The 1830 Resolution That Stopped Progress on the Disease – Marty M.

Thank you, Dr. Swinyard. I may say that we had some small complications trying to get this set up so I could speak to you. The stool isn't high enough and I feel kind of buried behind this podium but I'll do my best to overcome that even though I can remove that block anyway. I was here in time to listen to some of what Dr. Swinyard was telling you, and I'm glad that he made it extremely clear that that little extra line on the cover of your program reads other drug dependencies and that he pointed out to you that alcohol is a drug interestingly enough I think the majority of people who use alcohol have no idea that this is so and wouldn't want to know it if you tried to tell them because alcohol is not currently used at least they don't think it's being used as a drug and yet if you stop to think why people drink and the majority of our American population does drink about 70% of our adult population and this is an accepted social custom in our society and it's important that we always remember that but if we stop to think of why people drink i think there's only one common denominator for everybody it's awfully simple it's so simple that in many publications about alcohol and alcoholism is totally overlooked they drink to feel better They drink because it makes them feel good The fact that this is a temporary and transitory feeling That it doesn't last, in other words Is another reason why people rarely take just one drink They take another one And that continues the euphoric feeling which is the basic reason that they take alcoholic beverages in the first place and i suspect that that was true from the very beginning i think there's another thing we have to recognize about alcohol and you can't talk about alcoholism without talking about alcohol because without alcohol you wouldn't have alcoholism and this is not to say that alcohol causes alcoholism alone it does not do this or we'd have 70% of our adult population would be alcoholics, and we know that's not so. As a matter of fact, alcoholism strikes really only a fairly small percentage of those who drink, although the most recent studies are beginning to indicate that that percentage is going up and that it may indeed be as high as 10%, or one in 10 drinkers who develop alcoholism. But let's go back to alcohol. It is probable, and we don't know because this occurred before man had invented writing, but it is possible and probable indeed that alcohol was discovered by accident. In other words, that some fruit juice of some kind or some product of a living plant was left in the sun or the heat and nature's process of fermentation took place and although that may not have tasted terribly good whoever tried it discovered it made him feel wonderful and they quickly learned and I'm talking about primitive societies in prehistoric times how to make alcohol how to let fermentation create whatever this was that made them feel good. And by the time that mankind did learn to write and began to put down records of what he did and what was going on in his time, there were almost instantly records of the misuse or the overuse or of the abuse of alcoholic beverages. Alcoholic beverages were pretty well limited until, not modern times, but until the Middle Ages to wine and beer. In other words, to what the process of fermentation could do to give alcohol a beverage or to turn that beverage into one with an alcoholic content distillation which creates what we call hard liquor or spirits was not discovered until i forget whether it was the 10th or 11th century it's pretty early but a whole lot later than the discovery of wine and beer and the ancients drank wine or beer. The Greeks called it mead, some of it meade, and the Persians did too. And always apparently there were some people that couldn't handle it the way the others could. Always there are records or anecdotes or stories about some people who got in trouble with this. The Old Testament talks about it and warns people against looking upon the wine when it is red and talks about the damage that it can do and the annals of all of the ancient peoples contain warnings and contain anecdotes or stories about people who got in trouble because they drank too much as a matter of fact In fact, one of the earliest efforts that we know about to control alcohol was in China about 2500 B.C., where the emperor decreed that anyone making or distributing or using alcoholic beverages would be beheaded. It may have been successful for a short time, but in later Chinese records there are records of drinking again, so apparently it didn't last very long. None of mankind's efforts to eliminate alcoholic beverages has succeeded. None. And apparently the bulk of mankind doesn't want this kind of thing to succeed. Alcohol means something to them that they're unwilling to give up. And we had our own experience here in this country where our laws creating prohibition were honored in the breach rather than being honored by a great majority of our citizens. Law-abiding citizens, in other ways, managed to get their drinks, to get their liquor and to serve it and to use it, again in the majority of cases. So we're talking about something that is really very important to people. The roots of their appreciation or liking for this beverage go very, very deep. And we've never found a way successfully to pull up those roots and to eradicate alcoholic beverages. And I think one reason is because probably always the majority of people could use alcohol without getting into any serious trouble. And they couldn't see why they had to give up their pleasure, and for them it was a real pleasure, just because some people misused it or abused it. Actually, they began to recognize way back in very early historic times that the people who got in trouble with this were different. And they spoke of them as sick and their references in the early Sumerian cuneiform documents to somebody being sick because he drank too much. And I don't mean just temporarily sick because of that one occasion, but sick in general. And there are references in Egyptian hieroglyphics to the same thing. The Egyptians had physicians, and physicians treated these people. And this was true in ancient Greece. In fact, it was in ancient Greek that they tried to develop a cure. They dug a deep pit and they filled it with snakes and they lowered the person who drank too much down among the snakes on the assumption that this would be such a horror to him that he would never touch alcohol again. It was the earliest form of shock treatment, and it didn't work. As a matter of fact, we can go all through history. we can come up to the very beginnings of modern medicine in the late 18th century. First medical schools came into being, and one of the greatest was the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. And there a young English doctor who was getting his degree chose chronic or continual drunkenness for the word alcoholism had not yet been invented as the subject of his dissertation. In those days, they had to write a dissertation in order to get their doctor's degree. And in this dissertation, he diagnosed chronic or continual drunkenness as a disease and used that word. He went further. He called it a vicious disease. And he outlined a method of treatment that is just as good today as it was when he wrote it and just as essential, no matter what modern techniques we lay on top of it. His basic point was that it was the attitude of the physician that counted and it wasthe attitude ofthe physician that was going to make the patient get well or not get well. He said that this individual who was very sick indeed had to be treated with sympathy and understanding and a great deal of patience. And after you've heard all that you're going to hear about various approaches to alcoholism and the treatment of alcoholism, you'll find that at the core of every one of them are these same tenets. And young Thomas Trotter, in getting his degree in 1778, put it down then. Incidentally, that paper of his not only won him his degree, but it caused a sensation to such an extent that he was urged to expand it into a book and publish it as a book, and this he did. And upon the publication of his book, I think it was 1782, he was awarded a gold medal by the British Humanitarian Society for his services to humanity. He had made a real contribution. This didn't get stuck in the British Isles. it came across to this country maybe brought directly by the man who came to be known as the father of American medicine because he too was at the University of Edinburgh his name was Benjamin Rush he was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and he too wrote a book that was published in 1802 in this country and he too characterized chronic or continual drunkenness as a vicious disease and he specified that this required special treatment obviously what he believed and what he taught and what we were told and what they wrote spread through the small country that we were then for not long after in 1830, the Connecticut Medical Society petitioned the Connecticut State Legislature for funds to build a hospital for these sick people, stating that they needed special care and special treatment, and that they should have a hospital of their own. And the Connecticut state legislature acted as many legislatures do still, Well, with all due deliberate speed, they built that hospital in 1945. Well, what happened between 1830 and 1945 that stopped all progress in an area where the medical profession was beginning to make some progress and to gain some understanding and to feel that they could do something about this particular illness. I think what stopped it was the very serious problem that we had in this country. A lot of people are unaware of the fact that alcohol came along with the pilgrims when they arrived. The most precious part of their cargo were the casks of rum and whiskey that they had in the Mayflower. Now, they didn't bring those to get drunk on. They didn't even bring them to celebrate on or to give parties. They brought it because at that period in time, alcohol was an extremely valuable medicine. It was the only anesthetic we had, for instance. if a man's leg had to be cut off they gave him alcohol to sedate him to dull the pain perhaps to render him unconscious and for a thousand and one ailments they used alcohol and that is why it was important to a people who were coming to a new continent and having to depend on only what they could bring with them for life, to handle any kind of illnesses or accidents for any purpose whatsoever. But partly because this was true, the use of alcohol was almost universal. It was very widespread. It knew not even any age boundaries, because small children and babies needed medicine too, and the major medicine was alcohol. As we grew and became really a frontier country and began pushing west, alcohol always went along. It was always important. And when a new frontier was opened and a new town was coming into being and new houses were being built, you know they had a little roof tree? And when the house was completed, the roof tree came down and there was a celebration. And how do you think they celebrated? Just the way many of us do today. They all drank, and usually a great deal. In fact, it would appear, particularly if you're looking at documents of the time rather than reading some of our more popular history books. I'm going to digress just a minute to say that during the war, I was doing a series of radio programs that were supposed to be morale builders and they were called Little Known Incidents in American History. And I was responsible for my own research and I spent many days in the New York Public Library in the American History Room reading not the history books that I had read in school that all the rest of us had but reading the documents of the time they had an immense microfilm library where I could read newspapers journals, diaries all kinds of things that had been written at the time for the people living at the Time and it became very evident that drinking was a very important part of the beginnings of this country and that a great many people drank in fact most people drank and an awful lot of them drank too much not necessarily what we would call alcoholically today but at least too much this was so true and there were enough who developed what we know today as alcoholism and developed it to a serious extent so that Thomas Jefferson, when he was president, wrote to a friend named Charles Yancey. They're trying to tell me something. And he said that he intended to promote the distribution of wine and beer because, and I quote, whiskey is killing one-third of our citizens. end of quote now that is a problem and it would indicate that the incidence of alcoholism was perhaps higher then than it is today but in a new small country where manpower was crucial this was a terrible thing and not only did president jefferson get concerned but a great many other people got concerned. Three years before he wrote that letter, a number of such concerned people had come together and tried to figure out something to do about this situation. And they decided that they were going to undertake what today we call an educational campaign to persuade people to drink less. and in order to name themselves they went to the dictionary and they picked out a word which in its dictionary meaning means exactly that to do everything within limits moderately the word was temperance and the first temperance society came into being in 1812 with the avowed purpose of persuading people the american people to drink less they had no intentions in their earliest days of trying to abolish or to eliminate drinking they merely wanted people to be moderate to do things within reasonable limits and most particularly to drink within reasonable limits and this is what they set out to accomplish by any means that they could and the churches were very much behind this, but so were a great many other people. It took quite a few years, probably up until the 1830s, before they began to realize that this was not achieving what they had hoped to achieve. They were not persuading people to drink less. At least people were not drinking less. just as many people were getting into serious trouble losing all they had destroying their families becoming a burden to the community and they could see with their own eyes why it was because they drank this stuff and look what it did to them i think it's necessary to remember that at that time in history, there was no such thing as the scientific method. People hadn't learned how to test out ideas. They didn't look behind what they could see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears for reasons. And this seemed very logical to them. And gradually, over a not terribly long period of time, the emphasis of the temperance group shifted from the individual where it had begun, the person who drank too much over to the liquid that individual drank, the bottle. And they began preaching against the use of this stuff at all. And they begin exhorting people to not only give it up but to get rid of it. And for over 100 years, this became the major focus in this entire area as far as the american people were concerned they were either for or against temperance and if you were for temperance it meant you didn't drink you didnít have alcohol in your home you brought up your children not to drink and you were violently against it against its use in any form against its manufacture and distribution against the part that it played in our society. In this battle, because not everyone went in this direction, some went in the other direction, between the wets and the dries, the people that drank and believed it should be available to anyone who wanted it, and the people who did not touch it, thought it was evil and bad and should be abolished from the face of the earth, raged to and fro up and down the length and breadth of this country. The greatest scientist in this field, the late Dr. E.M. Jelinek, used to speak of it as a tug-of-war. And he said in that tug-o-war, the alcoholic was the rope. He got pretty frayed. But there's another way of putting it. It was a real battle. And the whole United States was the battlefield. And the casualties were the alcoholics, and nobody bothered about them at all. Nobody picked them up. They were left to die where they fell. In fact, society as a whole turned its back upon them. Now, I believe that something had happened, and this is my opinion, that we can understand. i think that in the effort to brand alcohol as evil as bad as death dealing as dangerous that these well-meaning and well-intentioned people achieved something they did not intend the evil aura they tried to build around alcohol came off on the people who drank too much of it. And alcoholics themselves were considered evil and bad and no good and hopeless taboo. And no decent person would have anything to do with them. And the little beginning that had been made dating from Trotter in England and Rush here in this country to treat chronic or continual drunkenness as a treatable illness and to treat it simply withered away. The last effort that we have any record of where the medical societies were interested or involved was that 1830 resolution in Connecticut. From then on, there was utter and complete silence. and the floor was held, and the noise was made by the people who were fighting the evils of drink. Incidentally, I think it might be of interest to you to know that the word alcoholism was coined in 1848 by a Swedish scientist. The interest in this didn't die in Europe the way it did here. Their temperance movements didn't begin the way ours did and didn't end the way ours did, particularly in the Scandinavian countries where they had temperance societies and so-called. They were only against hard liquor or spirits. They had no quarrel with wine or beer. And this was true in many European countries. And the high feelings that were raised in this country by the effort toward total prohibition of everything with alcohol in it did not occur on the continent of Europe. It did somewhat in Great Britain that has a similar Puritan heritage to ours, but it didn't occur on that continent and therefore scientific work and studies and the participation of both scientists and medical men continued in trying to find answers to this particular problem without the complete break that occurred over here. Nor did the terrible stigma that we placed upon the alcoholic as a result of his alcoholism occur to the same extent in Europe. Some did, but for a more understandable reason. Alcoholism is an illness, a disease, but it has symptoms. And most of its symptoms are behavior symptoms. And this behavior is not pleasant. And there's no way in the world of making an active drunk into a sympathetic sick person over which you can yearn. This has been one of the greatest problems we've had to face. To begin with, most alcoholics are adults. It's rare to have an instant alcoholic, although they do occur and there are some people who are in deep trouble from the minute they touch it, whether they're 13, 14 or 15. But this is rare. The great majority of people who develop alcoholism, who have whatever it is we don't know that makes them susceptible, are adults. We also know another thing. We know that alcoholism is a progressive illness and that the earliest symptoms, while present, are not necessarily visible. These behavior symptoms I was talking about which make the alcoholic such an unpleasant person for other people who are not in his condition are not visible in the first 10 years of drinking. The earliest symptoms of alcoholism are internal, they're within the individual and they have to do with his or her reaction to alcohol. What it does to him, what it means to him and for those of us who've been through it and I have, the meaning you discover in alcohol when you first taste it is very difficult to describe, it's sheer magic. It magics away your problems, as your troubles. And because of this magic, you become dependent on it. And as time goes on, you'll become more and more dependent on. But in my book New Primer, I list 22 early symptoms that could be recognized by the person who has them if he or she knew what they were knew what to look for. And if we're ever going to prevent this illness, it's at this level that we're going to have to work until we discover what the causes are. And this may or may not occur in the near future. We're getting more research today than we've ever had but it's still only scratching the surface. There is not enough money, there are not enough trained researchers, there's not enough public demand to see to it that we do get the funds and that it becomes a subject of such importance and interest that trained young researchers will go into this field and the only way we're going to do that is through a growing number of people like you who have come here to learn more about this and hopefully to go home with what you've learned and stir up some action in your community and not limited to your community you know all of us are voters no there may be a few that are not yet a voting age in this group they will be soon enough time passes very fast and we are the ones who can make our voices heard and our sentiments felt at the level of our state legislatures at the label of congress where there is currently a very good bill, having hearings, that would, if it were passed, produce a massive attack on the problem of alcoholism in this country. The only way we're going to get there, the only way we're getting the funds for research so we may learn, perhaps, what causes alcoholism — and incidentally, most people feel that the answers are going to be found not in one area, not in one single cause, but possibly in three different areas, physiological or biochemical, psychological or mental, sociological or cultural, that there has to be something you might say wrong in all of those areas before you get the proper fertile ground in which alcoholism can develop. Well, obviously, this fertile ground is there in an awful lot of us. We have been using for some years the figure of six and a half million alcoholics. But just a few months ago, a new study was released by Rutgers, although it was made by a group of scientists from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and it indicates we may have as many as nine million alcoholists in these United States. Now, that is an awful lot of people. It includes men and women, and they're at all ages. We're not keeping up with that despite the efforts that have been made, and a lot have been made and a has been accomplished, and we needn't be ashamed of what we've done. We haven't gone far enough, we haven't done enough, We haven't had enough money, we haven't had enough treatment facilities to begin to make a dent in the growing number of people who develop this illness. And if we're ever going to turn the tide, we're going to have to work a whole lot harder than we have up to now. I always feel that a school such as this, and I think it's very fortunate that more and more of them are coming into being. Last year Nevada had its first school. Arizona had its first school. This year, the northeastern region in New Hampshire is having its first school. They are increasing, and therefore, the number of people like you who are being exposed, who are learning the facts, are finding something with which to replace the myths and misconceptions with which we all grew up is steadily increasing throughout the country. and i believe that if we have a solid core of informed citizens that we are bound to make the kind of attack on this problem that has to be made if we're going to bring it under any kind of control myths and misconceptions are what you're here to get rid of incidentally that's the name of the chapter in my new book which is also outside questions and answers about drinking and alcoholism. And I doubt if there are any of you that don't have some of these myths and misconceptions buried very deep in your consciousness. And I hope that during the course of this week your major effort will be to get rid of them. You're not going to learn anything unless you have a totally open mind. If you come here convinced that you know the answers already And you're only looking for ammunition to buttress you In those things you already know You've come to the wrong place and you ought to go home You don't go to school for that purpose And if you come to a school If your mind is not open And you are not willing and eager indeed to learn I really don't think you should be in the school i doubt if that's true of anybody here i hope it's not but i urge you again with all the strength at my command keep an open mind this week listen and learn because the action that we as a nation are going to take or going to have to take is up to you thank Thank you.