Ideas - CBC Podcast, On Drugs Examines Pop Culture and Alcohol

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

For years as host of the CBC podcast On Drugs, Geoff Turner has examined the history, culture, science and religion of drugs, from ancient Berzerkers and their mushroom rituals, to the German army’s use of amphetamines, to the caffeine in millions of people’s morning coffee. In this episode, Turner gets personal. For more episodes: https://link.mgln.ai/TKNpBc  

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. I smoked pot for the first time as a teenager in November of 1968. I had an older sister and she brought the 60s down to my parents' basement. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I ended up macro-dosing by accident and I was just like manic and a little nuts and like oh the bridge is made out of fire now. You're hearing from people who enjoy taking drugs. From the CBC podcast on drugs. And one night I took mushrooms and went to a party and we were backstage at the party. It was on Hastings Street and I was in the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I was like,

I want to help people. Don't you know to never look in the mirror? Didn't they tell you that? I know. This was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end. I don't know. The show, now in its third season and hosted by Jeff Turner, explores society's complicated relationship with recreational drugs. It features episodes on amphetamines in war, psilocybin in the workplace, and the power of THC in the music studio. But there's one drug the show has left out until now, and it's the most popular recreational

drug in the world. One that Jeff admits he's struggling with. One of the big obstacles for me had less to do with the chemistry and a lot more to do with having built a social life around alcohol and occasions around alcohol. I've had a lot of really lovely experiences that involved a lot of alcohol. In this episode, Jeff does some self-reflection and looks at the way alcohol is embedded in our culture like no other drug. From social life to film and television

to psychology and history, here's Jeff Turner with On Drugs, On Alcohol. The first time I ever really tried alcohol, I was 14. I don't remember exactly how the evening came to be, but I was with my best friend Mike and we somehow got invited to hang out with some of my older sister's friends. One of them, Jane, lived a few blocks away and her parents were out of town and she and Sue had bought a big bottle of white wine and did we want to come over and listen to records? Well of course we did.

Jane's house was set back from the street tucked in among the trees. It was all cedar and modern and cool. We hung out in the rec room in the basement and we sat on the floor with LPs fanned out and the bottle of wine in the center of our circle on the rug. I probably drank that first glass of wine way too fast. And soon my cheeks were flushed. I don't know if it was the alcohol or the cigarette or maybe it was just because I was smiling so much. We didn't get drunk.

We maybe had two or three glasses each, but man, I just remember laughing so much and feeling at ease with girls, girls, even though they were four years older than us. I remember really listening to Bowie's Ziggy Stardust album for the first time and loving it so much and wanting to hang on to everything that I was feeling forever. And it felt like alcohol was the magic ingredient. A powerful elixir that made me feel funnier and smarter and just more comfortable in my skin and it seemed to be working for everyone else too. I sometimes wonder if I've been chasing that perfect buzz all of this time because alcohol

has been a part of my life, for better and for worse, ever since that night in 1983. Alcohol is far and away the most popular recreational drug in the world. According to Statistics Canada, just over three quarters of Canadians aged 15 years and older reported drinking alcohol in 2019. But that might be starting to change. Over the last 10 years or so, I've really noticed a gathering momentum of people who embrace sobriety or something close to it.

Three years ago, I decided to go Cali sober and it's honestly been the best decision I ever made. My name is Steph and today we're going to be speaking all about sobriety. Anyway, as you've seen from the title of this video, I'm going sober. Look, if you would have told me in my 20s, I'd be stone cold sober in my 30s, I would have told you hold my beer. But sober living completely changed my life and I know it might do the same for you. Now look, I want to be very...

That's not to say that alcohol is going away anytime soon. That became really clear in January 2023 when the Canadian government released new guidance on alcohol consumption. A new report from the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the science has evolved and so must the guidance. Low risk is now defined as two or fewer standard drinks a week. Any more than that and the risks start climbing fast. That report went off like a little culture bomb. I remember the mix of consternation, eye-rolling and denial among my friends and colleagues when the guidance was released.

After all, it wasn't that long ago that we were all parroting the supposed science that a couple of glasses of wine contributed to heart health and longevity. Of course, if you step back just a little bit and think about it, you know they are right. Alcohol is a known carcinogen and a major risk factor for several forms, including mouth, laryngeal, and esophageal cancers. It's terrible for your heart and it heightens your risk of stroke. Booze is implicated in a huge percentage of accidental deaths, homicides, and suicides.

And that's not even getting into the social costs, the broken families, the shattered careers, personal despair. But two drinks a week? For a lot of people, that seemed like a reversal of popular wisdom and an absolute buzzkill. That is Dino Senacola of St. Catharines, Ontario. A reporter from CHCH Television intercepted him on his way into the beer store and asked

him about the new guidelines. But there shouldn't even be guidelines anyway. Why are you going to tell me how much I can drink at home? Well, as you can imagine, that appearance made him a bit of a folk hero. Because even if you don't drink five or six tall boys a day, maybe you just don't want Big Brother giving you new guilt about something that gives you joy. And in these days of growing health disinformation and knee-jerk skepticism about public health authority, who knows what kind of effect the information really had anyway.

But there's something I noticed in checking out all those sober curious videos on YouTube and TikTok. The creators don't come off as the caricature of out of control drinkers, but they're looking at the kind of evidence the Canadian government is offering and they're asking a lot of really good tough questions about the place of alcohol in their lives. I have a bunch of those questions too too and I found just the person to help me with them. I'm Katherine Fairburn. I'm an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and I run an alcohol research lab here. The work in

that alcohol lab is fascinating. They hook people up with electrodes and they get them a little drunk and they see what happens. But as compelling as that research is, I have more personal questions for Katherine. Yeah, so you'd like me to psychoanalyze you? Because in addition to that research that she does, Katherine is a psychologist with a lot of experience in therapeutic settings where she helps clients struggling with addiction. Yeah, I'll do my best. Yeah, absolutely. Catherine, one of the things that I've been really interested in lately

is I've been looking at a lot of these, some of them are YouTube videos or TikTok videos. And I get the sense of a lot of young people embracing, it comes in different forms, but they call it sober curious, or they call it California or Cali sober, but just this general idea that a younger generation in my own is really embracing sobriety.

Is that borne out by your observations? Yes, there is some evidence that people who are now young adults and adolescents are drinking at lower levels, engaging overall in less binge drinking than individuals of an older generation were when they were the same age. And there's certainly more sort of a general culture of mocktails and dry bars emerging that wasn't around 10 years ago. You don't have to be a recovering alcoholic now in order to be curious about that lifestyle.

I think we're especially seeing that in younger generations. So maybe it's the new rebellion. Maybe it's gonna revert back at a certain point or maybe this is an enduring trend. I guess it really landed for me too, because I've recently become aware of this term gray drinking or gray area drinking. And it's being used to describe people

who are probably drinking certainly well more than what Health Canada is recommending. They're telling us two drinks a week is the maximum. But drinking a significant amount on a pretty regular basis. And when I started to think about it, well, that really described me. And I wonder, what do you make of that idea of gray area drinking? I think it's a really important concept. And I do think that that has been something that's missing. Like we have thought about people as two categories,

as alcoholics and non-alcoholics, and there hasn't been room for people to consider that there might be a spectrum. And I think maybe because that's threatening to people, maybe because the kind of reflection that you're doing right now feels kind of threatening and uncomfortable, but at the same time, that gray area drinking can be a really, really critical point.

First of all, gray area drinking can lead to some pretty serious consequences in and of itself. If you just have one night of extraordinarily heavy drinking, that can result in losing your license, losing your job, armed to relationships, all sorts of problems. And also, it can not only have problems immediately, but at the same time, it can be a trajectory to something else. The people that you talk to who are dealing with issues with alcohol, is there a typical presentation?

Are you seeing people who are that caricature, who are just, their lives are falling to pieces or is there something, is there a more typical characterization? Well, the answer is yes and yes. So we do see people who really do feel like they fall into a lot of those typical categories. Drinking all day, really unable to stop, unable to stop despite profound negative consequences for themselves. Muted response to alcohol, this sort of cluster of very severe symptoms. We absolutely see that. At the same time, if you actually look through the diagnostic criteria for alcohol use disorder

and the ways you can get there, there's huge variety in the kind of combinations of symptoms you see. Now to get to severe alcohol use disorder, you have to have six symptoms. And so necessarily the presentations become less variable when you get on the severe lens, sort of like every mild alcohol use disorder looks different

and every severe can start to look the same. Well, it strikes me that probably a lot of what people are talking about when they're talking about gray area drinking, they're actually talking about people who are probably on the low to moderate end of the spectrum of alcohol use disorder. That's correct. So, I think at that end, which is again a really critical end where you can transition one way or another, there's massive complexity both reflected within those diagnostic criteria, but also

extending beyond it. So I had my own look at that list of indicators from the diagnostic manual and I confirmed that if you answer yes to just two of the questions, well congratulations, you have mild alcohol use disorder. And if I'm being totally honest with myself, I answer yes to at least five of the 11 questions, which puts me firmly in the moderate category for alcohol use disorder. The questions are things like, have you had times when you ended up drinking more or longer than you intended, continued to drink even though it was making you feel depressed or

anxious or adding to another health problem? Check. Have you had to drink much more to get the effect you want? Check. Have you more than once wanted to cut down or stop drinking or tried to but couldn't? Check. Have you spent a lot of time drinking or being sick or getting over the after effects? Check.

And check. I could go on, but you get the idea. If you've ever questioned your own drinking, I suggest you look up those questions in the diagnostic manual. It's pretty stark when you see it laid out in black and white. I have to say though, you know, that there's no small amount of shame in reflecting on the fact that I'm almost 55 years old and it's literally, it's it's been 40 years since I first had a drink and there's no

small amount of shame in feeling that it took me 40 years to really seriously think about that and the price that I was paying and I wonder how that in itself like the shame and even addressing it prevents you from taking the step or something. Yeah, I think that is, there's a beautiful passage from the Little Prince where he meets the drunkard and he asks the drunkard, why do you drink? And he says, I drink because I'm ashamed. And he says, why are you ashamed? And he says, I'm ashamed because I drink. And when you're at more severe levels of alcohol use disorder, that cycle absolutely can come into play.

But I would also say that my hope is that one effect of this kind of gray drinking zone is that maybe we can move beyond some of that shame as a society that understand that alcohol use disorder isn't, or even individual symptoms of it isn't something that sets you apart as different, but rather it's something that can make you very human. So I think that always, you know, reflecting that we might have been doing something wrong is a painful one. But at the same time, I hope that we can remove some of that very specific stigma from alcohol

use disorder since I think it's an impediment. Another thing I've reflected on is the fact that for years I've practiced dry January, right? And I think partly that's because typically, like a lot of people, my drinking really ramps up over December to the point that I think where I probably started doing it because I was like, I really need a break. Like physically, I need a break from that. But I think also there's probably on some level, it's a way of telling myself I'm still in the driver's seat. I'm still, you know, alcohol is not the boss in me. But over time time I've started to wonder if actually it's had a different kind of negative effect and that maybe I would have been better off if I was real sloppy, obvious drunk who couldn't

do that because then the problem is so obvious that everybody sees it and I'm forced to a reckoning sooner. Instead it's like, oh, look at Jeff. Yeah, look at the discipline. He's not drinking at all in January, nevermind the rest of the year. You know, that's actually very interesting. One thing that's come up a few times now,

which is tolerance. So you've mentioned being a big guy, one drink doesn't really do it for you, being able to kind of pound them back. Tolerance occupies a really interesting cultural space, whereas kind of viewed, if you are somebody who's drinking a lot at a party, for example, and you are not falling down, you're not weaving, you're not slurring your speech, people will be less worried about you when they should be more. Tolerance predicts alcohol use disorder better than many other indicators.

One study I think found that people at risk for alcohol use disorder who also had tolerance were something like six times more likely than people with low tolerance to go on to develop a problem later on. And I think something that you just mentioned in terms of, I think it's this, you know, maybe this idea of, of really experiencing negative consequences, the result of your drinking between maybe dry January, but certainly your tolerance,

you're kind of insulated from some of those negative effects. One of the big obstacles for me, I think, had less to do with the chemistry and a lot more to do with having built a social life around alcohol and occasions around alcohol that there are so many baked-in associations, many of which are really lovely. I've had a lot of really lovely experiences that involved a lot of alcohol. And so then you have to start to ponder a future where you're going to still find joy in your life without this ingredient that you've been turning to

for 40 years to help create that joy. How much does that come up in your clinical work? I mean, that's huge. That's huge. There's so much, I mean, it's about joy, it's about community, it's about even a sense of identity. There's a lot of people who come to therapy saying,

I don't know who Sober therapy saying, I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. Drunk Jeff is the guy, you know, he's the life of the party. He's got friends. There's so many pieces that are wrapped up. But I think the piece that you mentioned about enjoyment, joy, reward is massive. And I think, you know, in our lives, we have home and work, and then we have the third place. And oftentimes, this sort of place that is a place of respite, refuge, rest, enjoyment, and so often that's been a bar. One thing that I say to clients, you know, I think alcohol and other substances can kind of act sort of like the sun. It is huge and powerful and warm and when it's around, you think that

it's the only thing in the sky. But when the sun sets and you can reach true nighttime, you begin to see this great complexity and this great array of stars, of tiny pinpricks of light out there. And so I think it can be a huge transition from pounding back five Jägermeisters at the bar with all your friends and dancing on the table and transitioning from that to a sunset walk or the smell of jasmine in the air, even just the taste of a pleasant food to those tiny little pinpricks of reward being what you turn to.

This ties into also the conversation around the question of whether moderation is an option or whether abstinence is the path. And I think in the back of my mind, I know that in the context of me drinking, there's just no moderation. And I guess I struggled because partly there's an admission then that, okay, you're not even the master of your own house here. How much of a struggle is that for people do you find? Like, do you find people having success in moderation or is it more typical that they have to give it up

altogether? Absolutely. So I think, yeah, I mean, I think this idea that the person who is totally abstinent is out of control and that is a jagged pill to swallow. I think, you know, there's a reason that in Alcoholics Anonymous, they make you repeat that. You know, I'm an alcoholic, my drinking is out of control.

They make you repeat that over and over again, in part, I think, to dull the pain, to sort of have that idea ingrained into you rather than this sort of alien sharp sentiment. It is, I think it can feel. It feels demeaning. I'm sure, you know, in common cultural terms, emasculating. It's a huge impediment, yeah.

So moderation is not only attempting paths because you get to drink sometimes, but also attempting paths because you get to preserve your inward and outward sense of self. That's a fascinating way of thinking about it. I think also in a previous conversation that we had, you used something that really stuck with me. You talked about how the attempts at moderation can appear in some ways, or they're sort of

analogous to a breakup in an unhealthy relationship where maybe there are some trial separations and you keep going back even though you know on some level that partner's not good for you, and then you wind up in a place, it's almost like a kind of acceptance and mourning that no, I can't be with this partner who turns out to be alcohol. That's right, and there's stages of grief

and there are stages of change for alcohol use disorder. So there's a time when you're thinking about it, but you're not serious. There's a time that you're thinking about it and you are serious. And then once you actually finally take action, there's grief, there's anger, there's loss. I have heard more than one client refer to alcohol as the love of their life and their best friend. I think there is a sense of personal and relationship loss when people lose alcohol and it takes multiple rounds of flirting with sobriety in order for people to get there.

[♪ Music playing. And a guitar playing.] You're listening to Ideas and to an episode called On Drugs, On Alcohol. It's from the third season of the CBC podcast On Drugs, where host Jeff Turner examines his own relationship with alcohol. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on SiriusXM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca. Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayd. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA,

the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. Alcohol is, of course, deeply embedded in our culture. In television and movies, you know someone's had a hard day because they crack a beer. If they're a character with a bit of moral complexity, maybe it's liquor, usually brown. And drinking to excess is often when a character has their deepest

moment of truth or most profound transformation. Culture sends a signal about what to drink, when to drink, and why. This is On Drugs, On Alcohol. alcohol. When my kids were younger, we used to play a little game on family road trips. We put on a country radio station in the car and we take bets on how long it would take until the singer mentioned alcohol. We quickly learned that the safest bets were under 30 seconds. Every one of those songs was among the top 20 in airplay on US country radio in 2023. They all talk about alcohol in different ways. Sometimes it's about celebrating love and friendship.

Sometimes it's about numbing the pain of broken relationships. Sometimes it's just there in the background. But in every case, the songs treat alcohol as a simple and essential fact of everyday life. That's especially interesting because country is the genre that more than any other aspires to speak to the lives of ordinary people. Ordinary white American people, anyway. people. Ordinary white American people anyway. Well as a white guy who came of age in the 1980s in suburban Canada I've clearly got some cultural blind spots of my own. It's easy to generalize about my experiences with alcohol and forget that how and if you drink well that's influenced by age and gender and even religion.

This became really apparent a while back when I was having drinks with some colleagues in Toronto. I was telling my producer Hadil Abdel Nabi a story that I heard from the bartender at my hotel. He explained that how for a couple of years the hotel had struggled to find a bartender for the weekend shifts. He told me that they'd recently hired someone at last, a young woman who incidentally had grown up in Iraq.

They trained her and she seemed to be a good fit for the job, but at the last second she bailed. She explained that having been raised in a non-drinking culture, she was simply afraid to be around alcohol. It was really not surprising to me at all. If anything, like I would have, like I understood immediately.

And I think I was more surprised that you were surprised because it was the first time I had considered, or not even considered, but it was like the first time I realized that my default setting is not the norm, even though I knew that, but I just like, I didn't realize that it would be out of the ordinary. Okay, so you're probably gonna have to explain

to listeners now why it would be that you would have such a particular reaction to alcohol in that way. So I was raised Muslim and it's sort of a pretty common thing to have alcohol be the thing that you are supposed to avoid. Like there are a handful of these larger transgressions that you are raised knowing that you are supposed to avoid. And alcohol has always been one of the main ones. I remember you saying also that your mom would cover your eyes or something when you were driving by a liquor store. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing.

It's funny and charming to think about, but I guess you don't really realize just how separate you are from this thing that dominates the social culture in this country. Did you ever feel like you were missing out in your culture? Because I'm sure you've noticed that in your adult life that alcohol is kind of everywhere. Like in music, like the country music

that we mentioned earlier, did you ever just have the sense that you were out of step with a major element of culture? Oh, absolutely. Like I guess so it evidenced in so many different ways. And I think particularly I noticed it for me when I started dating and I would be asked to go for drinks and then I would show up to a date and someone would sit across from me very uncomfortably trying to sip their drink and be normal while I was taking down like three diet cokes one after the other, not realizing that like, it's so weird to drink with someone who's not drinking and like, is not really questioning, like not saying anything about why.

So Hadil has given me a really different perspective on some of my own cultural assumptions about alcohol. But she also suggested we look at alcohol and culture through a very different lens. And that's what brings me to Todd McGowan and Ryan Angley. They host a really good podcast called Why Theory, and it turns out Hadil is a big fan. The show is about psychoanalysis, but instead of a person, they put a piece of culture on the couch and crack open the inner workings.

So psychoanalysis begins from the standpoint that people don't always do things for the reasons they think they do them. And they don't always think things for the reasons they think they think them. You don't always say things for the reasons you think you say things, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so if you just start with that little, that little insight, you open up this gap between what you think you mean to do and what you do do. Freud has this great line that this key inside of the unconscious means that the ego, your I, when you say I, okay your ego is not master in its own house. I want to know how my alcohol use is supported by the culture that I love.

Those country music samples I played off the top are really blatant instances. But I wanted to get a sense from Todd and Ryan of how alcohol is treated elsewhere, like in TV and film. So I think where I like to go is, so during the code era of Hollywood, during the production code legal censorship in Hollywood from 1934 to 1968. There were a lot of things you couldn't do, but you had to find ways of doing what you couldn't do. That's like I think one of the great stories of art is like, well, you can't

do this, but you're going to do it anyway, but you can't make it clear that you're doing the thing that you're doing, which is a very psychoanalytic position. If you go back to the idea of, you know, people don't always do things for the reasons they think they do them alcohol is one of the the forbidden aspects of the of the code was a licentious kissing So you couldn't have a kiss lasting longer than three seconds And you know you certainly couldn't show sex my god you couldn't do these things, but you had to show characters falling in love or have like some kind of like amorous connection and the drink at the bar is like always this ground

for a romantic relationship, where it typically plays out that way in a lot of Hollywood films. There's not a better example than the big sleep and the scene that was inserted after it became clear that Bogart and Bacall were like gonna be a big star. I'll have a scotch, mister. Yes, a scotch and plain water. Yes. How'd you happen to pick out this place? Maybe I wanted to hold your hand.

Oh, that can be arranged. So that legacy, so even though it's been a long, long time, of course, since the code existed, but I still think that there is a romance to specifically the mixed drink in a Hollywood film and even on television, you know, like I'm going to indict myself on this. Like if it wasn't for Mad Men, I would never order an old fashioned. You keep it down. Trying to drink.

But because of Mad Men, I do. Like any white guy worth his dark room glasses is going to order an old fashioned. That's like, that's, you know, just, just like me. So it's really because of that show that it started to appear on like menus in like this foregrounded way. And that harkens back to that history of this, the amorousness of the mixed drink and of I would say of wine a little bit as well. So I think the mixed drink as this prelude

to an amorous and romantic connection starts with being in the code era as this code for the beginning of a sexual relationship when you couldn't Show on screen that that was literally happening. So I think we still have that in in in film and television I'm glad you mentioned the the madman example because I think there's something going on there I was completely susceptible to that. I started drinking old fashions at exactly the time that that was airing. Of course.

Maybe that's the beginning of me getting really conscious too about drinking and the interaction of what's going on in culture because I think something I've really observed lately, like I just started watching the second season of True Detective, the one with Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell. And I noticed that they go really hard on that trope that's present in almost all contemporary cop dramas, which is it features the protagonist who's typically a broken man or woman

and who every suggestion is that they have some sort of issue with alcohol. And that they, when they turn to it, it's always used to signal, there's some high pressure situation and tension release. And it's almost invariably brown liquor poured straight into a glass. Usually, I think also, isn't it true that often that cop is an alcoholic and they're falling off the wagon

when they're sneaking the thing, right? Like they've trying to give it up and then they can't. And so it's a suggestion I think that there's this illicit activity. And I think what the films or television shows are doing is linking their particular insight into solving crimes to their indulgence in this illicit activity, right? Like they're not just chained to all the kinds

of prohibitions that govern the normal cops and the normal people in the society. Instead, they're able to do, like they drink on the job, like the rest of us drink at the bar afterward or at home afterward, right? But they're drinking, that's why they have the secret flask or whatever. So I think that that, I they're drinking, that's why they have the secret flask or whatever. So I think that that, I think to me, that's what it is.

It's like that alcohol signifies filmically or televisually, it signifies, I think, a special, especially when used illicitly, it signifies this special ability to get outside of the social norms. So I think that the drinking out of the brown paper bag or the flask has this kind of dimension to it still. And I think that's what it shows this person that's

outside of this, like, the norm that is governing the other cops and the rest of society. He looks like he's absolutely at the end of his rope. He looks like he's going to lose all his friends. Isn't that romantic? It's like this total reversal. And it's not just because that's how it's portrayed. It's because, and this is an insight that was so shattering for Freud

that he tried to run away from it. It's this idea of the death drive, which I would just say is this idea that we have a primary masochism. So like the thing that we know that is most to us is on some level doing ourselves a little bit of injury. Before we know anything else, we know that. And so then you have these objects in the world

or like, or relationships or whatever. It's like, boy, I keep getting caught in the same relationship dynamic that does me injury. It's like, you a little bit like that. That's a little bit enjoyable for you. Like that's something that you know. That is it. It's a masochism that does me injury. It's like you a little bit like that. That's a little bit enjoyable for you. Like that's something that you know. It's a masochism that you know well. And I think that's what I would say is what happens with alcohol because it has this thing where it is an allowed transgression.

So like in but it what's happened is that though because you drink, and obviously it used to be a time of prohibition, and that was a huge thing culturally of making it sexy, it has to do your health some amount of injury for it to be enjoyable at all. And it doesn't have to manifest itself even physically, I wouldn't say, but it's just like that idea that you have mentally is like, I'm not supposed to be doing this as much as I wanna do it.

That is what sustains the enjoyment of it. So, I think alcohol is almost like the, it's like the ideal transgression and I think that's like that ends up being sort of like a side comment. I think that ends up being like one of these things that makes it, the idea of being an alcoholic is like so shameful because like I I think people have, again, this unstated, unconscious idea that it's like, why can't you just have a regular unhealthy relationship to alcohol like the rest of us do? And so, I think that makes it harder for people who are suffering from the addiction side of it. In one of your episodes, I think it might've been Todd who talked about Prohibition being

an all-terrain vehicle. That's good. That's a good line. I wonder what you were getting at with that. Yeah, I think I was actually quoting Jock LaConven, that prohibition, it's an all-terrain vehicle for creating paths to enjoyment. Like if our enjoyment seems to be stifled in some way, just erect a bunch of prohibitions,

and then it all of a sudden is unleashed. I was just thinking about this the other day, like the way that prohibition functioned during the pandemic, all these prohibitions about like no more gatherings at church even, all of a sudden, like people that probably for them, church was the most boring thing in the entire world, like they all of a sudden going to church was like rife

with like, it was incredible. Like they was better than any sexual experience. So that's what that means, like it's all terrain vehicle, like it creates a new path for you to find a way to find some libidinal charge in your life when that's stifled, I think. And I think that is true, that that's what prohibition does. I think one last thing about alcohol I would just add

is that I think Ryan's right, that it's both socially acceptable and not. I think that's really important. I think I absolutely agree that it's this work of what we'd call death drive at work in us. But I also think it's one of the rare things where our pressure of conformity is in the direction of drinking.

Like I stopped drinking, I don't know, like 20 some years ago, just not because of anything, but just because I like to eat candy. And so I'm going to be self-destructive in one way or the other, and I just have to choose. But I can't tell you, I never go out, but when I do, I'm constantly the only one that doesn't have the drink. And there's a real pressure.

I mean, I feel it's palpable every time to like, why aren't you doing it? Why are you spoiling it for everybody, et cetera? And so I think, isn't it one of the few things where it both is part of our self-destructiveness and there's this incredible social pressure to follow along and do it. And if you don't do it, you're not, you're kind of, you feel like you're missing out. So I think, I think one of the things about it is it, it brings those two things together

in a way that few other activities do. I mean, smoking maybe once did, but it doesn't anymore. I don't think. Ryan, how do you see alcohol in our culture with regards to man in particular? Where I would come at this question of masculinity is I think that you drink as an excuse to socialize, because to say that you really need people

is kind of not masculine. And so I think that often know often you'll hear right alcohol is the social lubricant and I think that that phrase is used as like oh it loosens people up so they can be more social and I would say for masculinity I think it is hard and vulnerable for anybody to admit that they really need other people and I think that there is a pressure for a masculine ideal, the true masculine ideal, the alpha male that all these incels are always talking about,

that this person doesn't need anybody. And so I think alcohol allows you to partake and be kind of vulnerable in the social. Like you can get really sloppy and express your feelings, right? And it's okay, because you're drunk. And I think that maybe there's a jouissance attached to that from the side of masculinity, this like button up masculinity, like you don't say anything kind of approach to being

masculine in the social and symbolic. So I think that that's probably where I would take it. And then Todd, it comes along with a bunch of other weird dimensions for men as well. I was pondering as Ryan was talking about how there's this dimension to it about the capacity for drinking, that it's a marker of masculinity and vigor, your ability to hold your liquor. What's going on there? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because we think of that as like our cultural thing

But that's as old as that's as old as Socrates like in Plato's symposium That's what that's what Socrates is known for like no matter how much he drinks. He never gets drunk So it's really it's very interesting that that that idea that you just said I was thinking about that when Ryan talked to that idea is it has an incredibly long about that when Ryan talked too, that idea has an incredibly long 3,000 year history, right? And I think at least, and I think it has to do with this, precisely this idea that Ryan's getting about like masculine control, right? Like what does alcohol do? It causes you to lose control. And if you can hold your, what this is the term, right? If you can hold your liquor, if you can drink to excess without losing control, it's a sign that you have this masculine mastery that other people don't have.

And I think that you even see this filmically sometimes where there'll be a woman who can drink – this is the way they put it – they drink the guys under the table, right? And it's a sign that she has this masculine position. I'm trying to think, maybe it's in Zero Dark Thirty, but there's a moment – it's a Jessica Chastain film somewhere where she does that, but that's not an uncommon trope, right? Like this idea that the woman to assert her authority shows that she can drink better than the men can because that shows that she actually has more of a corner on the market

of masculinity than they do. And I think that that's exactly right. Like to me, it's about like, you're showing this phallic control over anything that comes to the body, right? Like, you're, it means that your conscious psyche can't be hurt. It's like the guy that gets shot and keeps on going, right? Like, that's the, it's the same idea. ["The Last Supper"]

In the course of producing these episodes, I've learned a lot of surprising things about alcohol. Catherine Fairbairn is the alcohol researcher who I spoke to in the last episode, and she told me about this study she was involved in where they found subjects who self-reported feelings of elation and sociability when they consumed alcohol. They just generally felt good when they drank. But when they gave those same subjects alcohol in the clinical laboratory setting, they had a hard time reproducing those feelings. And the researchers realized that maybe the chemical effects of alcohol weren't doing all the heavy lifting.

That maybe the set and setting of a bar or a nice dinner party or a great cocktail lounge or just some good company were just as important. In other words, culture over chemistry. I think it's probably a bit of both which gets me to wondering about the good things about alcohol, about how maybe it helps create social bonds and connections that we might not have otherwise. I think that the idea that they couldn't reproduce the effect of alcohol without the ritual is really revelatory.

But I think there's something that I don't think a placebo would work, right? I think that there's something about both things. Like the alcohol, what does it do? It takes you, and this is why I think one of the reasons why people like it, it takes you out of the ordinary. And I think in the same way,

the ritual takes us out of the ordinary, the everyday life. Like we have to get put on different clothes, we have to do different things, right? We have to talk in a different way. We can't say our usual jokes, or we have to say them more tastefully. Like all the things that we do in an everyday way,

we can't do. And I think that alcohol is tied to that, that it's this lifting. And I think you're right to say this is a, maybe call it positive effect of alcohol, right? Like it's this thing that does, that helps us do that to come. Because I think these moments where we're lifted out of the everyday are incredibly important as social glue, as just the things that make our lives worth living. So I think that alcohol does play a really important role

in that because it has that same positioning relative to the everyday, I would say. There's this whole realm of being out of your regular life. I think one of the appeals of especially the drinking in the bar or any drinking situation is that it does feel like a snow globe in your life. I think one of the appeals of especially the drinking in the bar or any drinking situation is that it does feel like a snow globe in your life. And I think that, you know, you kind of said it earlier about the hangover. The hangover kind of like tethers you to that snow globe and that kind of like continues the snow globe feeling. And I think it's difficult to produce something that is as appealing that is on the recovery side.

That's what I would say. That's really interesting, the image of a snow globe. And my mind immediately went to that Steve Buscemi film, Trees Lounge, where he plays this alcoholic whose life is totally centered on this little lounge on Long Island. And where all the regulars hang out pretty much all their waking hours and the cycle of their lives goes round and around like a snow globe, I guess. Well, Todd, don't you think a good example of just relevant for this conversation is it Matt Dillon in Barfly?

Mickey Rourke. Mickey Rourke. Thank you. It's Mickey Rourke. Yeah, it's Isabel Bukowski. So listeners, it turns out the movie that Ryan is remembering did star Matt Dillon, but it was not Barfly. It was a 2007 film called Factotum that was also based on a semi-autobiographical book

by Charles Bukowski. So film nerds, please don't send me angry corrections Okay back to the interview. There's a scene. It's like it's it's hard. It's hard to forget if you've seen the movie There's this scene where he's uh, he's just screaming. I need fuel Like to write but it's alcohol and he cuz he's just poor. He's just in this like motel like it's just life It's just the to crab. He's just screaming I feel like around anyway It's one of those I think what what Todd and I are would would link and I think this is what makes this conversation So interesting and especially to talk about like visual culture

And how it intersects with our lived? Psychic reality is that that's supposed to be the character at the lowest moment But there's all this excess and this excess enjoyment that's in it. And it counters your conscious intuition about what should be positive and what is negative, what should be an uplifting portrayal of someone. But it's just that scene is far more interesting than almost anything else in the movie. And there's not a slam or a slight in the movie.

It's just like, that's the character acting in this utterly excessive way. It's supposed to be at the bottom, but it's just for one's interest in that film, it's absolutely at the top. Right. And I think that the... I mean, this comes back to the war film point that you made, right? That I think it's very hard not to depict excessive drinking as enjoyable, right? Like even the, even leaving Las Vegas, which I think is a very bad film with where Nicolas Cage drinks himself to death. You're like, that wouldn't

be so bad. You know, that's, I think it's really hard to detach those two things. I think you can't separate enjoyment from the damage that it does to you. And why would that be? Why would that be? Well, I think it's because the damage lets you know it's worth it, right? It lets you know, like there's something really valuable. It's like a, it's like a little theory of value. Like there's something valuable here because I'm enduring this bodily

damage for the sake of it. That's how I know it's valuable. So I think that there are certain things that for the most of us go too far like heroin, cocaine, although I don't know, my students are now all doing cocaine, so maybe it's back in that. It's okay. Smoking maybe, although that's I think back too in a certain way. So I think alcohol fits like in the sweet spot, right? Because the damage is usually long-term, alcohol, it's like in the sweet spot, right? Because the damage is usually long-term,

it's not immediate, very few people drink themselves to death in a single night, and yet it is damaging you, it's not helping your body. In a very general or like commonplace way to put it is no one enjoys having the serving size of anything. And if they do, it's because what they're enjoying is depriving themselves of what it is they actually want. Yeah, it's funny. I've been thinking a lot about mocktails. A friend of mine was, you know, saying how it's, oh, it's nice to see how mocktails are being added to menus everywhere.

And I just think, you know, an old fashioned tastes good, but if it doesn't have alcohol in it, I'm not drinking an old-fashioned. That's not why I'm drinking it. Like a mocktail is interesting in this enjoyment question, right? Because you're trying to get the enjoyment of the drinking without the drinking, right? Like it's like caffeine-free Coke or something. This is a point that Slavoj Žižek makes all the time. Like it's like a caffeine-free Coke or a caffeine-free diet coke or something.

Like you want the enjoyment, but you don't want the cost of it. But the cost of it is the enjoyment. My apologies to anyone for whom mocktails are a source of great pleasure or even better, something that's helping them get past some problematic drinking. That was

just a light-hearted place to end the conversation that actually had a lot of personal resonance for me. I've been thinking a lot about the idea of jouissance that they talk about in psychoanalysis, this idea that people sometimes reach for something beyond pleasure that actually does us some injury or pain. It's not precisely masochism, but it kind of plays out that way sometimes. You were listening to Ideas and to an episode from Jeff Turner, host of the CBC podcast On Drugs. You can find more from season 3 of On Drugs on the CBC News app or wherever you get your

podcasts. If you'd like to comment on anything you've heard in this episode or in any other, you can do that on our website, cbc.ca.ideas, where of course you can always get our podcast. The episode was produced by Jeff Turner, Hadil Abdel Nabi, with sound design from Graham MacDonald. It was adapted for ideas by Matthew Lason Ryder. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas.

Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.