Drink (70 page)

By 1980, Cognac had become part of the identity of the Hong Kong Chinese. It was something to aspire to, and if a street sweeper dreamed of winning the Lucky Six lottery, there would be a place in his dreams for a specific brand of Cognac. The position for his fellow Chinese in the People’s Republic of China, however, was very different. China’s economy had flatlined between 1952 and 1978, and few of its inhabitants could dither over whether to buy XO or something more expensive for their second daughter’s wedding. In the sixties and seventies, when Hong Kong’s economy took off, at least thirty million Chinese died from starvation due to the failure of the so-called Cultural Revolution. This
folie de grandeur
featured the 1968 Down to the Countryside Movement, which was neither a hippy nor an Arcadian idyll but the forced reeducation of the country’s intellectuals in the ways of its peasants. While Chairman Mao declared the revolution over in 1969, its philosophy persisted until his death in 1976.

Over these years, alcohol production was something of a star performer in an economy crippled by dogma, and output doubled between the start of the Cultural Revolution and its conclusion. Chinese per capita consumption also rose and, by 1976, had reached 1.34 liters per annum, against 10.18 for the average American, 5.23 for a Japanese, 4.7 for a Hong Kong Chinese, and 21.1 for the inventors of Cognac. Over 90 percent of this small total was derived from traditional beverages, with beer making up the remainder. Western-style beer had been produced in China since 1903, when the Germans had taken control of Shandong Province and installed breweries. Interestingly, beer was not condemned alongside other imperialist fluids as a capitalist poison during the Cultural Revolution, and new breweries were built in all China’s provinces except Tibet. The star brew of Communist China was
Tsing Tao,
made with Lau Shan mineral water to a German recipe. Its quality was sufficient to attract attention outside China, and in 1972 it was exported to the United States to help reduce the Chinese trade deficit.

Tsing Tao was not the only Red Chinese beverage to make a name for itself overseas.
Mao-tai,
the prestige liquor of the glorious revolution, was also in demand. Distilled from brewed sorghum, mao-tai is a clear, sour-smelling spirit, as strong as nineteenth-century absinthe and notoriously inflammable. It was served to President Nixon and his entourage on his 1972 visit to China and made a lasting impression on every American who drank it. Dirck Halstead, a reporter covering the event, described mao-tai as “a highly combustible rice wine that was essentially sake—times ten.” Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, was equally impressed by mao-tai, as the following transcription from dinner in April 1974 at the Waldorf Astoria with Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping illustrates:

35 MESSAGES

While Asian nations were incorporating Western beverages within their own drinking cultures, research in America was uncovering some disagreeable information about the same drinks. In 1973, Kenneth Lyons Jones and David W. Smith, two dysmorphologists at the University of Washington, identified a pattern of deformation common to eight children born to alcoholic mothers that they named
fetal alcohol syndrome
(FAS). Their findings corroborated similar work carried out in France in 1968 and were confirmed by a Swedish study in 1979. These investigations, together with further research on primates, established an unpleasant truth about alcohol— that it was a
teratogen
. The word derives from Greek and its literal meaning is “monster maker.” It is used to describe substances or processes that cause congenital malformations. Other teratogens include the antiacne drug Accutane, the rubella virus, and atomic weapons. The existence of FAS gradually crept to the attention of the public. In 1975,
Time
magazine ran an article entitled “Liquor and Babies,” which explained that alcohol “easily crosses the placenta from mother to child,” gave an example of a drunkard’s child born with the smell of liquor on its breath, and claimed, on medical advice, that prospective mothers should “consider having abortions if they become pregnant while addicted to alcohol.” Similar articles in other publications followed, and by 1977 FAS had grown into a sufficiently important public health issue to appear on television. In May of that year
NBC Evening News
included pictures of Melissa, a baby girl afflicted with the syndrome. Her features were described to the television audience as follows: “She’s very, very small . . . she has microcephaly, which means that her head is very small. She also has short palpebral fissures or small eye slits, and she is mentally deficient.” The broadcast was followed by a Pabst beer commercial.

The news that alcohol could damage unborn children was received with alarm. It was infinitely more sinister than the temperance movement’s creed that drunkards fathered drinkers. Could martini moms beget monsters? The night after Melissa was presented to the American public, Barbara Walters on ABC and Walter Cronkite on CBS reported that, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), any pregnant woman who had more than two drinks a day risked giving birth to a handicapped child. Walters added that “the dangers of drinking during pregnancy are so serious, therapeutic abortion for alcoholic women may be advised.” Abortion had not been legal for long in the United States and the issue remained highly contentious. How likely was it that drinking damaged fetuses so badly that they should be exterminated in the womb? It was an era of health scares. A number of commonplace things, notably tobacco, had been found to be cumulative and deadly poisons. Was drinking as bad for you as smoking, if you were pregnant? According to the surgeon general it was. In 1981 he issued the warning that mothers who drank gave birth to undersized children, echoing a similar warning he had issued to cigarette smokers in 1964.

While some of the earliest research into FAS had been carried out in Europe, doctors and news anchors there did not rush to tell pregnant drinkers to seek therapeutic abortions, nor did their equivalents of the surgeon general advise abstinence in expectant mothers. The evidence in the case was different from that against smoking. While FAS was real, and caused terrible handicaps, it appeared to afflict only very heavy drinkers who took “eight to ten drinks or more per day.” In consequence, European health professionals felt the risk was slight when compared to the beneficial properties of alcohol, specifically beer and wine, for expectant and nursing mothers. A glass or two a day might help ease their stress, and in Germany beer was recommended in modest portions to breast-feeding mothers. In America, in contrast, concern over FAS continued to mount. In 1982, the commissioner of the FDA suggested alcoholic beverages should carry warning labels, a theme taken up by Senator Strom Thurmond, the controversial Republican from South Carolina who had proposed just such a measure every year since 1967.

The image of alcohol in America received a further dent at about the same time from a new group: Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). MADD was formed by a Californian named Candy Lightner, whose thirteen-year-old daughter had been run down and killed by a drunken driver in 1980. Lightner resolved that she “would fight to make this needless homicide count for something positive in the years ahead,” and through grassroots activism and media exposure, MADD quickly became a political force. It was a popular cause—in 1982, a total of 26,173 Americans were killed in alcohol-related road accidents. The bloodbath was worst among young Americans and was concentrated along state lines. Some of the states that had lowered their Minimum Drinking Age (MDA) during the Vietnam war had since raised it again, but others had not, so that an eighteen-year-old in a state with an MDA of twenty-one could get a drink at a bar in a neighboring state, then drive home. Such anomalies led to the emergence of so-called
blood borders
. One such border ran between Wisconsin and Illinois. In January 1980, the Prairie State had raised its MDA to twenty-one, while that of Wisconsin remained at eighteen. Within a year, alcohol-related crashes in Badger State border communities involving nineteen-year-olds from Illinois rose from just under a third to nearly one half.

Young American drinkers were also killing themselves and others in the centers of states, which led to the perception that boozing was on the rise among eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds wherever they lived,
⁷¹
a perception assisted by changes in the portrayal of drinking by Hollywood, whose drunken teenagers were at last beginning to look their age. The exemplar of the genre, the comedy
Animal House
(1978), glorified frat house drinking, featured a drunken road trip, and inspired a generation of male students to try to crush newfangled aluminum beer cans against their foreheads, in imitation of the actor John Belushi.
Animal House
also made a bow in the direction of the Western cultural roots of drinking in its toga party scenes, in which Belushi appeared as Bacchus, with a wreath of ivy round his temples. Literature also continued to set a bad example. By the 1980s the reading lists for high school curricula were dominated by drinkers, including Poe, London, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, O’Neill, Kerouac, Capote, Gregory Corso, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, and Edward Albee.
⁷²

In 1982, President Reagan appointed a commission to investigate drunk driving. The following year he broadcast its findings to the nation in a holiday season radio address. The statistics were horrifying: “We’ve lost more than a quarter of a million of our countrymen to drunk drivers in the last ten years. That’s five hundred every week, seventy every day, one every twenty minutes.” The casualty register for nonfatal injuries was even more appalling: “Every year, nearly seven hundred thousand people are injured in alcohol-related crashes. Every one of these casualties is someone’s son or daughter, husband or wife, mother, father, or friend. The personal tragedies behind the statistics are enough to break your heart.” Reagan concluded his broadcast with an indication that he intended to take action: “Some of our citizens have been acting irresponsibly. Drinking and driving has caused the death of many innocent people. It is up to us to put a stop to it, not in a spirit of vengeance but in the spirit of love.”

The love was already being manifested in a 1983 U.S. Department of Transportation ad campaign, which—under the tagline DRINKING & DRIVING CAN KILL A FRIENDSHIP—targeted the country’s sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, who now accounted for 42 percent of all fatal alcohol-related car crashes. After love came coercion. Reagan perceived the problem stemmed in part from the “crazy-quilt of different state driving laws,” and although twenty-six of the twenty-nine states who’d lowered their minimum drinking age had reraised them by 1984, he decided a uniform federal MDA of twenty-one would be the first step toward its resolution. Reagan took pains to explain why this decision was not inconsistent with his policies in general:

Prudent and limited federal action consisted of the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984, which required all states to raise the minimum age for the purchase and “public possession” of alcohol to twenty-one. In order to avoid a constitutional minefield, the act refrained from labeling any states that did not comply as rebels, nor did it seek to punish them with coercion or fines. Instead, it specified a 5 percent reduction in federal highway funding to any recalcitrant states, and this incentive persuaded them all to raise their MDA to twenty-one by 1988. The new act did not envisage total prohibition for any American under the age of twenty-one. Volstead-style exemptions were made in favor of religious communicants, and the medicinal use of alcohol, and drinking in private clubs was also exempted. Moreover, people under the MDA might still drink at home. Lest young Americans be tempted to explore such loopholes, the publicity campaign against drunk driving continued with redoubled force. Celebrities joined its vanguard, contributing their talents to the cause for free. In 1985, the singer Michael Jackson received the personal thanks of President Reagan at the White House, for donating his Grammy Award-winning single “Beat It” for use in public service announcements on television and radio aimed at dissuading young people from touching alcohol.

The forces of temperance were on the rise in the 1980s, and better provided than ever before with medical and statistical ammunition to take on the demon drink. Moreover, a dry spirit permeated the age. American consumption was in decline. From a post-Prohibition peak of 2.75 gallons of alcohol per head per annum (10.45 liters) in 1981, it fell to 2.3 gallons (8.74 liters) in 1991. Hard liquor suffered the most, dropping 30 percent over the same period. Consumer tastes were changing. It was chic to look tanned, trim, and toned. People went to aerobics classes after work and drank mineral water, instead of heading to a bar for a few happy-hour martinis. The interest in bottled water was something new in the United States. While its citizens had long been devoted to their sodas, the notion of paying a premium price for a drink that fell out of the sky for free was alien to them. Their minds were changed by fashion—it became all the rage to drink European spa and mineral waters, from “sources” such as Perrier, which were promoted and sold as a kind of cleansing elixir. Bottled water was perfectly suited to the spirit of the eighties. The nourishing, and therefore fattening, qualities of alcoholic drinks worked against them, and designer water had a freshness, an implied vitality to it that was better suited to consumers’ aspirations than the deadening consequences of drunkenness. In a decade dedicated to appearances, drunks were considered unhealthy. Swollen, pitted noses laced with exploding veins, slurred speech, trembling hands, tendencies toward violent rage or clumsy overaffection, sewer breath, and liquid bowels were all at odds with the new ideal. Health consciousness also affected the tastes of those who still drank. Instead of choosing dark, strong, traditional pick-me-ups like whiskey, they called for light rum and white wine coolers. Even the beer market was affected. Brewers were forced to introduce “lite” brands, which featured less color and flavor, and (critically) fewer calories.