Kicking it old school
Time travels on the wagon
BY Lynn Cunningham
Fifth century B.C. Plato’s prescription for avoiding over-drinking involves no wine for those under 18, moderate consumption for those under 30 and an open bar for anyone over 40. The average life expectancy at the time is 28.
1568 Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Peasant Dance is one of many famous images of rustics’ drink-fuelled merriment. Bruegel’s benign depiction is in sharp contrast to William Hogarth’s 1751 Gin Lane. A “gin epidemic” has gripped London and other English cities; the nation of 6.5 million is consuming up to 18 million gallons of the liquor a year, and the only rehab is death or confinement in an insane asylum.
1804 An English doctor, Thomas Trotter, is well ahead of his time in declaring, “In medical language, I consider drunkenness, strictly speaking, to be a disease produced by a remote cause in giving birth to actions and movements in a living body that disorder the functions of health.” A century and a half later, many experts still agree with Edward McGoldrick Jr., founder of an early treatment centre in New York, whose view is that “Alcoholism is no more a disease than thieving or lynching.”
1935 Alcoholics Anonymous is founded by Bill W. (Wilson) and Dr. Bob (Smith), whose philosophy starts with the notion “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.” A.A. has some slightly creepy aspects, such as its origins in the Oxford Group, an early-20th-century Christian movement that later displayed its fondness for the Nazi movement, and the organization’s bible, the “Big Book,” with its seeming preoccupation with “sex relations.”
2003 Augusten Burroughs (Running with Scissors) publishes Dry, his ruefully hilarious memoir about getting sober. Deeply spooked by the gay rehab centre in Minnesota he’s been shipped off to, he’s told by a fellow patient, “It’ll take a few days, but you’ll see. You’ll get it.” Burroughs thinks, “This is probably exactly what the Reverend Jim Jones said to his followers as he stirred the Kool-Aid.”
2008 Unlike A.A., whose meetings are both numerous and free, most residential rehab programs have a sharply limited number of beds for those without money or private health insurance. The wait for a space at Homewood in Guelph, Ontario (rumoured to be where Betty Ford got sober), is nine to 12 months, although for $222 a day, you can jump the queue.
