2023 Living in a State of Denial

 🍺 Living in a State of Denial

October, 2023 

Steven B. Zwickel

I am not a teetotaller. I drink alcoholic beverages, but I don’t drink much and a 6-pack of beer can last me a year. I am not opposed to drinking alcohol, but I didn’t grow up in a time and place where I encountered a lot of people who drank. We had no neighborhood tavern and my parents drank very little. We had wine at holidays and when we traveled in Europe, but that was about it. In fact, 40 years after the event,  I still had some bottles of liquor my parents bought for my Bar Mitzvah in 1962.

         When I went off to college, I didn’t make friends with drinkers and I was not in a frat or club, so, even though the legal age for alcohol was 18,  my drinking in college was minimal. {Confession: one night I was coaxed into going out for pizza and beer and I over-indulged. I got sick and after that I never got intoxicated.}

        Years later, I moved from New York to Wisconsin and entered a new world. I was a grad student, I made friends, and I was invited to grad student parties. The invitation almost always included this note, “Bring a 6-pack.” I was introduced to the world of Wisconsin beers—hundreds of brands and everyone I met seemed to be an expert. It made me uncomfortable, but when I asked another grad student why they only seemed to have alcoholic beverages, she told me, “Soda pop is too sweet.” And that seemed to settle the matter. Not wanting to be seen as a party pooper, I dropped the subject.

For two years I took the required courses and seminars in School of Social Work and I also took some electives in my chosen area of study—marriage and the family.  In what I now realize was a major failure, the school did not require any courses related to alcohol use. I realized later on that this gap in my knowledge left me quite unprepared to work in Wisconsin.

I got a job working as a social worker and living in rural Wisconsin. My cases involved children who were having difficulties at home, at school, and, in some cases, with the law.

Patterns Appear

After a few months in a rural county social services agency, I started to notice patterns. Every case seemed to involve a drinker or family member. I took an in-service training course on working with Adult Children of Alcoholics 1.

 I learned a bit about how families of alcoholics function (more accurately how they fail to function) and began asking questions. I polled the other social workers: how much of your caseload involves alcohol? And I was shocked by the answers. Most said three-quarters and a few said ninety percent. 

Startled by these answers, I asked other people who worked with my social services agency. When I asked two people in local law enforcement, they said, “If we got rid of alcohol, we could get rid of most cops; close most of the courts and the jails. We’d be out of a job.” The law enforcement people joked about how, whenever they stopped a driver and asked if he’d been drinking, the answer was usually, “just a couple of beers.” Apparently this was supposed to make it clear that he wasn’t really driving drunk.

I was talking to a local firefighter one day and asked him about alcohol and fires. His response, “About 95% of our calls are related to alcohol use.”

But, for the most part, the people I talked to about drinking in Wisconsin denied that it was a problem. “Everybody drinks” “Not really a problem” “I can take it or leave it” “It’s the same as everywhere else; no worse.”

I soon realized that every social and sporting event involved alcohol. People talked about “going drinking” is an acceptable activity. One of the social workers at my agency told me he used screening questions to identify alcoholics: “Ever go ice fishing?” followed by “Ever catch anything?” 

It was the same with local bowling alleys. A few people went there to bowl, but the rest were there to drink.

I heard more explanations and more ways of excusing misbehavior: “I don’t drink; just a couple of shots at bedtime to help me sleep” and “It’s not really his fault (what he did). He’d had too much to drink, is all.”

I was assured that people weren’t alcoholics because:

• They weren’t falling down drunk

• They could still hold down a job

• They only drank on weekends

I heard a slew of euphemisms: just had a few for my nerves, stopped on the way home, social drinker,  never gets really loaded. No one, it seemed, was ever called a drunk.

I learned that when a person was described as charming, it meant he was an alcoholic. I discovered some people were binge drinkers 2 and others, like a man I once worked with, took in alcohol one sip at a time all through the day. And I understood that many people (especially young people) I met felt social pressure; they must either drink or be considered anti-social, a snob, or some kind of an oddball.

I was curious to see what would happen if I tried adding information about alcohol abuse to some of the adult ed classes I was teaching. The result was immediate pushback; some people dropped out, and I heard more evidence of denial. Again, I was assured that drinking in Wisconsin wasn’t really that bad. I was told, “You’re not from here, so you don’t really understand.”

Drinking in Wisconsin: the facts

I had to find out for myself if Wisconsin is really so different from other states when it comes to drinking alcohol. So, I did a little research3 :

• Health care providers consider Wisconsin one of the worst places in the country for alcohol use. “Excessive alcohol use is a significant threat to the health, safety, and prosperity of Wisconsin’s residents. Unfortunately, every county in Wisconsin has high rates of excessive alcohol use” 4
• Binge drinking here is  a major problem. “Wisconsin not only has a higher proportion of people who drink compared to other states; it also has more people who drink ‘an incredible amount…’ ” 
• The alcohol industry is so powerful in Wisconsin that the state legislature is unable to pass any laws that might impact the Tavern League6 or the alcohol industry7. They are also deeply in denial. Recently some Republican lawmakers — Rep. John Plumer and Sen. Cory Tomczyk introduced a resolution to make the brandy Old-Fashioned Wisconsin's “Official state cocktail,” because, they argued, Wisconsin accounts for over half of Korbel's annual brandy sales in the United States — 150,000 cases in 2019 alone.8
• Driving Under the Influence (DUI): The punishments in this state for driving drunk are fairly lenient9. Many people in Wisconsin have multiple drunk driving convictions, including “a 74-year-old Green Bay native by the name of Wallace C. Bowers holds the record for most DUIs in Wisconsin, racking up his 18^th OWI conviction on January 8^th, 2021”10 The average jail sentence for a second offense DUI in Wisconsin is approximately 45 days in jail, more or less. It takes four offenses before it becomes a felony.

Life in a State of Denial

I like living in Wisconsin. It’s a beautiful place and the people, for the most part, are kind and polite. But I pay a price for living here.

• It is scary to be driving here, especially on weekend evenings. The roads feel dangerous when you know many drivers may have been drinking.11
• Bar fights downtown Madison and everywhere. That’s all related to alcohol and, sometimes, drugs.
• Failure of education. If you look at the course offerings in the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Social Work12 you will find a single elective class that deals with alcohol: “SOC WORK 453 — Substance Use Disorders [3 credits]. Presentation of social, historical, legal, political, and ethical considerations surrounding the use and abuse of alcohol and psychotropic drugs in the U.S.” That’s all. The School of Social Work let me down and is letting the state of Wisconsin down. The people who are supposed to be working with a population full of alcohol problems don’t know what alcohol does to individuals and families and how it affects all of us.

What I Learned About Alcohol Use and Abuse 13

Here is some of what I learned about alcohol abuse, which is officially called “alcohol use disorder”14 

• Alcoholics use more sick time, more healthcare, more hospital time, more court time than the rest of the population. According to a “report based on death registry data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alcohol-induced deaths increased 25% in Wisconsin, the greatest jump in almost two decades, in 2020. Starting that June, alcohol-related deaths began rising in two categories: acute deaths (such as acute alcoholic hepatitis or car accidents) or chronic ones (the long-term impact of excessive alcohol use, like cirrhosis). In 2020, Wisconsinites died from alcohol-induced causes at a rate nearly 25% higher than the national rate. The rate tripled from 6.7 to 18.5 per 100,000 from 1999 to 2020.” 15
• Alcoholics only care about getting the next drink. They will do anything they can to get to that next dose of their drug of choice. That includes lying, cheating, and making up excuses to eliminate obstacles between them and the next drink. If necessary, they will control family members with angry outbursts that justify going out to get a drink. Family members are intimidated and afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. But it is just a way of giving the alcoholic an excuse to get mad, slam the door, and go drinking. 
• Anger and stress (and just about anything else) are used by alcoholics to justify drinking. They like celebrations, holidays, and anything else that “calls for a drink” 
• Alcoholics like to have company when they drink; it makes them feel less guilty. Thus, alcoholics’ spouses are often drinkers or they are enablers (people who make it possible for the alcoholic to drink). 
• And, alcoholics lie. They lie about anything related to their drinking, including how much they drink, how often they drink, how drinking affects them and the people around them, and the impact of alcohol on their bodies. They lie so much that the helping professionals who work with them become cynical, skeptical, and exhausted trying to determine what is true and what is a fabrication.
• That is why, after a decade of practicing social work, I got burned out and left the profession.