Beer : Health and Nutrition

22 Chapter One
well return to a style of moderate consumption (Clark & Cahalan 1976). The reader
is referred to the autobiographical confessions of Jack London in John Barleycorn
(1913) for a literary example of this. As Schuckit (1984) observes, in any given month
half of all alcoholics will be abstinent, with an average of four months being ‘dry’ in a
1- to 2-year period. Keller (1972) points out that virtually all of the alcoholics that he
had encountered said that they could frequently take just 1 to 3 drinks for a period of
weeks without any episodes of being unable to stop. Keller observed that if there had
been an unavoidable slide towards uncontrolled drinking as a result of simply taking
one drink, then that would not explain why an alcoholic would lack the self-control
simply to avoid taking that rst drink. In other words, the lack of self-control exists
before the drink is taken.
Several studies have presented powerful evidence that heavy drinkers do possess selfcontrol.
Mello and Mendelson (1972) (see also Heather & Robertson 1981) performed
an experiment whereby heavy consumers of bourbon were allowed to earn ounces of
bourbon in periods of between 5 and 15 minutes in response to their ability and preparedness
to partake of simple tasks involving pushing a button according to instructions.
Under conditions where they could certainly earn enough bourbon to become intoxicated,
none of the subjects attempted to drink to gross excess. In fact they drank to maintain
high but approximately constant blood alcohol levels, in spontaneously initiated and
terminated sessions over a prolonged period as opposed to continuously. It was also
concluded that the amount of alcohol consumed was related to the effort that needed to
be exerted to get it – there was a bene t versus cost balance, which ies in the face of
the lack of control supposition associated with alcoholism.
In another study it was shown that, when given the choice of more liquor or the ability
to remain in a pleasant social environment, alcoholics mostly retrained themselves to
moderate drinking (Cohen et al. 1971). Pattison et al. (1977), in a review of more than
50 clinical studies, drew the conclusion:
Within a hospital or laboratory environment the drinking of chronic alcoholics is
explicitly a function of environmental contingencies.
This must mean either that there is something about non-controlled environments that
impacts on drinking behaviours or that properly controlled experiments and observations
made out of a clinical or laboratory setting have not been made. If the former is
the case, coupled with the observations made on individuals’ drinking habits in relation
to reward, then this argues for the importance of a range of other motivations for heavy
drinking that are not chemical based.
Indeed, a compelling study by Marlatt et al. (1973) showed that alcoholics consume
beverages in response to what they are directed to believe that those drinks comprise.
Thus, if given tonic water alone but told that it contained vodka, the subject consumes