A few ways to moderate your drinking

by Chaz Bufe, author of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?

Here are a few time-tested ways with which people have moderated their drinking. As with almost everything else in life, there are no guarantees that these will help. But if you’re concerned about your drinking and don’t want to quit, here are a few things that might work for you. Emphasis on might. (The AA dogma that you’re powerless is simply wrong — there’s a good chance that if you work at it you can learn to control your drinking, or at least moderate the harm it causes. You are not powerless.)

For now, we’ll address only the day-to-day techniques. And please note that this is not a comprehensive list of moderate-drinking techniques. These are only a few things that I know of that have helped people who want to keep drinking but want to moderate, and who don’t want to give up their drinking friends and usual haunts:

• Alternate alcoholic drinks and nonalcoholic drinks. For example, if you’re drinking beer, have a glass of water between every beer. The water will help you avoid getting drunk, and you’ll have the reward of a beer after every glass of water.
• Keep track of how much you’re drinking — write it down. Keep a “drink diary.” In years past, this was done with a pen and  pad. Nowadays, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t an app for it.
• If you’re out drinking, keep track of how much you’re drinking and over how much time. If you do this and have any doubts at all as to whether you’re close to or over the legal limit, look up your estimated blood alcohol content (BAC). Moderation Management has BAC charts on line. Here’s the BAC chart for men, and here’s the BAC chart for women.
• To take things a step further, carry a breathalyzer with you. Key fob, battery-powered breathalyzers are available on eBay for under two dollars, shipping included, and presumably better ones are available for about ten bucks. Before relying on one of these cheap Chinese products, though, it’d probably be a good idea to have a couple of drinks at home and check the breathalyzer reading against the BAC chart.
• Allow yourself a certain number of days per week to drink. Keep track of them. Even taking one day off per week is better than drinking every day (though three or four days off per week is better than that). After having a no-alcohol day or two, you can look forward to your next drinking day.
• Avoid hard booze, wine, and medium- to high-octane beer, and stick religiously to low alcohol beer. Stick to beer with 3.5% alcohol by volume or under. Some of these beers actually taste pretty good, and will get you buzzed but (probably) not drunk. (You’d have to work at it to get drunk on 3.3% beer.)  Sticking only with the ones commonly available nationally, the best are probably Kirin Light (3.3%), Heineken Light (3.3%), and Amstel Light (3.5%); the Miller (MGD 64) and Budweiser (Bud Select 55) low-alcohol brews are considerably worse than their full-alcohol (5%) counterparts. (Bud Light, at 4.2%, is not a low alcohol beer.) If you’re drinking craft beers, stick to the blondes, which tend to be under 4.0%. And even when drinking low-alcohol beers, do alternate them with nonalcoholic drinks.

There are no guarantees that these techniques will help you moderate your drinking. But they might.

If they don’t work, you can always try an abstinence program such as AA or SMART Recovery, and more likely succeed at it because you’ve given moderation a shot.

Best Blog Posts 2014 (Addictions)

We started this blog in July 2013. Since then, we’ve been posting almost daily.

When considering the popularity of the posts, one thing stands out:  in all but a few cases, popularity declines over time.

As well, the readership of this blog has expanded gradually over time, so most readers have never seen what we consider many of our best posts.

Over the next week or two we’ll put up lists of our best posts from 2014 and 2015 in the categories of atheism, religion, anarchism, humor, politics, music, science fiction, science, skepticism, book and movie reviews, writing, language use, and economics.

Because there were considerably more posts in 2014 and 2015 than in 2013, we’ll be putting up several posts for those years divided by category. We’ve already put up the following:

• Best posts of 2013
• Best Religion and Atheism posts of 2014
• Best Science, Skepticism, and Science Fiction posts of 2014
• Best Humor posts of 2014

Here’s the latest 2014 installment:

Addictions

• Alcoholics Anonymous Does More Harm than Good
• Alcoholics Anonymous Is Not Effective
• Why Is Alcoholics Anonymous Sacrosanct?

Definition of the Day 7-10-15 — Alcoholic

ALCOHOLIC, n. A self-identifying label often adopted by those who quit drinking decades ago, in much the same manner as those who gave up tobacco decades ago often identify themselves as “smokers.”

* * *

–from the revised and expanded edition of The American Heretic’s Dictionary, the best modern successor to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary

 

Why is Alcoholics Anonymous sacrosanct?

by Chaz Bufe, author of Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?

AA is arguably America’s most sacred cow, and has been almost since it first came to public notice prior to World War II. During the more than three-quarters of a century since then, while the country was inundated in pro-AA books and newspaper and magazine articles, entire decades went by without publication of a single book critical of AA, or a single critical article in a major periodical. This has changed a bit in recent years, but public criticism of AA is still relatively rare.

Why?

AA presents alcohol abuse as an entirely personal problem, and preaches that AA always “works if you work it.” If someone goes to AA and it doesn’t work for them, they tend not to talk about it, because of the stigma attached to alcohol abuse and because they probably do believe what they heard in AA–that their problems are entirely their fault. So, they don’t talk about AA.

And there are a lot of such people: well over a million Americans are either attracted to AA or are coerced into attendance annually, and then leave almost immediately. (According to its own figures, AA’s membership has been nearly static over the last two decades, with a growth rate considerably under 1% per year.)

But you don’t hear from those repelled by AA. Rather, you hear from and about the relatively few AA successes (roughly 5% according to AA’s triennial surveys). And because AA is a “program for life,” those few successes stick around to trumpet AA as “spiritual, not religious” (though it clearly is religious, as several federal courts of appeal have ruled), and as the only approach to alcohol abuse that works (though it clearly doesn’t work–its success rate is about that of spontaneous remission).

Those AA successes also tend to be the owners/operators of almost all alcohol abuse treatment facilities in the United States. They then use their position as “experts” to promote AA and its “program.” They also found “public health” 12-step front groups, notably the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (NCADD), to lend a scientific sheen to their promotion of AA. (The NCADD is hostile to scientifically based treatment methods with good evidence of efficacy.)

Given all this, it’s not surprising that there’s so little critical examination of AA in the corporate media. Reporters are often overworked, and sometimes lazy, so they tend to take the easy way out and report as fact the claims of 12-stepping “experts,” while doing no investigation of those claims. Beyond that, there are many 12-steppers and relatives of 12-steppers in the media who openly promote AA and attack its critics while concealing their connections to AA. (One can’t “break anonymity,” of course.)

(Even some of those from whom you’d expect better fall into this category. About fifteen years ago Bill Moyers [who has a 12-stepping son] produced Close to Home: Moyers on Addiction about alcohol abuse and alcohol treatment. It was a love letter to AA and one of the most dishonest pieces of reporting I’ve ever seen.)

So, the next time you see a glowing article on AA, or an interview with a gushing “recovering” celebrity, don’t be surprised. Just be aware that the claims of AA’s promoters are just that–claims. AA is religious, not spiritual. And its success rate is no better than the rate of spontaneous recovery–that is, AA is utterly ineffective. Not that you’ll hear much about that in the media.

Related Posts

• Alcoholics Anonymous does more Harm than Good
• Alternatives to AA — and Why They’re Needed
• Alcoholics Anonymous is not Effective
• Alcoholics Anonymous is Religious, not Spiritual

 

Related articles

• Alcoholics Anonymous Does More Harm Than Good
• Lawyers Still Drinking, Despite AA – Try “Harm Reduction”