Rather than a short disclaimer, this article is a satire on the dangers of the risky behavior in drinking known as preloading when social drinkers are determined to party by drinking before a public event due to high alcohol prices at the even and/or strict liquor laws. After my monologue on preloading, I will rant about social drinkers who become problem drinkers, which is when social drinking becomes a sociopathy. Finally, I will give my take about American Psychopath and the rebooted Halloween movies to explain my conclusions about problem drinking.
Before I move onto the body of the rant itself, my exposure to alcohol and drugs needs to be shared because I truly care for the social drinker.
During my life, I have mostly been a light drinker thanks to intolerance of alcohol due to my Asian physiology when one or two drinks often made me drunk. As well, I practiced safe drinking because I was never exposed to peer pressure over social drinking.
Apart from the rare forays into drinking until my early 30s, my drinking days only occurred around social events. 2007 was a great challenge because of reconnecting with a friend I had met 10 years earlier who is a moderate drinker.
Today, I don't drink alcohol and am totally dry since June 2014 mainly because I believe in sobriety and have continued prayer and meditation to distract me from seeking comfort in the bottle.
Because I had a brief history of binge drinking and other risky behavior until I stopped drinking in 2009, I retain the privilege of experience to be the party pooper in regards to drinking. However, the following rant is because I am stone cold sober.
Addictive behaviors occur long before children are introduced to alcohol and drugs around middle school (grades 5-7). Peer pressure only causes addictions when children want to fit in and socialize.
So I am glad that I chose to not drink until well into my 30s. YMMV.
Tolerance to alcohol occurs when a person who drinks needs more alcohol during regular drinking hours in addition to the copious amounts of drink at home. However, the myth that drinking is fun is encouraged by the fact that you only live once, an attitude that will be addressed later on in this rant.
According to the anti-drinking propaganda, it is said that risky drinking threatens people who once lived productive lives.
In aother myth, public health (doctors, nurses, hospitals) is anti-drinking. Actually public health recommends 1-2 drinks a day as being safer than drinking up to 14 drinks or more over a 60-hour period on the weekend, depending on whether everyone is in party mood, due to a public holiday or other event.
Perhaps it is more fun and entertaining to drink 1-2 drinks with each meal from breakfast, lunch and dinner, as long as the intended purpose is social drinking, be it at home or every day. For the purpose of social drinking is to be of good cheer, apparently.
As has been stated before, preloading behavior occurs when prices are high and laws are strict.
According to health officials, alcohol preloading is harmful, only if the drinker drinks more alcohol later on in the evening. Thus, the risk of excessive drinking is higher than not preloading. The resulting higher consumption levels increase risk for injuries and possibly death.
Strict alcohol laws increase the chance of preloading. Additionally, licensed establishments have a high risk of liability serving already inebriated patrons.
Thus, lowering alcohol prices tends to lower risk of preloading.
Therefore, liquor laws need to be moderated. Liquor prices need to be low enough to encourage less preloading but not so low as to encourage binge drinking. Additionally, both binge drinking and preloading need to be addressed through the use of propaganda advertisements.
It is less risky and cheaper to drink 1-2 drinks at bars, pubs and restaurants with affordable prices every day of the week than to preload on the weekend and risk higher levels of consumption.
From the viewpoint of the consumer, public education from middle school to college level should still discourage preloading and risk factors that may be encouraged by the "you only live once" myth (YOLO).
You do live once, but it is a factor that is disproved by preloading due to strict liquor laws and high alcohol prices.
Contrary to the myth that preloading is safe, more people risk dying from alcohol-related injuries including poisoning, fights at establishments and car accidents.
From the viewpoint of sobriety, preloading might indicate future risk for alcoholism when drinking also occurs during the rest of the week. However, I believe social drinkers are potential alcoholics when inebriated if they are led to the belief that drinking is so fun that every day must be a party in order for them to feel in control. After that suspension of disbelief, they may turn every evening into a party and the line blurs between social drinking and alcoholism.
However, the alcoholic will deny he is an alcoholic because of two pernicious attitudes about drinking: "everyone is doing it" and YOLO. However, a minority of people drink that much or more, while the majority of people may be their concered friends and family who are saddened by the fact that drink became more important than them.
I know of people who met in bars, had a few drinks, and flew in for a Vegas wedding, including Britney Spears who had hooked up with a high school friend, partied, got married and subsequently got the marriage annulled. Fortunately her Vegas wedding was not a career-breaker.
Despite all the late night talk show hosts joking about Spears at that time, the risk of ruined ratings reduced their call for less drinking. That's because the entertainment industry needs the extra revenue from alcohol sales and often considers safe drinking behavior to be an economic threat to their industry.
Yet safe drinking behavior is actually no threat to their industry because more social drinkers can spend each day drinking up to 6 drinks a day with meals per person and not lose sleep over preloading and binge drinking on weekends.
Also the purpose of buying liquor - preferably beer - at night is not to drink it all away before morning but to have enough alcohol to stay within the 6 drinks a day limit. Public drinking education should consist of math quizzes to meet that limit and stay within it, in order to maintain a healthy social drinking climate.
Indeed, the sly promotion of "drinking is fun" by a bar or club is done to obtain high drink sales to derive enough alcoholic revenue to offset the hourly minimum wage. Beer bongs, drinking shooters off hot models, and associated antics are actually done to encourage social drinking at levels which not too many social drinkers can sustain. Nor does ladies' night with half price on shooters promote safe drinking.
All this does is lead to a 1-5 percent of a party of revelers to encounter blackouts and all the mayhem that happens during blackouts, especially the ones that last a month, a year, or maybe even a decade or two.
Right now, I have to discuss sociopaths who drink, because they are the people who have lied to themselves so much that drinking is fun. One successful sociopath too many has said, "I like to have vodka in my cereal every morning." They thus center their lives around being the pernicious party animal.
Although the public health officials have labeled them "problem drinkers," their problem is the ability to believe the lies that they tell other people about their drinking. Since their world revolves around drinking and socializing, they are able to socially engineer a way to stay drunk throughout their lives and often turn binge drinking and preloading into performance art.
Along the way, alcoholic sociopaths give a bad rap to successful sociopaths like celebrities, business people and even Randolph Hearst, a publisher who made his money from alcohol advertisers before Prohibition but also made money by being a moral compass when Mae West came to New York City. Yet Mae West helped Hollywood make money by challenging the moral taboos about being a sexy and successful sociopath for the entertainment industry.
A marvelous Hollywood celebrity who was quite successful during her career is Tallulah Bankhead, who not only drank her way around Hollywood but also snorted her way around the secret party scenes, too. Being a relatively successful sociopath, she also slept her way from casting couch to the beds of other celebrities, men and women alike. Once she had to get a hysterectomy after a bad case of gonorrhea, and said in passing to the hospital surgeon "If you think this is going to stop my behavior, think again."
Thus, society must be ever vigilant about sociopaths who shall be detected during their first forays into social drinking before their white lies lead to the bigger whoppers they tell themselves once they totally buy into the YOLO attitude and make it their motto for life. For alcohol and sociopaths are a dangerous mix that may lead to risk of violence to themselves and their loved ones.
Anyway, I am all done with ranting and would like to thank Hollywood for popularizing social drinking (Jackass), cocaine (Traffik), risky behavior (American Pie), decadent hedonism (those crazy movies from the 30s involving dancing the shimmie while dressed in sheer fabric), and a sociopathy that fails so horribly that sexual psychopathy becomes confused with benign sociopathic behavior by the sociopath's victims (American Psychopath).
If it wasn't for Hollywood, then we wouldn't have all the failed sociopaths who crossed the line into their five minutes of fame. If it wasn't for the brilliance of American mainstream media to enshrine individualism as freedom from neo-conservative sheep mentality, then there wouldn't be the Craigslist killer meme.
In conclusion, I would like to insert a sober moment here to end this rant by stating that the sociopath is not a broken individual as a child. Rather, she is not a victim of child abuse, neglect or anything that horrible.
Rather, a sociopath learns early that society is based on white lies which help us to sleep at nights. When a child is fibbing, it is child abuse to force them to stop lying when few parents can stomach telling their children the truth too early but sometimes failing to figure out the truth about their society.
For a sociopath learns early in childhood that toeing the line comes with benefits and risks, including telling a white lie to ensure family harmony. What a brilliant career in big business awaits them, if only parents were taught from middle school about ethic and morals in a manner than benefits every child.
Indeed, when drinking becomes a sociopathy in middle school, parents should admit to the double standard and determine if they are narcissists, empaths or sociopaths instead of lying about these descriptions for what passes as normal human behavior.
Even so, "normal" is the biggest white lie to promote social harmony while leading to the stigma of the mentally ill without just cause. As is "denial" a white lie when declaring that a psychopath is sane.
Personality disorders are not a sign of insanity unless a person described as sociopathic are mistreated by former friends who can only see through the lies of the sociopath but have little insight into the white lies that lead to real whoppers like "the mentally ill are not really normal people".
Truth be told: Hollywood manufactured the propaganda that psychopaths are horrible people but the reboot of Halloween turn the story of a failed sociopath Michael Myers, who was neglected as a child but was molded by unprofessional therapy by Doctor Samuel Loomis and the incompetence of the State into a serial killer, the criminal psychopath.
However, American Psychopath is not an honest portrayal of sexual psychopathy because it leaves out the antihero's childhood. On the other hand the rebooted Halloween movies is only a portrayal of two kinds of sociopaths, the failed sociopath known as the criminal psychopath and serial killer Michael Myers and the successful sociopath, Dr Samuel Loomis.
Hollywood tells us white lies about sociopaths like Myers while showing Doctor Loomis as a successful sociopath. It also only documents the sexual psychopathy of the antihero in American Psychopath in adulthood, but offers no insight on the fact that he is a failed sociopath whose social drinking helped him to fit into urban society.
Those people who fail as sociopaths sometimes develop a psychopathy if they maladapt to the stress that society places on them. Otherwise, they would be make fine successful sociopaths such as many CEOs, world leaders, and celebrities whose normative behavior endear them to their fans.
Perhaps society is just as subtly as sociopathic as it is empathetic, narcissistic, for it encourages us to be normal in our lives, which might be described as one big snafu where the situation is normal but all fouled up.
On a positive note, 95 percent of people are not sociopaths. Most of them do not drink and few of them turn to drugs. Society is not inherently sociopathic. Rather, it might be that the empathetic and the narcissists in all of us realize how to be successful without harming other people.
YMMV
Originally posted on Oct 13, 2014 at 5:55 PM
American Psychopath: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Psycho_%28film%29
Halloween: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_(2007_film)
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