addicts of 19th century New York City. It was a
time when such shelters were made available primarily to women and children.

One of his last published pieces, "Homes for the Friendless", appeared in
the New York Tribune and received editorial approbation from Horace Greeley.

In 1874, an English chemist would combine morphine with acetic anhydride; a
white powder was the result.

It proved to be considerably more powerful than morphine, but it was
apparently ignored for 20 years.

Eventually, the German pharmaceutical company Bayer started marketing the
substnace under the name "heroin," a name probably derived from heroisch,
German for "powerful." Patients liked this new drug very much. Bayer
stressed heroin's efficacy as a cough suppressant, not as an analgesic
(Bayer didn't start selling its famous aspirin until one year later, in
1899). By the mid-twentieth century, heroin would be featured in books by
writers as diverse as William Burroughs and Nelson Algren. Algren's novel,
The Man With the Golden Arm, was the first recipient of the National Book
Award, in the year 1950. In 1953, Burroughs published his first and perhaps
most conventional novel, Junk, under the nom de plume William Lee. (It would
be reissued as Junkie in 1964.)

Soon thereafter, Burroughs would set out on a quest for the fabled botanical
entity, yage, which is found in certain quarters of Latin America. This
journey resulted in The Yage Letters, coauthored by that other beat legend
Allen Ginsberg. The book is essentially a collation of correspondence
detailing their searches for and experiences with this extraordinary
hallucinogenic, known as "the visionary vine" and by other lofty names.

In 1954, the revered author and spiritual seeker Aldous Huxley would relate
his experiences with mescaline in his influential chronicle The Doors of
Perception. He borrowed this title phrase from William Blake; and a decade
later the young Jim Morrison after reading Huxley would borrow the phrase
again and name his rock and roll group simply "The Doors." Huxley continued
his careful and studious explorations of inner space through the use of two
other substances, psilocybin and LSD. On his deathbed, in a mutually agreed
upon experiment, his wife Laura administered a measured dose of LSD to her
husband. Huxley died on the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination, November
22, 1963. As the sixties blossomed into full-fledged psychedelia, many would
refer to Huxley's drug taking to rationalize their own sometimes reckless
and often hedonistic use. This eventually prompted an outraged Laura Huxley
to charge that her late husband ingested fewer hallucinogens in his lifetime
than some enthusiasts were ingesting in the course of a week. However, Mrs.
Huxley's castigation did little to stem the rising tide of sex, drugs, and
rock `n roll.

The influence and impact of a kaleidoscopic cavalcade of intoxicants on the
deep and rich veins of American music -- jazz, blues, rhythm and blues,
country, folk, rock, rap, and hip hop -- goes without saying.

This all too brief reflection on the tenacious reality of inebriation and
altered states of consciousness in Western culture is not to suggest that
anyone who downs a shot of Chivas Regal, pops a pill, smokes a reefer, or
ingests any intoxicating drug automatically becomes an artist.

Nor is it to ignore or minimize the pain and calamity that have been visited
upon many individuals, families, and communities due to the abuse and misuse
of various forms of intoxicants. The point is that our Western world has
cultivated and courted all manner of plant and concoction that affect or
stupefy the senses.

And our contemporary American scene is abundantly awash in booze, illegal
dope in multifarious manifestations, and a crescentic cornucopia of
prescription drugs.

Writing in his provocative 1972 work The Natural Mind, Dr. Andrew Weil
stated: "It is my belief that the desire to alter consciousness periodically
is an innate, normal drive analogous to hunger or the sexual drive." In
2002, journalist and historian Stuart Walton contributed a volume to this
discussion entitled Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication. He echoes
Weil: "Intoxication is a universal human theme. There are no fully formed
instances of societies anywhere that have lived without the use of
psychoactive substances." Walton notes that the Inuit were the one known
exception due to the simple reason that they could not grow anything in the
harsh arctic climate.

Once alcohol was introduced by European explorers, "a conspicuous biological
anomaly in our species was forever erased."

Anthropologists have long noted that cultures which have in-depth and
persistent experiences with certain kinds of phenomena will tend to have
many names for that particular thing, like the Inuits who have many words
for snow. During Prohibition, the famed writer Edmund Wilson listed over 100
words for drunkenness. Long before that, Benjamin Franklin listed over 200.
In the book Alcohol Wordlore and Folklore by Ernest L. Abel, one will find
an Appendix containing well over 1,200 English words and phrases that are
synonyms for the word "drunk."

Given the prevalence of drugs and booze in postmodern society, it is no
wonder that a portion of our citizenry fall haplessly prey to the allure,
pleasure, and potential addiction of getting drunk or high. There is ample
evidence that one factor contributing to the demise of some drinkers and
drug users is a genetic predisposition to abuse mind-altering substances,
and that the risk of addiction is much greater for these individuals.

What does this have to do with street drunks and the debate over expanding
the Alcohol Impact Area? It has everything to do with it. The AIA scheme is
an inherently hypocritical and ultimately feckless policy.

It is hypocritical because it penalizes the street alcoholic while allowing
a plentiful river of booze to flow freely in the lives of those whom our
society perceives to be a classier clientele.

Keep in mind that the grizzled, addled street topers are on the streets in
great numbers because all of the flop houses, boozer hotels, juice joints,
and taverns that used to cater to the rough-and-tumble Skid Road trade are
almost completely eradicated. Once the Skid Roads and Boweries of America
provided an urban quarter where drunkards, drifters, druggies, and others
could hole up, get a room, and keep to themselves. The wrecking ball has
long since dismantled that option in cities throughout the nation.

Our society has avoided the formidable challenge of addiction by penalizing
and punishing those who fall victim to habitual and excessive chemical
consumption, instead of devising and funding a truly comprehensive system of
treatment.

Drugs and alcohol are here to stay. How we deal with them and understand
them will determine the future tone and temper of our streets and
neighborhoods. We know a lot about drug addiction and alcoholism and how to
treat them. AIA is no way to sensibly and effectively confront these exigent
and growing problems.

Andrew Weil, who suggested that getting high or altered is perhaps an
instinctual part of the human experience, stresses that he does not wish to
imply that drugs or drink are the only ways to attain an altered state of
consciousness. Numerous other nonchemical routes are available to those who
would be willing to explore them. And with that I will end this rumination
with this gem from the poet Baudelaire:

"You must always be drunk.

Everything depends on it: it is the only question. So as not to feel the
horrible burden of Time wrecking your back and bending you to the ground,
you must get drunk without respite.

"But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you choose.

But get drunk.

"And if sometimes you wake up, on palace steps, on the green grass of a
ditch, in your room's gloomy solitude, your intoxication already waning or
gone, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, clocks, ask everything
that flees, everything that moans, everything that moves, everything that
sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the waves,
the stars, the birds, clocks, will answer, `It is time to get drunk! So as
not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk constantly! On
wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you choose.'"

PQ: In Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication, Stuart Walton writes:
"Intoxication is a universal human theme.

There are no fully formed instances of societies anywhere that have lived
without the use of psychoactive substances." He notes that the Inuit were
the one known exception due to the simple reason that they could not grow
anything in the harsh arctic climate.

Once alcohol was introduced by European explorers, "a conspicuous biological
anomaly in our species was forever erased."