I was 19 the first time I blacked out from alcohol consumption. It was during the summer between my first and second years of college and I’d found a job for the season scooping ice cream at a concessions stand in Yosemite. The days felt like indentured servitude. I lived in a tent cabin next to the parking lot where Half Dome hikers would leave their dusty Oldsmobiles, a privilege for which $75 was deducted from my weekly paycheck. I worked long split-shifts, going from 9AM to noon and then again from 4PM until 10 or 11PM. During my first week in orientation I discovered that many of my co-workers were ex-convicts.
One of the first acquaintances I made told me about his recent release from prison after serving 3 years for beating a man with a tire iron after a soccer game. Another friend, a very gentle Indian immigrant in his late 30′s, had just been paroled after serving 5 years for selling cocaine. I was terrified by these men in the beginning, they rose out of a dark vulgarity I’d only driven through in my suburban youth. By the end of the summer I’d bridged my fearful stereotypes of their criminal past and become good friends with both, bonding over late-night drinking sessions in the woods, sneaking a few plays of NFL pre-season games on the dining room television on Sundays, and complaining about the bureaucratic inanities of working for the government.
After my last shift I met both of them for one last night of boozing in the forest, wandering around the cluster of tent cabins like a dormitory, carrying six-packs of beer and joking loudly in the black night. At the end of the night, beer-drunk and ready for bed we started to say goodbye. The tire iron man always carried a flask of Souther Comfort whiskey with him, and he had a fresh bottle. He cracked the cap-seal and offered me the first drink in honor of my departure.
I remember looking at the open glass circle and the brown liquid inside as I raised the bottle to my mouth. I wondered how much of a swig one was supposed to take from a whiskey flask in a pass-the-bottle setting. Then suddenly it was 11AM the next morning and I was flat on my back in the lower bunk of my tent cabin, fully clothed and with some dried blood on the front of my sweatshirt. I felt unwell.
There is an attempt at ordered thinking that occurs in moments like these, a series of logical questions that try and connect two moments in time. Where am I? Can I move all my limbs? Am I clothed? Do I have all my teeth? Why exactly does my head hurt? These are unpleasant questions to think about while making the unsteady first movements of a hungover morning–flooded with nausea, the vertigo of blood rushing out of your brain, and the traces of toxicity streaking through your muscles.
I wandered outside and found one of my neighbors, a long-haired hippy who’d taken the job in Yosemite to hike for free. He immediately recognized my state and offered me an empty can of whipped cream to soften the sharpening trauma of the morning. He hadn’t been with us the night before but had been told what happened. I had apparently drunk the entire flask of Southern Comfort in one massive gulp and collapsed to the ground, cracking my chin on the cement below. My friends had carried me back to my tent cabin and ten hours later I’d finally been able to stand on two feet again.
Earlier this month the FDA issued a warning to a number of alcoholic energy drink manufacturers, encouraging them to remove caffeine from their recipes after New York, Washington, Utah, Michigan, and Oklahoma banned Four Loko, a stimulant-powered binge drinking liquid alleged to be a malt liquor. Gil Kerlikowske, the White House’s Drug czar, released a statement supporting the efforts. “These drinks are especially unhealthy and dangerous because they combine alcohol and caffeine — and present a further concern when used by young people,” he wrote.
The fears of public health danger have been triggered by the quick rise in a social fetish surrounding Four Loko, a can of which contains high levels of four different stimulants and the equivalent of four drinks of alcohol. None of the offending chemicals are illegal but the claim is that the mixture of alcohol and caffeine at higher than normal levels leads to drunkenness that is intolerably dangerous. As news agencies have picked up on stories of misconduct, alcohol poisoning, and drunk driving it appears that we’ve discovered a cultural moment where responsible action can be taken to save lives and stabilize a youth society pinioning out of control.
I have used Four Loko recreationally three times so far, never more than a can in any sitting. It is as potent as it is purported to be. Its cans are decorated in cheerful colors and backgrounded with confetti flecks that, when combined with the word “Loko” in big blocky letters and the prominent announcement of 12% alcohol content, seems to fairly represent just what it is you’re getting yourself into. It’s not sold on the magical illusion of good taste and recumbent conversation with a literary-minded friend with a nice sweater collection. Four Loko sits at a more honest end of the alcohol spectrum, made for and marketed to the people who prefer getting fucked up to unwinding.
The enumerated public health concerns are, likewise, behavioral more than chemical. People inclined to appreciate a good fucking up are inordinately more likely to drive drunk, die prematurely, experience alcohol poisoning, or wake up with a missing tooth. These negative outcomes are the product of alcohol, and the main benefit of drinking Four Loko is the lengthened time one can stay fucked up on alcohol before collapsing into the passed out haze that is binging’s natural endpoint.
The urge to get fucked up–to exploit the various functions of the body with a briefly overwhelming quantity of some poison or another–is one of the irrational privileges of having learned the details of our physiology. While consuming Four Loko puts one in a state of mind more susceptible to risky behavior, we’ve long ago made our social bargain with the chemicals that make it so. The FDA says there is evidence that caffeine masks the effects of alcohol, which is what makes the case of alcoholic energy drinks a public health concern. It would hardly be worth drinking if it weren’t so. And while the bizarre mix of stimulants (sugar, taurine, guarana, and caffeine) make it possible to stay on one’s feet quite a while longer in the fuzzy clutch of an alcoholic binge, it’s self-pitying to suggest the quantity of alcohol being consumed is obscured by this trick.
The will to get fucked up, to propel one’s brain into a dopamine vision that reframes the world as irrational and ecstatic is a normative one. That’s why all of the worst outcomes of Four Loko are behavioral rather than chemical. Binge drinking is a behavior, and is more frequently done with generic vodka from Sam’s Club than Four Loko. It can have terrible outcomes, but it is more commonly something that people do to punch out of the mundanity and incoherence of living in a hybrid republic, founded on individual freedom and persistently constricted by post-facto religious challenge.
The lust for irrational excess is not original to Four Loko or college fraternities–from the Roman vomitoriums to the unregulated halls of public drunkeness in 18th century America, taking pleasure in over-indulgence has been a hallmark of human behavior. While many of the country’s founders considered overindulgence in alcohol a social pox, just what that constituted is hard to measure today. One of the most disciplined of the founders, John Adams, was described by descendants as having a tankard of hard cider before breakfast every day. Likewise, a preserved bar bill from a party to celebrate the Constitutional Convention reveals an athletic appreciation for alcohol. The 55 attendees at a Philidelphia tavern were billed for 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, 8 bottles of whiskey, 22 bottles of porter, 8 bottles of hard cider, 12 bottles of beer, and 7 large bowls of alcoholic punch.
The tradition remains well-preserved by modern political lions like Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd, the glitter twins of D.C. who would not uncommonly enjoy six or eight drinks over a business lunch and sometimes take time to have sex with a waitress under a restaurant table in a back room. Tom Delay confessed to a taste for martinis, drinking as many as 12 in a night while periodically enjoying the benefits of alcoholic blackout. Former President Bush is a reformed cocaine user and surely enjoyed the even more accelerated benefits of a good binge drink with the clarifying counter balance of razor-cut talking powder.
These aren’t indicators of moral decrepitude, they’re reminders that even the most pious and powerful are susceptible the pleasures of irrationality. The FDA might just as easily issue a warning to bars that serve 12 martinis to any one customer on public health grounds. That would at least have the benefit of seeking to limit abusive behavior rather than targeting an unthinking chemical. A flask of Southern Comfort contains a far more dangerous volume of alcohol in a much more concentrated package than Four Loko.
Yet most people seem to know that a pint of whiskey is more than they’d want to drink in a single sitting. It doesn’t need a label of FDA warning or state bans. Likewise, most people know that a pint of hard alcohol–or a folksily named mixture made with it–can be a happy expedient on a circular quest into the fucked up ether. Bars from Oregon to Brooklyn will make you a deal on a shot and a beer and, after 2 rounds, you’ll have consumed as much alcohol as you’d stomach in a Four Loko. And it would probably still be Happy Hour by the time you’d start thinking about whether or not to go for round 3. Montana has only just now decided to question whether to outlaw drinking and driving after one old rancher had 13 drinks in 2 and a half hours at a bar then crashed into a police car on the way home.
Drinking is not something I take lightly, but it’s not something worth villifying. When I grew up alcohol was stigmatized to an extreme, something poisonous and addictive, with only negative consequences. When I took my first sip at 14 I thought something irreversibly destructive would happen to my brain. I was happily surprised to discover that, before anything else, alcohol is brilliant fun. It can be beautiful, enlivening, encouraging, and make the absurd seams of civilization appear in happy distortion for a little while.
It’s also a fantastically taxing chemical with a toxic footprint, a capacity to turn thoughts into mush, increase aggression, and change a person’s moral conscience into a shackled mute. Alcohol and the far ends of getting fucked up are not antidote to anything nor are they noble. They are just one aspect of our most irrational, sensual selves, one way of being among many. It’s dumb luck and political hypocrisy that’s left us in a country where the only readily available intoxicants are those manufactured by super-governmental conglomerates who sell some of the most addictive chemicals in the world: alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. Withdrawl from alcohol is among the worst in the world, ranking higher than heroin and cocaine on the Henningfield Ratings scale.
I have no interest in consuming Four Loko often, but I confess I have every intention of winding up just that fucked up in the not too distant future. It’ll be every bit as easy to do with Four Loko banned, and for this reason every justification cited by the FDA and the various state legislatures about public health can be taken as ineffectual. We don’t make sense and we like things that make us feel good, pressing our luck in how far those tendencies can be pushed is an essential part of knowing yourself and experiencing some of the innumerable variations of life among ritualistic mammals doomed by the inescapably traitorous and degenerative molecules in our own bodies.
Learning how and why we can be seduced into stupidity is an irreplaceable part of living as a human, and learning how to still be a better version of yourself in the maw of that inescapable stupidity is the only of nobility you and I may share. Without an honest understanding of our stupid underbellies, our finely combed heads are doomed to be even more caged and meaningless than they already are.
*Images via EthanLong and MelleOh
Michael Thomsen
Michael Thomsen is a New York-based writer. He has written about game culture, entertainment, and sex for IGN, Nerve, Edge Magazine, Gamasutra, and The Escapist. He has also been a contributor to the ABC World News Webcast and the Q Show with Jian Ghomseshi. ...
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alcohol, ban, binge drinking, black out, charles schumer, chris dodd, college, drugs, fda, four loko, montana, new york, ted kennedy, tom delay
