(4 of 10)
Social Custom. The National Council on Alcoholism, a voluntary health organization, has drawn up a checklist of 26 questions for drinkers. In its view, a yes answer to any one of them warns of possible alcoholism. Some of the council's questions: Do you drink heavily after a disappointment or a quarrel? Did you ever wake up on the morning after and discover you could not remember part of the evening before, even though you did not pass out? Do you try to have a few extra drinks when others will not know it? Are you secretly irritated when your family or friends discuss your drinking? Have you often failed to keep the promises you have made to yourself about controlling or cutting down on your drinking?
The Rutgers University Center of Alcohol Studies offers a more concise definition: "An alcoholic is one who is unable consistently to choose whether he shall drink or not, and who, if he drinks, is unable consistently to choose whether he shall stop or not." Yet the more researchers study alcoholism, the more complex they realize it is. There are, in fact, almost as many "alcoholisms" as there are alcoholics. Behavioral Scientist Don Cahalan of the University of California at Berkeley objects to even attempting a strict definition. Drinking, he says, is a continuum, and no one can draw an exact line between an alcoholic and a severely troubled drinker. "The issue," he states, "is why some people apparently waste their lives on alcohol while others don't. What's the 'glue' that binds some people to their alcohol problems?" Adds Marty Mann, the woman who founded the National Council on Alcoholism: "No one has ever found the way to turn a nonalcoholic into an alcoholic. There is a basic difference in people."
For those who are susceptible, U.S. society offers powerful temptations. Ob serves NIAAA'S Morris Chafetz: "There are houses where they don't even say anything to you when you come in the door before they ask, 'What will you have to drink?' " He also notes that "in our crazy-quilt value system, masculinity means that if you can hold a lot of alcohol and seemingly not show its effects, that's somehow a sign of strength." Chafetz points out that in some other countries—Italy and Israel, for example —drinking is an accepted social custom, but there is little alcoholism. Why? The reason, he thinks, is that alcohol in those countries is a companion to a happy occasion, not the occasion itself.
Many other countries, however, have a much worse problem with alcohol than the U.S. France, for instance, has the highest rate of alcoholism in the world (an estimated 10% to 12% of the population, including some children), and the Soviet Union may not be far behind. Soviet newspapers now blame 60% of their country's murders, holdups and burglaries on that old demon vodka. Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev gave tacit recognition to the problem when U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited him recently. Discussing with Kissinger plans for a U.S.-built soft-drink factory in the Soviet Union, Brezhnev mused: "Maybe we can teach our people to drink less vodka and more Pepsi-Cola."