Beer
Ever since my older sister spent a year in England, I’ve been thinking about why European countries don’t have anything near the same problems with drunkeness as Ameica does. Over there, everyone drinks. Heck, if you want to find your pastor in the evening he’s probably down at the pub having a cold one – and this is considered normal behavior. But they don’t have the problems with alchoholics, the drunk driving that we have here in the states. Why is this?
The first theory I came up with is the fact that drinking is sort of the ‘forbidden fruit’ in America. It’s ‘wrong’, therefore it’s tempting. Further thinking doesn’t bear this out though. This theory could possibly explain part of the underage drinking problem, but once it becomes legal it’s acceptable enough to drink in most circles, particularly the type of circles that breed most alchoholics. So that theory sort of fizzles.
Then I started contemplating Europe’s mass transit system. This does an excellent job of explaining fewer drunk drivers – there’s fewer drivers, period and absolutely no need to drive because the mass transit system can get you pretty much wherever you need to go. However this is only a partial answer, because it does nothing to explain why Europe has fewer alchoholics.
Then it struck me, as I sat here in my chair finishing my LaBatts (canadian beer, quite good as cheap beer goes). American beer is nasty stuff, better used as punishment in the lower levels of hell than as a beverage. When drinking American beer, you drink the first one and it leaves this nasty taste in your mouth, you just need something to wash it down with. Unfortunately, the only thing around is another nasty American beer. So you drink a second one, and that one’s nearly as bad as the first, so you grab a third to wash the second one down and then you need a fourth to get over the third one. Once you hit that fifth beer, due to the alchohol inhibiting your taste, you can actually start enjoying the beer and by the time you’re at seven or eight it’s tasting pretty good.
Unfortunately, seven or eight beers will get you pretty thoroughly smashed, but it’s necessary to drink that many in order to enjoy American beer. Contrast this to good beer (Blue Moon, Killians, the aforementioned LaBatts and many others) that you can enjoy from the first sip, and there’s your explanation why Europeans with their good beer have less of an alchohol problem than we do. They don’t need to be drunk in order to enjoy their beer, their beer tastes good from the start. That is the answer.