Alcohol - statistics

t turns out to be bl**dy hard to find any statistics on alcohol-related traffic deaths, but at least here's something to go by. Based on this document (and a couple of WHO sources to which I've lost the URL), about 40% of fatalities in motor vehicle crashes in the USA are alcohol-related. (Turns out it's fairly constant whether you consider 2002, 2005 or 2006, so this is a reasonably reliable statistic.) For Europe, where drinking ages are generally much lower (if they exist at all link) but where the limits on blood alcohol content while driving are lower as well(*), I found the following list of statistics on this WHO webpage:

Austria, 2001: 6.5% of fatalities; 1998: 8.5%.
Belgium, 2000: 10.2%; 1998: 8.9%.
Czech Republic, 2002: 10.5%.
Denmark, 2001: 26.6%; 1995: 20.2%.
Finland, 2005: 14.3%; 2004: 15.7%; 2002: 14.6%; 2000: 14.4%.
etc.

I could go through the entire alphabet, but I guess you see my point. (I'll admit there are exceptions to this rule: France 2002: 30 to 40%; Ireland, 2000: at least 40%; Italy, 2000: 30-50%; Spain, 1998: 41%.)


I guess my point is clear by now.

Have a great - and safe! - 2010 everyone. Happy New Year :-)


(*): ps: the link for the European statistics doesn't seem to be working. Let's see if we can remedy that. The data I show comes from this page: http://apps.who.int/globalatlas/default.asp. In the right-hand box "Related Sites", click on the bottom link ("GISAH"). Confusingly, you'll find that the URL doesn't change, but the webpage does. Anyway. Now you click on the third link from the top: Data query to search the contents of the information system, select the category "Harms and Consequences", the topic "Mortality" and sub-topic "Alcohol-related road traffic fatalities" (all the way down the bottom). Make sure to select a decent range of years, so you don't accidentally tick a year that didn't have any information.

Interestingly, last time I tried this, I only got European countries. Now it has all of them - so you can verify the American ~40% and see that Australia had 31% in 1990. (After 1990 the Aussies seem to have subtly tweaked their statistics, but I'll leave that debate for now.) UK was at 15% in 2002.

Alcohol and how to (mis)use it

As a nice little attention for the holiday season, WVU provided all its employees with a useful little brochure, reminding us the university is totally an alcohol (and drug) free place. It lists the pains and troubles you could find yourself facing when you are found to unlawfully possess, use or (insert any number of verbs right here) a controlled substance in (or near) the workplace and goes on for no less than 20 pages (A5 or whateve the equivalent name is for a folded US letter size paper) listing the fines, detentions and obliged sessions of councelling you might attract when coming anywhere close to any of these things.

Problem is, of course, that neither "unlawfully" nor "controlled substances" are clearly and univocally defined anywhere.


Anyway. The real reason for bringing this up, is that it brought to mind the fascinating and - in my mind - rediculously ambivalent relationship between the state (or, in this particular case, WVU) and alcohol. Let's, for once, start my tirade far away from home, in beautiful Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico.



Santa Fe (depicted here is the main square at nightfall, lit by some great Christmas decorations and poorly photographed by yours truly. Adam (Deller) has many more pictures that worked out much better, but I haven't managed to get them off him yet.) is a nice, seemingly authentic and very touristy town - I would almost call it the Bruges of New Mexico, but since Bruges has been around for thousands of years and Santa Fe barely for hundreds of years,... well, okay, I guess some astronomers might find them equal.

I had come to Santa Fe on a slight detour while travelling to Socorro on a visit to Adam and - more importantly? - the Very Large Array (VLA):



Since Socorro hasn't got anything more to offer than the VLA (and a bunch of scientists), Adam had the brilliant idea to show me the capital as well in a way of - you know - reminding ourselves what civilisation looked like. Truly it was a fantastic idea and I am grateful for it, even if the town didn't like us. Sparing you a rant on all that can go wrong on a two-day visit to an artsy town, I'll stick to the first night when we attempted to go out and catch up over a beer or two.

At the first pub we turned to (and as we later found out, probably the only pub that was still open at this late hour), the bouncer required a $5 entrance per person (fair enough, I guess?!) and demanded to see our ID. Given the fact that I'm 27 and that - ever since I regrew my mustache and goatee - I even look this old, I rarely carry my passport unless I'm about to board a plane. In West Virginia people have been sensible enough to accept my Belgian identity card which, even if it doesn't hold any official power abroad, does identify me and isn't easily forged (it has a chip in it!) In fact, I have successfully and without problem used this ID to both rent a car and cash a several hundred dollar check in WV. However, to get into this pub in Santa Fe; to be allowed to pay $5 to enter so that I could subsequently pay much more to drink beers while listening to music that would probably be so loud that the catching up we intended to do in the first place, would probably become impossible; to do that, my Belgian ID turned out inadequate because - as the bouncer put it - "they had had recent trouble with fake foreign IDs".

I simply didn't know what to say, how to react. There's so much I couldn't grasp, couldn't understand. Do I look like I'm 20? Do I sound like I'm American? Does my ID card (with chip!) look like it might be forged? Do I look like I would imagine I should need to go through extreme forgery attempts in order to be let in to a bar? I was flabbergasted, could not figure out what his problem was. Did not understand why the bouncer of a place would stop such a thorough forgery - if indeed it had been one, which it wasn't. Surely it wasn't his job to distinguish false documents from real documents? Surely he just had to check if the date on whatever card I showed, read less than 1989 and then let me pass? Would they really shoot themselves in the foot by disallowing entrance to two guys in their upper 20s? We ended up drinking tap water over a game of cards in our hotel room.

I'm not sure what my readers (that would be you) are thinking at this point, but the proof of age, irrespective of what you look like, is a very common thing in the US - it becomes a second nature: I show my ID card (though never my passport) without even thinking about it anymore. - But that doesn't mean it isn't hypocritical. My problem is that they're anal about checking your age but that once you turn 21, you're perfectly welcome to do whatever you please - as long as you have your ID or drivers licence (well, and as long as you're not inside university buildings). One of the most frightening things about this, is the combination of this policy with the driving culture that seems to be more common here than elsewhere. What I'm saying is that it seems to not be too uncommon to go out drinking and drive back home. After all, real men can do that, right?

I have been told - though I've forgotten my source - that there are pressure groups intent on making alcohol consumption hard and difficult in the States and that such pressure groups could - and have - send kids into bars with fake IDs, only to get the police involved as soon as the kids manage to get served alcohol, causing the place to be closed down for serving to minors (<21s). While this would explain the reluctance of our bouncer, it does not (in my view) do anything useful. Surely it would be better for everyone if we would embark on a sensible debate about the dangers and problems of alcohol consumption, instead of making 21 some sort of magical barrier past which the sky is the limit?

I guess my point is this: if, instead of threatening us with dismissals, fines and councelling when we turn up to work drunk, if they provided us with a simple, 1-page overview of the damage alcohol does to ones body, mind and brain - and showed the statistics of traffic accidents and deaths that involved alcohol, then maybe we can slowly move towards an understanding and towards a reasonable culture of care and responsibility.


One final example. Sometimes some of the graduate students at WVU go out for drinks - yet the non-drinkers never follow. One day I had the interesting idea of asking a teatotalling student to join us anyway, just for the social aspect of it - and that he could drink orange juice instead, for example. I was met with the same blank stares I gave the bouncer in Santa Fe and a discussion ensued on whether such a thing could be conceivable - if not in real life, then maybe in fantasy fiction. Sure: bars would have some orange juice to make cocktails, but chances were they wouldn't just squander that away on a full glass of orange juice - surely such a strange thing would be unheard of.

In Belgium, ever since the Bob campaign started in 1995, it is implicitly assumed that one person in each group does not drink. Or rather: drinks orange juice, water, coke, whatever non-alcoholic beverage you like. At parties, at pubs, at dancings - anywhere it has become the standard. The "Designated Driver" (aka 'Bob') has become a standard - and he isn't someone who counts his drinks and uses complex arithmetic to justify driving: he's someone who doesn't drink.


Of course, moving from a 21-and-you're-good mentality to a responsible voluntary abstaining for the greater good, isn't easy and takes a lot of campaigning along with some brainwashing. Be that as it may, harshly checking ID cards, trying to get pubs closed by tricking them into serving 20-year-olds and warning your employees about fines and prison sentences, are definitely not going to get us there. (IMHO, of course.)

Have a drink!

A few weekends ago, on a Sunday around noon, I decided it would be nice to make pancakes for lunch. And what better way to enjoy waiting for the whiteish-yellow dough to turn yellowish-brown than by enjoying a beer on the side. So I grabbed a random one from the fridge and started lunch.

An hour later, as I was glad-wrapping the final few pancakes for dinner on Monday, I became aware of a slight tipsiness which didn't so much worry me as it confounded me. Maybe the milk had gone bad and was having an effect on my digestion / maybe this was the effect of a few nights of bad sleep? Maybe - no, surely it couldn't be the beer.

From a Belgian perspective, the initial interesting (and disturbing!) fact about beer in WV is that beer with more than 6% alcohol may not be sold. While this law is of course totally preposterous, meaningless and useless, it didn't bother me too much because a) I did not believe that any country other than Belgium can produce a good-tasting beer with high alcohol content and b) We happen to live 6 miles from Pennsylvania and a 45 minute drive from Maryland. (The law was most recently changed so that now it should be allowed, though the shops haven't caught up yet.)

The problem with Pennsylvania is (as I am told by the natives) that you can only buy beer by the case (or slab for you Australians - for everyone else: a 24-unit container), except for the really basic stuff like Budweiser (in which case you can buy 6-packs at bars, I'm told). So in order to get a taste of variety, Pennsylvania wouldn't be the right place to go. Hence, we teamed up with a couple of students and went on a "beer run" to Maryland. Hop across the border, buy an interesting-looking collection and hop back. As a consequence, my fridge has been filled with a quite intruiging (though currently dwindling) variety waiting to be tried ever since.

The random pick I drank while eating pancakes, happened to be a "Stoudts Triple". Now I know what you're thinking: Triple - that spells trouble. But really, the beer didn't taste like alchohol. In fact, it pretends to be a "Belgian Abbey-style Ale" and to my great surprise it smells, looks and tastes damn close to exactly that. Again, I feel a footnote is in place. Once you start paying attention, you'll find beers all over the world pretending to be "Belgian style" this or that. It's an easy trick to get sold: paste a label irrespective of whether you have anything to do with it or not. (On that topic: how many of you knew that the corporate headquarters of IKEA are in the Netherlands?) Anyway. Disappointment after disappointment has taught me to never expect a Belgian style beer to be Belgian style at all. I guess Stoudts finally proved me wrong. After checking the internet (for some reason that defies my logic, alcohol content is often not printed on the bottles or 6-packs), this specific brew was supposed to have 9% alcohol. On a Sunday at lunch with nothing but some pancakes. I guess that would explain some of the tipsiness. Joris - American Beer: 0 - 1.

But that's not where this ended. Oh no. If you thought getting drunk at noon was bad, hang on to your hat, worse is yet to come.

A week and a bit later - a quiet Tuesday evening I think it was - I sit down for my favourite passtime: reading a book with a nice beer as companion. Now since I was the only Belgian on the beer run, I felt morally obliged to buy just about all the Belgian beer that wasn't Leffe (since Leffe you can find anywhere). Consequentially, I happened to have a sampler pack of the (pretty much unheard of for all I know, but then I haven't lived in Belgium for nearly a decade) Petrus brewery - which is indeed, very Belgian.

My random pick that Tuesday evening left me with the "Aged Pale" of Petrus and to say the only positive comment I can devise, it was unlike any beer I've ever tried before. It was not, however, too different from the Slovenian apple vinegar my dad once bought in the vain hope of getting apple juice - the difference being that the Aged Pale tasted less of apple and more of vinegar. I never thought I'd see the day, but here it was: blunt and undeniably in front of me: the ultimate undrinkable (Belgian!) "beer". The struggle that went on in my head was terrifying in that it defied the only things I still believed in: the Belgian supremacy on the front of beer-making. If we cannot even have that, then what good can we do? (Well, I guess there's still chocolate?)

The dark side won. I chucked the vinegar down the sink after only the tiniest sip. And I took a Leinenkugel's 1888 Bock to replace it. Joris - American Beers: 0 - 2.


At this point I bluntly and openly admit defeat: Belgium, Germany and the Czech Republic are not the only nations in the world to make good and varied beers (though the Czech republic doesn't necessarily do that, either). The U.S.A. knows quite a bit, too. I've had some really good wheat beers (which, again, say to be "Belgian style" and in fact they may well rival Hoegaarden, especially since this latter has now been absorbed into the Death Star called "InBev" - that's right: Hoegaarden and Budweiser are owned by the same company. Disgusting, isn't it?) I've tasted "Belgian Abbey-style beer" which actually emulates exactly what it set out to emulate. I'm really, honestly surprised by the variety - the many different brands, the different types available and the quite regularly recurring fact that these things actually taste right! And on top of that, I don't even think I've yet tried any of the beers Josh and Nick told me to look out for.