Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2014

Alcoholics Anonymous and addiction

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

In Maclean’s, Kate Lunau talks to Dr. Lance Dodes about Alcoholics Anonymous:

Dr. Lance Dodes has spent more than 35 years treating people who are battling addiction, including alcoholism. In his new book (co-written with Zachary Dodes), The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry, Dodes takes a hard look at Alcoholics Anonymous, a worldwide organization that describes itself as a “non-professional fellowship of alcoholics helping other alcoholics get and stay sober.” Today, there are more than 5,000 AA groups in Canada alone, which are free and open to anyone. Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, argues that some groups — and many for-profit private rehab centres based on the 12-step model — are often ineffective, and can cause further damage to addicts.

Q: How did you come to work on addiction?

A: I first became involved with alcoholism and addiction in the ’70s, when the place I was working, which is now part of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, needed to develop an alcoholism treatment unit. I was director of psychiatry, so I said, “I’ll develop it.” Afterward, I became involved in various addiction treatment programs, including running the state’s largest compulsive-gambling program. Over the years, I became very familiar with AA. It became clear that, while AA works for some people, the statistics just didn’t back it up. The real problem is that [doctors] refer 100 per cent of their patients with alcoholism to AA, and that’s the wrong thing to do 90 per cent of the time.

Q: AA has more than two million members around the world. You say its success rate is between five and 10 per cent. How, then, do you account for its enduring popularity?

A: AA is a proselytizing organization. The 12th step is to go out and spread the word, and they do. Because there are so many people in prominent positions who are members of AA, it gets tremendously good press. If AA were simply harmless, then I would agree that a seven per cent success rate is better than zero. But that’s not the case. It can be very destructive. According to AA, AA never fails — you fail. AA says that if you’re not doing well in the program, then it’s you. So you should go back and do the same thing you did before: Do more of the 12 steps, and go to more meetings.

March 3, 2014

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger – bacon and booze

Filed under: Food, Health, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 14:30

At The Register, Lester Haines fights the killjoys in public health journalism to bring forth the revolutionary booze-and-bacon diet:

“Bacon is particularly problematic,” doomwatched the Daily Mail, a noted proponent of the “if it’s tasty it’ll kill you” school of scientific killjoyery.

It gets worse. Scientists have indicated that bacon also reduces fertility, while a daily consumption of of more than 20g of processed meat in general — “equivalent to one meagre rasher of bacon” — is a surefire shortcut to the hereafter.

Or so they’d have you believe. Among the amazing powers of bacon is its ability to cure hangovers. The negative effects of excessive alcohol consumption are well known — impotence, cirrhosis of the liver, maudlin pub musings, alcopop-fuelled teen pregnancies, the Saturday-night reduction of British city centres to vomit-spattered warzones, and so forth — but booze too has extraordinary properties.

In fact, it benefits cardiovascular health, fights asthma, provides immunity to Mike Tyson and, critically, wards off dementia and makes you clever.

So, here’s the thing: if bacon can be used to combat the negatives effects of alcohol, while alcohol can prevent you from losing your marbles as a result using bacon to counter the downside of alcohol (something we have dubbed the “Baco-Booze Harmonious Feedback Loop”), then you are in a position to exploit the increased intelligence alcohol confers.

February 18, 2014

Historical hooch – George Washington’s own White Lightning

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Uploaded on 16 Feb 2011

Many know George Washington as a general and statesman, but few think of America’s first president as a preeminent entrepreneur, operating the most successful whiskey distillery in the late 18th century. At its height, Washington’s distillery produced over 11,000 gallons of liquor a year, supplying the surrounding area and becoming one of his most lucrative business ventures.

At Washington’s former plantation, Mount Vernon, a group of historic interpreters are looking to bring this story to a wider audience. Thanks to a fully functioning replica of Washington’s distillery (and special dispensation from the Virginia General Assembly), George Washington’s rye whiskey is once again being made and sold to the public.

In November, Reason.tv followed the entire process as Dave Pickerell, Master Distiller and former Vice President of Operations for Maker’s Mark, and Steve Bashore, Mount Vernon Distillery Manager, oversaw a two week production run while adhering as strictly as possible to 18th century means and methods. The result is an 80-proof reminder of the nation’s first president and the entrepreneurial ideals of colonial America.

Shot, edited and produced by Meredith Bragg. Music by www.audionautix.com. Approx. 6 minutes.

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for the link.

January 24, 2014

President Obama in hot water for not lying about marijuana

Filed under: Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

Politicians get into trouble for shading the truth, being “economical” with the truth, or just flat-out making shit up. It’s what politicians do. In this case, however, President Obama is taking flak because he didn’t lie:

Prohibitionists were outraged by President Obama’s recent observation that marijuana is safer than alcohol — not because it is not true but because it contradicts the central myth underlying public support for the war on drugs. According to that myth, certain psychoactive substances are so dangerous that they cannot be tolerated, and the government has scientifically identified them. In reality, the distinctions drawn by our drug laws are arbitrary, and marijuana is the clearest illustration of that fact.

“As has been well documented,” Obama told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview published on Sunday, “I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.” When Remnick pressed him to say whether marijuana is in fact less dangerous than alcohol, the president said yes, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer.”

Judging from survey data, that is not a very controversial position. According to a recent CNN poll, 87 percent of Americans think marijuana is no more dangerous than alcohol, and 73 percent say it is less dangerous. Yet Obama’s statement does seem inconsistent with his administration’s stubborn defense of marijuana’s placement on Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a category supposedly reserved for drugs with a high abuse potential that have no recognized medical value and cannot be used safely, even under a doctor’s supervision.

[…]

You can see why pot prohibitionists reacted with dismay to Obama’s comment — not because it was false but because it was true. As measured by acute toxicity, accident risk, and the long-term health effects of heavy consumption, marijuana is clearly safer than alcohol. That does not mean smoking pot poses no risks, or that drinking is so dangerous no one should ever do it. It simply means that the risks posed by alcohol are, on the whole, bigger than the risks posed by marijuana. So if our drug laws are supposed to be based on a clear-eyed evaluation of relative risks, some adjustment would seem to be in order.

December 5, 2013

Happy Repeal Day!

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Eighty years ago today, the US finally repealed Prohibition. Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken was among the first to publicly celebrate the demise of the hated legislation:

HL Mencken celebrates repeal of Prohibition, December 1933

Published on 5 Dec 2012

In honor of Repeal Day, which celebrates the end of America’s “noble experiment” in banning alcoholic beverages, Reason TV is happy to introduce you to George Cassiday, a man whose life and work should be taught to every schoolkid — and to every member of Congress hell-bent on legislating the nation’s morals.

From 1920 through 1930 — the thick of the Prohibition era — Cassiday supplied illegal liquor throughout the halls of Congress. Known as “The Man in the Green Hat,” Cassiday was the Capitol’s highest-profile bootlegger, with a client list that included senior members of the Republican and Democratic Parties. How instrumental was he to the D.C. power elite? He even had his own office in the House and Senate office buildings.

Cassiday gave up the liquor trade after his arrest in 1930, but gained notoriety by penning a series of front-page articles for The Washington Post about his days as Congress’ top bottle man.

Though he never named names, Cassiday’s stories detailed every aspect of his former business — and the depths of hypocrisy in Washington. By his own estimation, “four out of five senators and congressmen consume liquor either at their offices or their homes.” Appearing days before the 1930 mid-term elections, Cassiday’s revelations caused a national stir and helped sweep pro-Prohibitionist — and ostensibly tee-totaling — congressmen and senators out of power.

Today, with the rise of cocktail culture and prohibition-vogue in full swing, Cassiday’s life and legacy are being re-discovered. Through books such as Garrett Peck’s Prohibition in Washington, D.C.: How Dry We Weren’t to New Columbia Distillery’s Green Hat Gin, the remarkable story of George Cassiday — “The Man in the Green Hat” — is again being told.

Reason TV spoke with Cassiday’s son, Fred, author Garrett Peck, and New Columbia Distillery’s John Uselton to discuss George Cassiday and the end of Prohibition.

November 29, 2013

“This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Brian Lilley is against a new bill that would provide the police with the power to demand that drivers submit to breath testing even when there’s no evidence that they’ve been drinking:

It’s the latest attempt to crack down hard on the ever-shrinking problem of drunk driving. The news release touting Bill C-556 states that, if passed, it would, “amend the Criminal Code to allow police officers to perform systematic random breathalyzer testing regardless of whether or not the driver shows signs of impairment.”

That means police don’t need a reason to give you a test.

They don’t need to see dilated pupils, smell booze on your breath or even have you admit you had a beer while watching the game.

The bill would give police a big increase in power and that’s not a step I want to take.

No one supports drunk driving, no one that I know anyway. And attempts to deal with the issue have largely been successful.

Statistics Canada is clear — drunk driving has been on the decrease for years now.

“The impaired driving rate generally declined from the mid-1980s to 2006, when it reached its lowest point in over 25 years, at 234 incidents per 100,000 population,” reads a report from the agency.

Back in the mid-80s there were roughly 600 incidents of impaired driving per 100,000 of population; in 2011 the Canadian average across all provinces and territories was 262 incidents per 100,000.

[…]

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees all Canadians are protected from unreasonable search and seizure.

This bill would shred that protection.

This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard and those in favour of ever expanded police powers are just waiting for Parliament to step on it.

Canadians need to say no to drunk driving and they need to say no to this bill.

November 17, 2013

QotD: Mixed drinks

Filed under: History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:45

If, as Philip Larkin observed not so long ago, the age of Jazz (not the same thing as the Jazz Age) ran roughly from 1925 to 1945, the age of the cocktail covered the same sort of period, perhaps starting a little earlier and taking longer to die away finally. The two were certainly associated at their inception. Under Prohibition in the United States, the customer at the speakeasy drank concoctions of terrible liquor and other substances added in order to render the result just about endurable, while the New Orleans Rhythm Kings or the Original Memphis Five tried to take his mind further off what he was swallowing. The demise of jazz cannot have had much to do with that of the cocktail, which probably faded away along with the disappearance of servants from all but the richest private houses. Nearly every cocktail needs to be freshly made for each round, so that you either have to employ a barman or find yourself consistently having to quit the scene so as to load the jug. Straight drinks are quicker and guests can — indeed often do — help themselves to them.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

November 6, 2013

“Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

David Warren explains why Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford had to exist:

… every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

[…]

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

Update: Take it away, Taiwanese animators!

October 15, 2013

QotD: Duties of a good host

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Up to a point (i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like), go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage. On the same reasoning, give them big drinks rather than small — with exceptions to be noted later. Serious drinkers will be pleased and reassured, unserious ones will not be offended, and you will use up less chatting time going round to recharge glasses.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

October 3, 2013

Everything old is new again … this time it’s mead making a comeback

Filed under: Business, USA, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

BBC News Magazine looks at the rise of modern-day mead in the North American market:

Long relegated to the dusty corners of history, mead — the drink of kings and Vikings — is making a comeback in the US.

But what’s brewing in this new crop of commercial meaderies — as they are known — is lot more refined from the drink that once decorated tables across medieval Europe.

[…]

Mr Alexander is not the only one to have caught on to the commercial potential of mead.

Vicky Rowe, the owner of mead information website GotMead, says interest in the product in the US has exploded in the past decade.

“We went from 30-40 meaderies making mead to somewhere in the vicinity of 250 in the last 10 years,” she says.

“I like to say that everything old is new again — people come back to what was good once.”

[…]

The mead of the past was often sweet, and didn’t appeal to many drinkers who were just looking for something good to pair with food. But mead has since changed.

“People don’t realise that just because it has honey in it, [mead] doesn’t need to be sweet,” says Ms Rowe, citing the proliferation of not only dry meads but also meads flavoured with fruits, herbs, and spicy peppers.

Yet hampering efforts towards building mead awareness is also the name mead itself.

Technically, mead is classified as wine by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates alcohol sales and labelling in the US.

This means that mead has to be labelled as “honey wine”, which doesn’t help combat people’s perception of the drink as being as cloyingly sweet.

“How do people recognise it as mead if you can’t say the word?” says Ms Rowe.

September 14, 2013

Highlights of the 2013 Ig Nobels

Filed under: Humour, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

At Ars Technica, Dean Burnett rounds up the wins and near-misses of the 2013 Ig Nobel awards:

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 12 at a meeting of nerds at Harvard University. The prizes are given for genuine scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.”

So, at first glance, the research may strike you as somewhat baffling, surreal or even downright ridiculous. But science is rarely frivolous. None of the experiments awarded an Ig Nobel will have been the result of casual whims or unplanned notions, like the cast of TV series Jackass being set loose in a laboratory. If any of the prize-winning experiments really are “mad,” it is a determined, dedicated, thorough sort of madness that is probably a lot more worrying in the long run.

Like the Nobels, the Ig Nobels are awarded for individual categories.

[…]

Psychology

The Ig Nobel for psychology went to Laurent Bègue and colleagues for showing through experiment that drunk people consider themselves more attractive. With alcohol such a common intoxicant the world over, analysis of its effects on human behavior is never not-relevant. People may think it’s obvious that drunk people find themselves more attractive, but that’s never been objectively demonstrated. And with alcohol having so many knock-on effects for society, assessing how it affects people’s behavior is always potentially useful.

This award must be doubly welcome after the original experiment about whether drunk people are more aggressive if you spill their drinks had to be abandoned due to the hospitalization of several post-docs.

[…]

Probability

Bert Tolkamp and colleagues showed that cows are not more likely to lie down if they have been standing up for a longer time. Ergo, cows don’t get tired. This could be useful data for the agricultural industry.

This study was chosen ahead of the other favorite, a study titled “The defecation habits of wild bears in areas of high forestation.”

QotD: Humanity and alcohol

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Anthropologists assure us that wherever we find man he speaks. Chimpanzee-lovers notwithstanding, no animal other than man is capable of laughter. And, although some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian jungle might conceivably provide an exception tomorrow, every present-day society uses alcohol, as have the majority of those of the past. I am not denying that we share other important pleasures with the brute creation, merely stating the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.

There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate. A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War. Not only is drink here to stay; the moral seems to be that when it goes, we go too.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

August 20, 2013

QotD: Queen Victoria’s Tipple

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

1/2 tumbler red wine
Scotch

I have it on the authority of Colm Brogan that the Great Queen was “violently opposed to teetotalism, consenting to have one cleric promoted to a deanery only if he promised to stop advocating the pernicious heresy,” and that the above was her dinner-table drink, “a concoction that startled Gladstone” — as I can well believe.

The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once.

Scholars will visualize, pouring in the whisky, the hand of John Brown, the Queen’s Highland servant, confidant and possibly more besides; and I for one, if I listen carefully can hear him muttering, “Och, Your Majesty, dinna mak’ yoursel’ unweel wi’ a’ yon parleyvoo moothwash — ha’e a wee dram o’ guid malt forbye.” Or words to that effect.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

July 21, 2013

Sad tale of whiskey theft

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

It puzzles me why the alleged thief didn’t just sell the stuff and buy (far cheaper) modern booze with the proceeds.

The owner of an historic inn in Pittsburgh has brought charges against a former tenant she says was supposed safeguard 50 bottles of vintage whiskey valued at more than $100,000 but drank it all instead.

The owner of the South Broadway Manor Bed and Breakfast, Patricia Hill, found 104 bottles of Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey when she bought the historic mansion and converted it into a bed and breakfast. It had originally belonged to Pittsburgh businessman J.P. Brennan.

The whiskey had been distilled in 1912 and given to Brennan in 1918, she told ABC News affiliate WTAE.

“There were four cases, 52 bottles, manufactured by an old distillery here in the Township that went out of business many years ago,” Barry Pritts, chief of police in Scottdale, Pa., said today.

He said the bottles had been made and sold before Prohibition and then passed down.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

June 4, 2013

LCBO intransigence triggers constitutional challenge

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

This is kinda fascinating:

What started out as a simple privacy commissioner complaint has turned into a constitutional challenge of the validity of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) — and this time the Board has only itself to blame for the brouhaha, proving once again that Ontario’s LCBO is so far out of touch with the realities of today’s world, it’s downright scary. At a time when they should be thinking about transitioning out of the alcohol business, the Ontario provincial government and the LCBO seem to be clinging to its very existence with even more tenacity and verve than before. They’re like the old boxer clinging to past glories who just has to show you the right hook he can still throw — yet only ends up throwing out his shoulder. In the LCBO’s case, the word “Control” won’t be pried away from its “cold dead hands” anytime soon… or will it? In its most recent fight, the LCBO is proving it is a government entity most in need of being on the chopping block — if not the auction block — of government institutions that should be moved over to the private sector.

[. . .]

Why the LCBO has chosen to play hardball over such a trivial matter is incomprehensible; according to reports, the LCBO has decided to appeal the order and has asked that the records be sealed in the process. This seems to contravene common sense. “A government entity has chosen to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to fight an order by the Privacy Commissioner whose sole purpose is to make these decisions,” Porter says.

Now fed up with the collection of information, Porter and his team have decided to question the entire existence of the LCBO as it contravenes the Constitution Act of 1867 by challenging the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA) itself — which bans the free flow of goods (including alcohol, wine and beer) between the provinces. The argument hinges on Section 121: “All articles of Growth, Produce or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” This challenge could, and would if successful, lead to the downfall of the LCBO. Social networks were abuzz with the news about the challenge. Alfred Wirth, president and director at HNW Management Inc., applauded the news on Facebook: “Any progress towards competition among merchandisers is to be appreciated – even if it’s for domestically-produced products. Several years ago, when I questioned why Ontario couldn’t privatize the LCBO, the then Minister of Health said that alcoholic beverages were a crucial health matter which the province had to control. Despite the risk of people (including underage youth) freezing to death during our cold Ontario winters, he did not explain why the sale of crucial winter coats could be entrusted to Sears, the Bay, etc…” While Porter himself posted an analogy to cigarettes: “How about this one. Cigarettes are so dangerous that you cannot advertise them on TV, print, billboards or even display them behind a counter… but they can be sold at any store. Alcohol is so dangerous that it has to be sold at a government store with specially-trained people… but the government itself floods the market with advertising and even publishes a free magazine where 50 per cent of the content is about consuming the product.”

Energy lawyer Ian Blue has joined the Vin de Garde team for the action. I interviewed Blue in 2010 about the IILA, which is now under fire. Here’s what Blue had to say: “The law that gives provincial liquor commissions a monopoly and the power they have, is federal law, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act; it’s highly arguable that the law is unconstitutional. It’s also pretty apparent to government constitutional lawyers, who are knowledgeable in these matters… [If the Supreme Court of Canada] takes a hard look at the IILA, and if they do an intellectually honest interpretation, the IILA probably cannot stand up to constitutional scrutiny.”

In 2009, lawyer Schwisberg commented to me when speaking about the IILA: “The very underpinning of Canada’s liquor regulatory system is unconstitutional. Isn’t that a mind blower?” Blue said: “There is nothing natural or logical about the existing system. It bullies, fleeces and frustrates wine producers and the public… If the IILA were to fall… wine producers could probably make quantum leaps of progress towards a fairer and more rational system of liquor and wine distribution in Canada.”

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