Why I’m giving up sobriety when everyone else is giving up drinking

We drink too much, and don’t we know it. The advice, the shaming, the hectoring, the guidelines – it never ends. Yesterday’s headline was: “Wine o’ clock culture blamed for UK women being biggest boozers in the world.” A respected global think tank, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) had published a “Shock report!” and guess what, British women are the sobriety school dropouts of the world.

Believe me, I know it’s bad for me. I’ve long written about the growing sobriety trend and the booming “no and low’’ alcohol market. I’ve personally tried to inflict numerous restrictive and prohibitive regimes over the years. I got the drinking is bad memo, read it multiple times, pinned it to the cellar door, and consumed many thousands of peer-reviewed studies that describe alcohol’s causal role in over 60 medical conditions, including many cancers and depression.

I really have tried. I once had an entirely alcohol-free cocktail party just to prove it could be done. Half my friends, the fun ones, didn’t show up. And half of those that did come had a gin and tonic afterwards to calm the nerves – including me. The ex-chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, has a cosy nook in my brain, where she sits glowering as I head to the bar, saying over and over that I need to ask myself, “Do I want the glass of wine or do I want to limit my own risk of breast cancer?”

open image in gallery

How come, given all this information, I’ve decided to fall off the wagon for good. It’s certainly not because I want to be fashionable. Lately, even the governmental recommendation of 14 units provokes a tut from many. There is a new temperance movement, with its hashtags, of course, like #alcoholfreeme and its socially engineered challenges like dry January and Stoptober. According to the data, young women are the keenest on the #soberlife, buoyed by hopes that not drinking will lessen anxiety and improve wellness, the twin goals of online 21st century healthy living. Where fun and togetherness come in this, I don’t really know. On the yoga mat?

Perhaps this is the defensive rambling of one of those middle-aged, female wine o’ clock losers the OECD is so concerned about? It doesn’t feel that way to me, but perhaps I am an addict in denial. Most weeks (though people famously underestimate how much they drink) I stick within the recommended 14 units and easily so, though I do victory laps if I manage more than the advised three proximate days off.

Funnily enough, the certain knowledge that I will never stop drinking came from reading peer-reviewed academic papers on the subject. Professor David Nutt’s book, Drink? dedicates every chapter bar one to alcohol’s proven deleterious effect on the individual and society.

In 2009, Nutt famously lost his job as the New Labour government’s Drug Tsar for saying, when it came to harm: “There is not much difference between horse-riding and ecstasy.” A year later he put out a harm scale, where alcohol was at the top, next to heroin, while LSD and magic mushrooms were way down the other end. Nutt’s credibility is not in question, he is the current director of Imperial College’s neuropsychopharmacology unit in the division of brain sciences. He also has a side hustle developing safe alternatives to alcohol. His Sentia is a “safe’’ alcohol-mimicking drink that replicates that nice sociable first-drink feeling. It’s certainly worth trying out. It’s a nice middle way between sober and a good bottle of wine.

But what we never hear about is the role alcohol has played in history, in the formation of society, in the evolution of our species and the doing of its diplomacy. And work by anthropologists, paleogeneticists and historians persuaded me never to relinquish a determinedly healthy relationship with the beloved psychoactive compound ethanol.

open image in gallery

When you try to give up, you realise quite how firmly drinking is wedded to our identity at a genetic level. It’s almost as if drinking is in our DNA. And in fact, it is.

This was worked out by paleogeneticists trying to discover why alcoholism happens, and it turns out that a single crucial mutation in chimps and gorillas – the Great Apes – meant they alone could metabolise ethanol and turn it back into calories and food. This meant we developed a prehistoric “nose’’ for alcohol. We could sniff it out. This is the Drunken Monkey hypothesis. It’s real. When we came down from the trees and started hanging out on the ground we developed an appetite for those extra sweet, slightly rotting fruits on the forest floor in what a winemaker might call early fermentation. Long before humans made Beaujolais, gorillas were enjoying the smell of fermenting fruits.

Nutt might be over the toxic elements of booze, but he also has a share in a wine bar. He tells me in a quick email, “We are partial to alcohol on an evolutionary level because it is packed full of calories – apes that could sniff out fermenting fruit had an advantage over those who didn’t. [And] it feels good. Alcohol stimulates the neurotransmitter GABA, which governs our feelings of relaxation and sociability at smaller doses – such as the kind you’d get from munching on some rotting fruit.”

But then early man starts fermenting on purpose, perhaps to enable food storage, perhaps to enjoy the vibe. Either way, ethanol remains a molecule beloved by humans. There’s another theory that says this also helped us bond and build friendly little tribes and communities that would eventually turn into farms, villages, towns and then, Glasgow.

There’s a lot that’s bad for us besides drinking a little alcohol (within sensible limits). Not least loneliness. Loneliness is a nasty affliction. The US surgeon general recently announced it is as bad as six drinks a day. Professor Robin Dunbar is head of the social and evolutionary neuroscience research group at Oxford University’s department of experimental psychology. He believes our evolution involved a wee drinkie because it allowed the guard to come down and for close-knit groups to be formed, which “offered greater protection from predators mainly”. Today, our social networks provide us with the single most important buffer against mental and physical illness. Of course, I am not saying you can’t have a great social life when you are sober, and you can certainly lose friends when you drink too much, but it’s undeniable that a drop in measured doses in the right circumstances can ease the passage of human friendship.

One of the most measured and inspiring non-academic people I have spoken to about drink lately is Clara Rubin, head of wine at Hawksmoor, the UK and New York steak restaurants. She has the glow and gleam of a very healthy millennial, and yet she believes, strongly, in the ways that alcohol, drunk sensibly, can nourish the human spirit.

open image in gallery

“In demonising alcohol, we are demonising the activity of social drinking, which has a beautiful history. In anthropology it’s called ‘communitas’, which is when humans get together and go on a journey together to another plane of social norms. Alcohol is one of the commonest ways we do this. It’s about anti-structure, the liminal state, and suspending social norms. When you come back down, you can find things changed.”

So when I say I am giving up drinking, it doesn’t mean you’ll find me retching up blue WKDs into the gutter at 2am, or that I’ll be sculling pints of crap lager with vodka chasers til those little red veins burst across my face like vascular fireworks. It’s an unfortunate and rather shameful fact that those of us who live otherwise fairly healthy lives, eat well, sleep well, exercise, and live in middle-class comfort do not suffer the same health issues as those in lower socio-economic groups who drink less. It’s called the alcohol harm paradox. In all the science I have mangled to justify my continued use of alcohol, this one makes me feel uncomfortable to share from my nice Fleurie-in-the-door-of-the-fridge position of privilege.

Perhaps I am a tragic human figure, missing the moment as humankind evolves into some new sober elevated stage. Perhaps the new puritanism popular with younger generations is the better future with its goals of health, longevity, spiritual growth, anti-anxiety, wellness, purity and healing. Or are they just neurotic? I had a couple of drinks with a 25-year-old PhD student recently and she told me the thing among her highly anxious peers now is to meet for “walks”. I know this one, I’ve tried it myself when attempting sobriety, this let’s meet for a dog walk or a yoga class, let’s go for coffee. It’s nice enough but then so is a good lunch with fine wine. I hesitated before venturing: “Do you think they might benefit from a drink?”