Drink (71 page)

The beverage alcohol industry found itself under siege in the 1980s. Its products deformed unborn children, turned drivers into killers, and ruined peoples’ looks and waistlines. A change of image was in order. Booze needed a new appearance to tempt back deserters and make its steady friends consume more. Its manufacturers placed their hopes in lifestyle advertising. If drinking could be associated with activity and adventure, with skydiving, car racing, and rodeos, then people might love it once again. The new approach was commented on by
Advertising Age
magazine in 1984: “More and more it seems that the liquor industry has awakened to the truth. It isn’t selling the bottle or the glass or even liquor. It’s selling fantasies. Life-style approaches have come into favor as the most effective way for the liquor industry to promote its wares. Psychologically, for consumers to be attracted to these ads, they need to be attracted to the people in them, to identify with the fantasies they create.”

Perhaps the most effective lifestyle advertising campaign of the period was the
Spuds MacKenzie
series for Bud Lite, featuring an English bull terrier with a black patch of fur around one eye. Billed as the ultimate party animal, Spuds was introduced to America during a commercial break in Super Bowl XXI of 1987. Spuds (in real life a bitch named Honey Tree Evil Eye) had an entourage of three beautiful and scantily clad young women—the Spudettes—who accompanied him on various adventures. The idea of representing the ideal drinker as an animal in broadcast media ads had been pioneered in Great Britain, where Hoffmeister beer had chosen a bear called George as its archetypal customer. George (an actor in a bear costume) was represented as a natural leader among a gang of young men, the best at darts and hoops and finding excitement and girls. The campaign’s tagline was
Follow the bear.
Spuds resembled George in many aspects— he was leader of his peer hierarchy, irresistible to women, and his life was spent in having fun. The ads appealed to Americans of all ages. A later survey showed that 88 percent of fifth- and sixth-grade schoolchildren could match the slogan “Spuds McKenzie, the original party animal” with Budweiser the brewer.

Neo-Prohibitionists, concerned that children might be persuaded into drinking beer by a pet dog, revived the alcohol advertising debate of the 1950s. What was to stop infants, inflamed by Spuds, from raiding their parents’ fridges for Bud Lite? The matter was raised in Congress. Dr. Jean Kilbourne advised the chamber that drink ads created “a climate in which dangerous attitudes toward alcohol are presented as normal, appropriate, and innocuous. Most important, alcohol advertising spuriously links alcohol with precisely those attributes and qualities [like] happiness, wealth, prestige, sophistication, success, maturity, athletic ability, virility, creativity, sexual satisfaction, that the misuse of alcohol usually diminishes and destroys.” Not only was such advertising dangerous, it was ubiquitous. Alcohol was promoted on a scale similar to food and cosmetics. In 1988, over eight hundred million dollars was poured into television promotions for wine and beer. And ads weren’t the only problem. It was estimated that America’s brewers “paid for about 10 percent of all sponsorships of athletic, music, cultural, and other special events” in the country; and that many of these events attracted “large audiences of underage drinkers.”

In response to such alarm calls for action, Congress considered two categories of marketing control measures that might be applied to alcohol: Restrictions on advertising, including mandatory counterpropaganda; and health warning labels, as had been imposed on tobacco packaging. The issue was raised in the Senate by Strom Thurmond, who singled out Spuds MacKenzie for an especial curse and berated a cardboard cutout of the animal during a speech from the floor. By 1989 opinion in both houses had tilted in favor of some form of control. The drinks lobby fought back by pointing out that per capita consumption and advertising spending were contrary trends: They were competing harder for fewer customers. Moreover, in their opinion, “to blame advertising for the tragic effects of alcohol abuse” would be “to controvert the best available social science.” Images of bull terriers in midget submarines did not turn people into alcoholics. However, sentiment in Washington was against them. The dangerous consequences of drinking, whether provoked by advertising or not, were highlighted by the Carrolton bus disaster of 1988, when a drunk traveling the wrong way down a highway collided head-on with a school bus on hire to a church youth club, causing twenty-seven fatalities and fifty-four other injuries. It was the worst such accident in the country’s history, horrible in excess of the neo-Prohibitionists’ predictions.

Action against alcohol became inevitable. In 1988, Strom Thurmond introduced a bill to the Senate, supported by Orrin Hatch, Ted Kennedy, and Al Gore, that aimed to place a two-part warning on all drink packaging, which, in its final form, was as follows: “(1) According to the Surgeon General, women should not drink alcoholic beverages during pregnancy because of the risk of birth defects. (2) Consumption of alcoholic beverages impairs your ability to drive a car or operate machinery, and may cause health problems.” The bill was signed into federal law in 1989. In retrospect it was a victory for the alcohol lobby. Pregnant women had never been a major market, and the warning against drunk driving absolved brewers, distillers, and winemakers of any potential liability to the relatives of the victims of drunk drivers. Moreover, the debate about booze advertising had revealed weaknesses in the arguments of their opponents, many of which were founded on the disease theory of alcoholism that had risen to prominence in the 1950s. If alcoholism was a disease, then how did someone catch it from a TV commercial? The idea that Spuds, or his successors, the Singing Frogs, might trigger an innate and insatiable lust for drink, as strobes set off epileptics, was the best explanation neoprohibitionists could offer, but it was not enough to convince the legislature to act against drink advertising.

The appearance of warnings had no evident effect on the nation’s drinking. The gently declining trend in consumption did not suddenly plunge, and its continuance downward was best explained by changes in corporate attitudes toward drinking. Alcohol, and alcoholism, were considered backward in the brave new world of globalization and information technology. Drinking was regarded as a juvenile activity— something to be experienced at college but abandoned once upon the corporate ladder. Multinational companies evolved antialcohol policies that their employees were expected to follow for the good of their careers. The three-martini business lunch was consigned to history, as were many corporate cocktail cabinets. The new ethos was apparent in the 1985 movie
Wall Street,
a Faustian tale about Bud, a young stockbroker eager to share in the immense fortunes being made in the markets at that time. Bud solicits the attention of Gordon Gekko, a corporate raider, who epitomizes the new model capitalist. “Lunch is for wimps,” he declares at their first encounter, and Bud pointedly calls for Evian when he meets Gekko in a restaurant at night. The old order is represented by Bud’s father, a union leader at Bluestar Airlines, who does his business with the men he represents over a few beers in the local bar. Gekko aims to take over Bluestar in order to break it into pieces and rob its pension fund, and Bud is forced to choose between old-fashioned beer-drinking, metal-bashing America and the greed-is-good philosophy of Gordon Gekko. After a bottle of whiskey he decides to do the right thing—intoxication leads to an epiphany that restores his moral perspective.

There were genuine monetary benefits to be gained from alcohol-free workplaces. Companies that introduced such policies found their workers had fewer accidents, thus reducing insurance premiums and compensation payments, and that they had to sack fewer workers for drunkenness, enabling savings in termination costs and the expenses of recruiting replacements. IBM, then the most profitable industrial company in America, was a shining example of an efficient alcohol-free corporation. It had long frowned on drinking among its employees, to whom it issued etiquette manuals that set out appropriate hairstyles, advised them not to wear a blue suit with brown shoes, and pointed out that being “under the influence of or affected by alcohol” constituted “inappropriate conduct” and was grounds for dismissal.

The private-sector move toward alcohol-free workplaces was followed by federal regulation. The Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act of 1991 required alcohol testing of safety-sensitive transportation employees in aviation, trucking, railroads, mass transit, pipelines, and other transportation industries. The act affected several million workers, any of whom, subject to appropriate procedure, could be tested for drink at any time while on duty. Despite the eminently sensible nature of the legislation, it was controversial. How far should the government, or an employer, be permitted to pry into the personal habits of a worker? The contract between employer and employee was a commercial arrangement and should not dictate the latter’s conduct outside of working hours. Vows of sobriety—or chastity for that matter, for the country was in the middle of the AIDS panic and compulsory testing was being considered for that too—were more appropriate to monasteries than to capitalist nations.

The Omnibus Transportation Employee Testing Act rounded off ten bad years for alcohol in America. There had been, however, a few bright spots in the gloom. The television series
Cheers,
which, after a poor first season in 1982, had shot up the ratings and spent eight years as one of the ten most-watched programs in America, was one such glimmer of hope. Almost all of its action took place in a barroom, which was modeled on the Bull & Finch Pub in Boston. Despite the promise this location offered for bottle fights between aging rummies, or as a hangout for the unemployed,
Cheers
focused on social drinking. The bar’s clientele were rarely shown under the influence, and when they were they were credited with motives, like promotion at work.
Cheers
appealed to the 66 percent of the American population aged fourteen years and over who admitted to drinking. The program was rewarded for its realism with twenty-six Emmy Awards over its eleven-season lifespan.

The final episode of
Cheers,
broadcast on May 23, 1993, was the most-watched TV show of that year. For most of its run the habit it portrayed had been demonized and regulated against. Just as in the glory days of the WCTU, children were being taught, as fact, that alcohol led to mental and physical ruin. If they started drinking they would move on to crack and quite possibly catch AIDS en route. The bias against alcohol was apparent at the highest level. The federal government’s
Dietary Guidelines for Americans,
issued in 1991, advised adults as well as children not to drink at all. Alcoholic beverages had “no net health benefit”; they were “linked with many health problems,” were “the cause of many accidents,” and could “lead to addiction.” “Their consumption is not recommended,” the guidelines concluded. However, and in the same year in which they were published, evidence to the contrary was broadcast on prime-time television, which was so persuasive that the minority of Americans who did not drink might have been expected to buy a bottle or two and toast farewell forever to abstinence.

The revelations were contained in the November 17, 1991, edition of
60 Minutes,
hosted by Morley Safer. Its subject was a health conundrum, known as the
French Paradox,
which Safer phrased as follows: “So why is it that the French, who eat 30 percent more fat than we do, suffer fewer heart attacks, even though they smoke more and exercise less? All you have to do is look at the numbers: If you’re a middle-aged American man, your chances of dying of a heart attack are three times greater than a Frenchman of the same age. Obviously, they’re doing something right—something Americans are not doing.” Safer examined several possible theories as to what that something could be. Was it because the French ate more fruit and vegetables, or that they lingered over their meals instead of bolting them down standing up, or could it be because they drank ten times as much red wine? In the opinion of
60 Minutes,
the solution to the French Paradox was hidden in a bottle: “There has been for years the belief by doctors in many countries that alcohol, in particular red wine, reduces the risk of heart disease. . . . Now it’s been all but confirmed.”

The program featured two medical experts, Dr. Curtis Ellison of Boston, who confirmed the potential of wine to protect against heart disease, but also drew attention to “the tremendous problem of alcohol abuse”; and Dr. Serge Renaud of the French health service, who was more bullish on the issue, and who was happy to state, “It’s well-documented that a moderate intake of alcohol prevents coronary heart disease by as much as fifty percent.” At the show’s conclusion, Safer raised a glass of red wine to the camera and commented, “So the answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass.” The program was watched by an estimated 33.7 million Americans, who responded positively to the good news. Within a month of the broadcast, sales of red wine increased by 44 percent. Morley Safer was honored with a special prize from LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French champagne and luxury goods producer.

While the idea that drinking might be good for you came as a surprise to most Americans in 1991, the evidence had been around for a while; indeed, ever since the depths of Prohibition. In 1926, Raymond S. Pearl, biologist, pioneer researcher into aging, wine lover, and
bon viveur
, had published
Alcohol and Longevity,
in which he demonstrated that moderate drinkers outlived both alcoholics and abstainers. The book had been inspired by research Pearl had carried out into chicken breeding. He had decided to test the hypothesis that alcohol affected the birds’ fertility, and noted that those chickens that had been made to drink “far outlived their untreated brothers and sisters.” Moving on to humans, he examined the data from a survey made in Baltimore on tuberculosis, involving 3,084 men and 2,164 women, and found that, after disregarding other factors, those of his subjects who treated themselves with bootleg hooch also outlived the dry members of their peer group.