Garth George: Message in the bottle a road map to hell - and back

COMMENT

I got the message in the bottle in my mid-teens. It told me, subconsciously, that if one drink of alcohol could make me feel good, then a few more could only make me feel even better.

It was, though I knew it not, a life-changing experience for me. Looking back, I reckon I was born uncomfortable. From my earliest recollection I never really felt part of the human race. There was always me and them.

There was no apparent reason. My parents were normal for their day, dad at work and mum at home; there were never any loud arguments, let alone violence; neither drank except on odd social occasions and then so little that you couldn't tell.

Our family was better off than many (we had a car and a telephone), not as well-to-do as some. We never had plenty, but we always had enough. Yet I never seemed to feel part of the family and communities - school, church, youth organisations - in which I lived.

Alcohol, discovered when I was 15 or so, changed all that. When I had a drink or two, everybody else changed. I could be one of the boys, chat up the girls, play sports, and comfortably do all the things that boys do.

In my high school days episodes with liquor were few and irregular. Booze was hard to come by in those days with the legal age at 21. But we managed: those of us who looked older dressed up to suit, and usually managed to fool some far-off bottle store attendant into believing we were of age.

Then when I started work at 18 and had money to spend, having a drink before work became almost a daily event. It didn't occur to me that having a couple of drinks before starting work was odd; all I knew was that they seemed to set me up for the day.

Nobody told me that alcohol was a mind-altering chemical, an addictive drug and a brain poison. All I knew was that it came in bottles (or out of hoses), tasted okay and made me feel great.

Alcohol became my servant. At just what point I crossed the invisible line between heavy drinking and alcohol addiction I don't know, but I suspect in was in my early 20s because by the time I was 24 it was causing such problems, financial mostly, that I quit drinking for six months.

And when everything came right at home and at work and and the bank manager forgot my telephone number, I started again, but carefully. I promised myself (and my wife, too, no doubt) that if it ever caused trouble again, I'd stop.

But as the years went by that promise was broken time after time as we moved from place to place and job to job until my wife had finally had enough, left me and took the children. Looking back, it amazes me she put up with it for so long.

By this stage, though I didn't know it, I was a chronic alcoholic. The addiction had crept up on me subtly and remorselessly one day at a time until alcohol was no longer my servant but my master, something I know social drinkers find it hard to get a handle on.

I came to Auckland having blown yet another job and things settled down, but only for a while, for I ended up in the Kingseat Hospital villa for alcoholics, wherein a team of mad psychologists tried to teach me to be a social drinker, which worked for a month or so, but that's all.

Eventually, sick unto death and staring into a grave I had dug for myself, unemployed and unemployable, with nothing in this world but a suitcase full of tatty clothes, I ended up in a Salvation Army drunk tank - and it was there that the miracle happened.

Faced with the fact of my chronic alcoholism, I was able at last to ask for help - from God and man - and received it willingly from both.

And after 28 years of a whole new life provided by a commitment to total abstinence - a second chance I certainly did nothing to deserve - my gratitude to God and those whom he has put in my path along the way is boundless.

I am one of a chosen few. Most alcoholics, and a large number of heavy drinkers, never survive. They die of overconsumption that stops all vital functions, choking on their own vomit, violence, drowning, road accidents, fires, suicide, malnutrition, organ failure, to name a few.

And rarely does the real cause of death appear on the death certificate.

But while far too many men and women abuse alcohol and cause a lot of damage to themselves and to others, as our comprehensive series on alcohol this week is revealing, few become real alcoholics.

And the fact is that alcohol remains the safest and most readily available tranquilliser known to man, an indispensable social lubricant, the cup that cheers, the measure of wine for the stomach's sake.

It just pays to remember that it is a mind-altering chemical, an addictive drug and a brain poison; that anyone who drinks too much of it too often and for too long will surely become addicted.

And that it is no coincidence that alcohol is called a spirit.

* Garth George's column will appear next week on Monday.

* Email Garth George