This won’t be the most popular question I’ve ever raised on my Substack platform — especially among my northern California Wine Country neighbors — but how did we come to live in such an alcohol saturated society and nation?
Look around. We not only accept and tolerate a constant presence of alcohol in our daily lives, but we actually celebrate its conspicuous consumption. We glorify and joke about its wanton uses in our arts and literature and everywhere else. Of course it’s all over our TVs and every other media. Tall, tall billboard photos of wine labels and beer bottles held by bikini models and husky dudes accompany our rides down the highway. It doesn’t take too big a crowd before we see a few people wearing a Corona, Heineken, Jack Daniels or Korbel tee shirt or baseball cap.
It should prove sobering about how complicit we are in hiding and disowning the heavy social, economic and tragic impacts of our unquenchable thirst for fermented fruits and grains. But sober is not celebrated by us all that much, now is it?
But hey, we get it. We know alcohol in its many intoxicating forms has been at the center of all civilizations, going back thousands of years even before Biblical times when Jesus first turned water into wine. But here in America, we’ve been on one hell of a bender since we repealed Prohibition 90 years ago, don’t you think?
Are we really that thirsty? Is our consumption pattern “normal?” Or, are we the unwitting subjects of an almighty alcohol industry? Just as much as we want beer, wine and liquor to be legal, we also know alcohol is a source of a terrible social disease.
We blame part of our homelessness problem on alcohol. Broken marriages and domestic violence often have traces of alcohol abuse. The tales of tragedy of a spoiled young life often start with early warning signs of binge drinking all the way back to high school. How many of our movie and music idols crash and burn on too much booze and partying?
Yet, what personal milestone or big time achievement is not saluted with raised glasses of beer, wine or other “adult beverages?” We drink extra on all our holidays, except maybe Easter. During last year’s Super Bowl Sunday football crowds drank 325 million gallons of beer. (That’s $1 billion in sales.)
We are by no means leading up to a neo-prohibition sermon here. But we are still left wondering where so many of us first acquired our seductive relationship with the grape or barley. What about you?
By the numbers
More than half (52%) of all U.S. households are led by an adult who drinks several times a week, according to National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports. Ten percent of all children (10.5%) live in a household with a “problem drinker.” We’re told often about the mortality rates from drunk drivers, suicides and alcohol-related chronic diseases. But more hidden are the economic and social costs of lost worker production, health care bills, mental health services and the added expenses at several layers of our law enforcement, judicial and vehicle licensing systems.
In the U.S., the economic cost of excessive alcohol use is estimated to be around $300 billion in a recent year, with $179 billion in workplace productivity costs, $28 billion in medical costs, $25 billion in criminal justice costs, and $13 billion in motor vehicle collisions. These figures are from the 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, a federal agency.
What the National Survey and other official reports do not track are the personal, family and community costs of emotional distress, social disruption, substance abuse monitoring and voluntary prevention and rehab efforts by local churches, AA chapters and others. Also not counted is the pain, nausea and suffering of millions of us who never become a statistic, unless we are counted as a “functional alcoholic.”
Right now, at this very moment, there are 300,000 drunk drivers behind the wheel across our nation, according to MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.) Every 52 minutes there is another DUI fatality. We don’t doubt these statistics because we read about at least one, two or more DUI casualties every week in the local newspaper.
Prohibition
“We cannot shut out of view the fact, within the knowledge of all, that the public health, the public morals, and the public safety, may be endangered by the general use of intoxicating drinks; nor the fact established by statistics accessible to every one, that the idleness, disorder, pauperism and crime existing in the country, are, in some degree ... traceable to this evil.”
The above is part of an 1887 U.S. Supreme Court opinion written by Justice John Harlan affirming the right of the state of Kansas to prohibit and hold liable a manufacturer (distiller) of alcohol beverages that might lead to injury or personal loss.
Harlan’s decision was part of a rising anti-alcohol public crescendo that 33 years later led to the enactment of the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Age of Prohibition.
The story and origins of The United States’ era of Prohibition (1920-1933) are both fascinating and full of myths and misinformation. President Herbert Hoover called it “a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.” The “Nobel Experiment” is largely considered to have been a distracting failure but there is much evidence to suggest otherwise.
The Colonies and the young United States always had various forms of “temperance” alliances and “dry” political voices. Throughout the 1800s, several states and counties outlawed alcohol production. The American Temperance Union formed in 1826 and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) came along in 1874. Both were instrumental in campaigning for the passage of the 18th Amendment that outlawed alcohol production in all 48 states. (Important note: the 18th Amendment did not outlaw drinking alcohol, only its production and sales.)
The WCTU protested the proliferation of “working man” saloons and the increased use of alcohol by new immigrating cultures like the Irish and others. As the nation became more urbanized with big cities, the taste for liquor increased. With more drinking, the WCTU claimed, came more domestic violence, disease and new kinds of immortality.
Prohibition was a long time coming. In the decades before the 18th Amendment was ratified, the “dry” majority in the U.S. Congress held a significant lead over the “wets.” Thirty-two states already had laws restricting or prohibiting alcohol trade. The United States had been “dry” for the previous half-year under the Wartime Prohibition Act. The 18th Amendment passed with a 68% majority in both chambers of Congress.
During the decade-plus of Prohibition, liver cirrhosis, alcoholic psychosis, infant mortality and other diseases dramatically declined. Ford Motor Company noted a 50% decline in worker absenteeism. Many town centers were vitalized by new businesses that replaced thousands of closed saloons. These included coffee and sweet shops, “dry” ethnic restaurants and new shops that catered to women shoppers.
All was good, whole and healthier in the new “dry” America except for one major factor — the loss of alcohol tax receipts. It has been calculated that Prohibition cost the U.S. Treasury $11 billion in alcohol taxes and another $300 million to enforce the new rules under the Volstead Act.
Congress tried to solve the loss of revenues by enacting the 19th Amendment, which, in part, replaced the tax on alcohol manufacturing, distribution and sales with a new personal income tax. The new tax was not popular and it only made up for a percentage of the lost alcohol tax.
Prohibition-era stories about rampant crime, the Mafia and Al Capone made for sensational newspaper headlines and newsreels, but the real crime stories were elsewhere. It was hometown and neighborhood bootleggers and moonshiners who kept the “wet” parts of the nation supplied in drink. In something of a reverse picture, the United States is now experiencing this same “underground” and “black market” dynamic playing out between legal and illegal cannabis cultivation and sales.
On Feb. 20, 1933 the U.S. Congress voted to approve the 21st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, effectively repealing the 18th Amendment. Most states installed new alcohol beverage commissions and licensing fees. Major breweries and distillers squeezed out the little local home brewers and craft distilleries and gained new political powers and built the alcohol industry we see today.
There are 229,000 bartenders in America today, according to U.S. Census statistics. Almost 70,000 people work at the nation’s 4,493 breweries. A similar number of wineries (4,123) employ another 48,000 workers.
Wine Country
In my hometown area of Sonoma County, there are almost 800 wineries, including the home bases for the world’s three largest wine operations, Gallo, Kendall-Jackson and Foley Wines. The Sonoma County Winegrape Association, a trade association that represents 1,800 vineyard owners, says its members employ 6,000 full-time workers. Recent grape harvests have produced just under $1 billion in annual crops that end up as finished wines that total a $7.6 billion retail market.
The local Wine Country was much different during the era of Prohibition. European immigrants had brought their Old World winemaking skills and grape varieties with them. These included Foppiano, Seghesio, Pedroncelli, Italian Swiss Colony and Gallo. During Prohibition, these wineries were allowed to grow grapes and provide juice for homemakers and others to make “sacramental wines.” Each American household was allowed to produce 200 gallons of alcoholic beverages per year. Some of the Sonoma County wineries shipped railroad tank cars of “grape juice” to the eastern markets of St. Louis, Chicago, New York and others.
Then and now, Wine Country is much more than just bucolic vineyards and purple and golden beverages. A century after Prohibition, 54,000 people are employed in the hospitality industry that attracts five million annual visitors and an overall economic impact estimated by the county’s Economic Development Board to be $13.5 billion in overnight stays, restaurant meals, daytrip excursions and tasting room wine sales.
Not that anyone wants to try, but it would be impossible to imagine Sonoma County without its 60,000 acres of vineyards and the romantic attachment to the crushed grapes that get bottled each year.
Sonoma County is also home to almost 50 breweries (Lagunitas, Bear Republic, Hen House, Russian River Brewery) and two dozen small craft distillers and cider makers.
This same local economic impact profile exists in many other places across America from Golden, Colorado (Coors) to Lexington, Kentucky (whiskey alley) to the headquarters of Sam Adams beers (Boston) and St. Louis (Budweiser) and beyond.
Like Big Oil, Big Alcohol isn’t going anywhere, anytime soon. The worldwide alcoholic beverage industry is a $250 billion annual market that produces 117 billion gallons of fermented adult beverages each year. (That is a liquid total that exceeds the total volume of blood contained in Earth’s eight billion humans by ten-fold!)
Repeated alcohol consumption damages DNA and inhibits cellular repair that can increase underlying conditions for cancer and chronic diseases. Incessant imbibing creates oxidative stress on internal organs, increases stiffening and arthritis and is very bad for rising blood pressure. All this scientific mumbo jumbo can be found under the dictionary entry for “hangover.”
Cheers.
— Rollie Atkinson
11-1-2023