Drying Out America
The first step is to admit you have a problem. And America, you have a problem. Each year, alcohol abuse costs us $249 billion in lowered productivity, higher healthcare costs, added law enforcement expenses, and motor vehicle accidents. Every year, thanks to booze, 88,000 of us die. And we drink more every year, as the rates of associated liver disease and cancers, as well as fetal alcohol syndrome, increase as well.
Our drinking problem has been with us for as long as we’ve been a nation. Various solutions have been attempted, the most famous being Prohibition, which went into effect a century ago and failed spectacularly.
Alcohol wasn’t always a problem. In colonial times, it was considered a friend that dulled pain, brightened spirits, fought fatigue, and soothed indigestion. It was a medicine with many benefits, and often safer to drink than water. Even the Puritans, for all their disapproval of self-indulgence, didn’t outlaw liquor — there was more beer than drinking water on the Mayflower. In a sermon, Puritan minister Increase Mather referred to alcohol as “a good creature of God,” though drunkards were “from the Devil.”
Drunkenness wasn’t considered a social problem in those days. When people drank to excess, the community dealt directly with them. Drunkards were placed in stocks in the center of town for public humiliation, fined, or whipped. Robert Coles of the Massachusetts colony, who was known for his drunkenness, was made to wear a “D” of red cloth on a
