Mexico Prison Bar

It's a real wonder the Mexican police force is a disaster and violence is at insane levels in much of the country.

Drunken Owls

This would never happen in a puritanical country like the United States....

German police said on Tuesday they had discovered a paralytic owl that appeared to have drunk too much Schnapps from two discarded bottles.

"A woman walking her dog alerted the police after seeing the bird sitting by the side of the road oblivious to passing traffic," Frank Otruba, spokesman for the police in the southwestern city of Pforzheim, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The Brown Owl didn't appear to be injured and officers quickly concluded that it had had one too many. One of its eyelids was drooping, adding to the general impression of inebriation.

"It wasn't staggering around and we didn't breathalyze it but there were two little bottles of Schapps in the immediate vicinity," said Otruba. "We took it to a local bird expert who has treated alcoholized birds before and she has been giving it lots of water."

The bird will be released once it has sobered up, police said.

Historical Image of the Day

I am going to spend the next several days linking to these depictions of African-Americans in 19th century magazines from the New York Public Library collections and usefully linked to by the always excellent Sociological Images.

"A Privilege?" 1875

Text:
"Wife: I wish you were not allowed in here."


This image shows segregation as a good thing. Because blacks can't be served by whites, they can't go into taverns. Thus, blacks are saved from the scourge of alcohol. It's absurd on the face of it, but useful in showing how whites could justify segregation in any number of ways.

Damrak

If you've never had a martini with Damrak Gin, you basically haven't lived. This despite the sentence fragment on the home page. But I'll take bad grammar for this level of awesomeness. Even if you claim to not like gin (which shows bad character right there), you will love a Damrak martini. But no olives--you don't want to cover the taste of this delicious gin.

Daryl will not only back me up on this, but I owe him forever for introducing me to this glorious gin.

The Rich: Our Binge Drinkers

Interesting:

Among adults, young men, ages 18-34, are the biggest bingers. Whites are the ethnic group most likely to binge. And when you take a look at income, the bingeing prevalence was highest — 19 percent — in households making $75,000 a year. Bingeing was lowest at the other end of the income spectrum — 12 percent for people in households making less than $25,000.

Why would rich people be the biggest bingers? For people who only have cell phones, the numbers are higher:

Finally, the CDC's main conclusions about binge drinking come from a phone survey of more than 400,000 people conducted over landlines. A smaller, though still big, survey of nearly 16,000 people with cellphones showed an even higher rate of binge drinking — about 21 percent.

So rich young people drink a lot.  Do the rich drink more because they can afford it? Do we all wish we could drink more but we just can't work it out? Unless we are really poor of course.

Drinking and Watching

Like Wendell Jamieson, I increasingly find my drinking habits heavily influenced by the films I am watching. I first started noticing this in the last year as I've engaged in television series for the first time in a decade. I realized when watching Deadwood how much more straight whiskey I was drinking, sometimes backed with a beer, sometimes not. After finishing that show, I've moved on to Mad Men, which of course has spawned a whole literature on the nation's alcohol habits in the early 1960s. And while I haven't been drinking old-fashioneds like Don Draper, I have significantly increased my consumption of martinis and Manhattans, while my drinking of straight whiskey has declined just as much.

I like the idea of trying to match my alcohol with the movie. I can't be too exacting--after all, while I have a not small amount of alcohol in the house, I hardly have the money for everything. But I can be in the ballpark most of the time. Of course, when it's a movie I haven't watched before, I have to guess what the alcohol of choice will be. Last night, I watched Lukas Moodysson's fine film Together, about a Swedish commune in the early 70s. I figured that since they were Swedes, vodka would be the drink of choice. I was wrong (it was wine) but whatever. It's fun to guess.

I Need an LCD for My Drink

This is very likely the dumbest thing I've seen in months. For a mere forty clams, you can get some crappy vodka that has a goddamn screen on it. You can program it to say whatever you want. Amuse your friends! Ask your sweetheart to marry you with the gift of booze. I might get a bottle and never touch it (swear), but program it to read when it is picked up, "This was a test. Your intention to drink from this bottle proves you're an asshole. Get out of my house."

This probably isn't the dumbest gimmick given to a vodka bottle, but it still nears the level of dumb that I call the "Steve Miller's Lyrics Level."

Shorter Coolidge Administration: Drinkers Deserve to Die

A student sent me this remarkable piece about the federal government poisoning alcohol during Prohibition in a failed attempt to force people to stop drinking it.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly.

The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible."

 .....

His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: "[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic," read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner's office.

Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country's poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff."

Truly remarkable. I already knew the Coolidge administration could not care less about the poor, but I had no idea they openly murdered thousands of Americans. Then, as now, conservatives blamed the problem on the poor. If only they didn't drink, they wouldn't ingest government poison!

A Product We Can All Get Behind

Or at least manly men like myself....

From House and Garden magazine, 1961.

The history of products designed specifically for men to get them to clean, smell good, be comfortable doing things defined as feminine, etc., is pretty interesting. And this is a classicly extreme case.

I wonder if Don Draper would approve of this ad? 


Via the always useful Sociological Images.

Shorter New Mexican Politicians: "We Need to Reduce Our Population through Violent Means"

This is obviously a terrible idea:

A bill that would allow concealed handguns in some restaurants that serve beer and wine has been pre-filed for the 2010 legislative session, which begins later this month. The bill, sponsored by state Sen. George Munoz, D-Gallup, would allow concealed handguns in “a restaurant licensed to sell only beer and wine that derives no less than 60 percent of its annual gross receipts from the sale of food for consumption on the premises.”

I just don't understand the purpose of this type of proposal. Why on earth would anybody need a concealed weapon in a beer/wine bar or restaurants (since 60% of the income apparently must come from food)? I don't buy the whole "self-defense" bit. You know what's good self defense? Not having to worry about some drunk shooting you unexpectedly. I suppose my favorite haunts are probably off limits on this, as they also serve hard liquor. Still, this just screams "stupid idea" all over, and the fact that a similar bill has already passed New Mexico's house just leaves me more depressed. Maybe I'll go have a drink...

The Economic Crisis Hits Home

One might think the collapse of the academic job market is the most profound way the economic collapses has affected me. But no. Eric describes:

Over Thanksgiving, while visiting family out of town, I went looking for Angostura bitters. There were none at the local liquor store, so I settled for Peychaud’s, thinking nothing of it. Then, over Christmas, I went looking for Angostura bitters here. There were none in the shop, and upon inquiring I was informed that there are none to be found anywhere locally, because none had been manufactured for months. It seems the financial crisis took down the company behind the little bottles.

The proudly Trinidadian firm was supposed to have been rescued in October, and supplies were supposed to hit the Northeast back in the fall. But there are still none hereabouts and as of even date they are reportedly out in the UK.

Even if the works are up and running, it will take a while for bitters to return to shelves everywhere: “You can’t just turn on and off supply of bitters. It’s not like producing bottled water – it’s a very delicate, intricate process.”

What!?!?!?!?!?

As he titles his post, "Coolidge Would Have Sent in the Marines." Damn right he would have. And rightfully so. How long is a good American going to have to live with second-rate bitters?

And we know that we'd have full British support for a bitters-related military action.

Bad Days in American History: October 28. 1919

On this date in 1919, the United States officially went insane. That day marked Congress' overriding of President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, for all intents and purposes banning the consumption of alcohol in this nation.

It's hard to stress how loathsome the temperance movement was. While it's true that early Americans were extreme drunks (as demonstrated amply in W. J. Rorabough's The Alcoholic Republic), the temperance movement moved beyond reforming extreme behavior and into a moral crusade that saw alcohol use as an overarching explanation for everything wrong with America. That included immigration and there were many connections between the temperance movement and the anti-immigration movement that succeeded in closing America's gates to most immigrants by 1924.

Now, one might think that Wilson vetoing the Volstead Act reflects well upon him, but he certainly didn't veto it out of principle. Rather, it was on technical matters concerning its relationship to wartime prohibition. Wilson had supported prohibition as part of the New Freedom when he was elected in 1912. As I was researching this, I was hoping to finally find something worthwhile about Woodrow Wilson; alas, I was again foiled in this quest.

The Volstead Act also demonstrated the worst characteristics of Americans: nativist, puritanical, simple-minded, insular. We became the laughing stock of much of the world (though in fact we were not the only nation to attempt banning alcohol during these years). Of course, prohibition had massive unintended consequences that its priggish supporters neither anticipated nor had any answer for. It made drinking cool again for the first time in decades. It created a massive surge in crime. It led to a huge black market. Police corruption became an epidemic as guys who didn't want to enforce the law found it really easy not to do so. Politicians and other societal leaders rather openly ignored it. Prohibitionists' reaction was simply to demand greater enforcement and tell everyone to go to church.

Prohibition played a major role in the standardization of bad beer in this country. I am just beginning research on a book length project on beer and local breweries in America and I understand that up until Prohibition, local breweries around the nation made a wide variety of sometimes very high quality beer. I hear the original recipe for Coors produces a quite delicious beer, though I have not had it. But after years of not drinking beer, the public had largely lost its taste for complex beers by 1933 and in order to survive, the breweries who managed to reopen after fourteen years found it in their interests to produce weak lagers that appealed to wider audience. I need to research this phenomenon in significantly more detail, but if we have the Volstead Act to blame for Miller Lite and Keystone, I am going to be even more full of rage than I already am.

Of course, the Volstead Act is hardly the only time the nation has decided to criminalize a drug for less than rational reasons. Many of the Volstead Act's less savory elements have contributed to the current War on Drugs. Combine this with a far more advanced police state than we had 90 years ago and you see the elimination of the 4th Amendment from providing any real protections for people, a skyrocketing prison population, and the forcing of perfectly decent people into lives of poverty and stigma because of harmless crimes.

All in all, I wonder if October 28, 1919 isn't one of the very worst days in American history. I know it's not quite on the same level as FDR's executive order placing Japanese- Americans in concentration camps or the founding of the KKK, or the election of George W. Bush, but it's pretty nightmarish. A social and political disaster, it reeked of the most disturbing and close-minded trends in American life that we still have to fight today.

The Tofu of the Bar

I'm glad to see a reaction against the overuse of vodka developing. It's about time.

Of course vodka has its uses. But the drinking habits of my generation have made vodka the primary liquor of choice precisely because it has very little flavor and makes drinking an experience you don't have to think about.

Bourbon

While I don't understand why someone serious about bourbon would stop at the Jim Beam or Wild Turkey distilleries, Jason Wilson's piece on bourbon is pretty good and worth reading.

I thought this bit especially interesting

That's not to say anyone needs to understand esoterica to enjoy bourbon, easily the most accessible and affordable premium spirit in the liquor store. It always surprises me that mixologists or other spirits "educators" so often steer newcomers directly toward Scotch or Irish whiskey or, these days, to trendy ryes. Often the newbies' only experience has been with white spirits, such as flavored vodkas, or with bad cocktails. I've seen it happen many times: The newbie takes one sip of smoky Scotch or spicy rye and doesn't take a second.

Bourbon, on the other hand, is too often dismissed by misguided whiskey snobs as "sweet," which has become the euphemism in food and drink circles for "less sophisticated." This is a shame.

Why would someone steer a newcomer toward scotch? That's a very difficult drink and in my view, unpleasant. I like a good Irish whiskey and I'm glad to see rye come back into fashion. But for my money, there's no better whiskey than a good bourbon. That snobs have decided that bourbon is uncool for the time being because of its sweetness is indeed a shame--if it is a bad thing to enjoy the taste of my drink, I guess I'm just unsophisticated. I know those newbies having a scotch thrust upon them probably would have enjoyed something else and now they probably won't come back to good whiskey for a long time.

Brazil's Caipirinha Guidelines

Now this is governmental action I can fully support:

Brazil's government has published legal guidelines for the popular caipirinha, the most common and extended alcoholic drink of the 190 million population country, and which becomes mandatory as of this month.[...] The purpose of the bill is to establish the guidelines of “identity and quality” to which all caipirinha elaborated in Brazil for domestic consumption or export must abide.

This may seem like a silly thing for governments to be doing, particularly when your military and police forces are out of control, but it's actually a small-but-decent thing the government can do without too much difficulty or effort. Caipirinhas in Brazil are generally delicious, but it's not completely uncommon to come across some that are extremely weak and watered down, or to find cachaca that's clearly not made the way it's supposed to be and whose taste reveals this. This bill seems to address that issue. Additionally, I suppose it's good to try to regulate and make uniform the packaging of cachacas (buying cachaca in a syringe??!?).

Anyhow, the difference between a good caipirinha and a "not good" caipirinha is actually enormous, and I agree with the bill and the Ministry of Agriculture that those who make "illicit caipirinhas" should most certainly be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Say It Ain't So, Coors!

I think I'm going to be sick.... The economic crisis has finally reached critical mass. Coors has decided to finally discontinue Zima for good. Stock up people, this amazing beverage will only be in stores until December and it will be gone for good. Oh, how I'll long for the days of listening to my Boyz II Men and Blues Traveller CDs while sitting down to a couple frosty, refreshingly clear malt beverages. I was going to tie a sweater around my neck and relive those days tonight, but now I'm too sad. Please, Coors, please restart the clear revolution. In these tough economic times, won't somebody think of America's thirst?

Lyrad's Occasional Image

In my experience, the world's finest gin. Hints of orange and lavender make Damrak an everyday drinking kind of gin. Try it poured over ice with a slice of orange. That's summertime heaven.

Book Review, Pamela E. Pennock, Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990

"I think I'll take up smoking
Though I've never smoked before"

Tom Russell
"What Do You Want"

I've always been extremely uncomfortable with the moralistic overtones of anti-smoking fanatics. I am a non-smoker. But the condescension that non-smokers have toward smokers often makes me angry. To what extent should the government regulate the personal behavior of citizens, particularly when they are not hurting others? Yes, second-hand smoke can be bad, especially for children. But unless you are going to regulate the behavior of adults inside their homes, there is little to be done. Outside of that, second-hand smoke isn't really going to hurt you, unless you are in a band or work in a bar. It's not good for you, but neither are a lot of other things that people don't complain about either. They whine about smelling a cigarette and then drive 50 miles in their SUV through massive air pollution, stopping at McDonald's on the way home where they get everything super sized, and then sit and eat it on the couch while watching "American Idol"

On the other hand, there's little question concerning the lack of morality among tobacco officials. Their product does cause cancer, they knew it, and they didn't care. Should cigarette companies be able to advertise on TV? No, I don't think so. Should they target children through Joe Camel and other cartoon figures? Probably not. So clearly, there is a role for government regulation of legal drugs.

It is much the same with alcohol. While I don't smoke, I certainly do drink. It's hard to look back at the temperance movement without laughing. Yet, while prohibition was a failure, it did reduce Americans' drinking consumption. As Pamela Pennock shows in Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950-1990, the Prohibitionist movement was far from dead after World War II. It pushed for a total ban on alcohol, but knowing that was pretty well impossible, had to settle for reductions on advertising pushed on children.

The problem though with limiting advertising aimed at children is that the assumption remains that alcohol is a bad thing. The problem to me is not with alcohol per se, but with the underlying moralistic assumptions of American culture. The constant moralizing is combined with a consumer culture that undermines those morals and personal desires that shows the hypocrisy of so many Americans. They speak of "family values" and then drink, smoke, take drugs, go to prostitutes, cheat on their spouses, etc.

What if we focused on reforming Americans' attitudes toward pleasure rather than think of it as a bad thing that needs regulation? But I guess that would be swimming upstream against 400 years of American Puritanical moralizing. There's no doubt that anti-alcohol groups have done some good things. In the 1970s, drunk driving was not only extremely common but basically unpunished, even when someone was killed. Only with the creation of MADD and intensive lobbying did Americans begin taking drunk driving as a serious offense. I'm glad that has happened. We should continue to make driving drunk socially unacceptable and punishable by law. But I have to wonder if another way to fight these problems isn't making drinking an acceptable everyday occurrence that would make binge drinking less appealing to younger people, as well as a national investment in public transportation that would mean you could drink all you want and still have a reasonable way to get home without driving.

Pennock's book is an interesting overview of the policy debates taking place in the postwar years over restricting the advertising of tobacco and alcohol. I don't want to get into the details of the book in too great of detail. If you have a scholarly or personal interest in issues of alcohol history like I do, then it is an important book. But it is policy and therefore a bit on the dry side. I do want to focus on a couple of interesting issues she touches upon.

First, these debates mirrored postwar debates over free speech. Different makeups of the Supreme Court led to slightly different interpretations of the protections granted to advertisers and broadcasters over advertising sin. One argument the industries consistently fell back upon was the idea of the slippery slope. Once you start banning ads for alcohol and tobacco, what is next? Why not coffee? Sugary drinks? Anything that could be seen as bad for you might be next? Where do you draw the line? These are important questions for anyone thinking about free speech issues, regardless of their interest in these particular products. It is almost impossible to demarcate what is OK and what is not. Almost inevitably, reformers draw the line wherever they are comfortable, which makes it almost impossible to create lasting legal codes with any sense of logic. My sense is that we should ban very little. Perhaps restricting certain sorts of ads to late night hours works, but in reality it just gives those products an aura of naughtiness about them, which just reinforces the problem of overwrought morality in America to begin with.

Second, Pennock offers useful insights on the increased role of science in these debates. While the temperance movement after World War II was still dominated by aging prohibitionists, few took their arguments seriously. But once scientists began studying the effects of smoking, fetal alcohol syndrome, and other affects of these substances on bodies, the terms of the debate began changing. The moral component largely (but certainly not entirely) fell by the wayside and scientific evidence began to take over the now regulatory rather than prohibitionist movements. I think Pennock makes good points here, though she does overstate Americans' love affair with science in the postwar period (92). Rather, Americans were enamored with technology and the good life. Science brought us those things but we've never had a national love affair with science. Large numbers of Americans opposed to teaching Darwinism, discomfort with the effects of the atomic bomb in the early years of the Cold War, and today's baseless skepticism over climate change are just a few examples of the ambivalent relationship Americans have had with science. Technology we love, science we love only when it serves our desires.

My other big criticism of the book is the lack of focus on illegal drugs, especially marijuana. She tries to cut off this criticism early on by saying that she is interested in legal marketing practices (9). OK, but that is a narrow interest. Why not expand the study to ideas about regulation of drugs more generally and use marketing as a tool to understand these questions? I think bringing a discussion of marijuana to these broader questions would make the book all the more interesting and useful for current political debates. Certainly the kind of prohibitionist rhetoric that dominated the temperance movement continues to play a huge role in debates over marijuana. Plus such a discussion would help expose the absurdity of marijuana restriction, at least in comparison to the far more destructive and legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol.

Historical Image of the Day

Woodcut of Puritans in tavern.

I don't have a date on this. But I did get it off this interesting site. It lists all sorts of important things about American history and alcohol. In short, before Prohibition, Americans drank a shocking amount of alcohol. This is almost totally forgotten about today. But Christ did the Puritans like to drink. They would shame most anyone today.

Vodka

Scott is right about the disturbing replacement of gin in martinis for vodka. In fact, a martini with vodka is not a martini, as Scott points out.

I'd go a bit farther though and lament the domination of vodka for my generation's mixed drinks. Frankly, when drinking hard alcohol, one should have to be aware of the existence of alcohol. Otherwise, we are 15 and drinking wine coolers.

I have no particular problem with the occasional vodka drink, but seriously, the preponderance of vodka bugs me an awful lot. Particularly because it has come largely at the expense of gin, the greatest alcohol ever invented.

Also, the whole martini phenomena, particularly when had with vodka, smacks of the worst kind of hipster pretentiousness.