My entire adolescence took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. It also took place in the context of my primary personality trait at the time, which can only be described (charitably) as “stupidity”.
It was my mother, a woman of enormous (if often sharp and sarcastic) insight, who realized that the spatial and temporal overlap of those two phenomena was a foolproof recipe for disaster. She spent some months early in the year my draft number came up (the 1970s draft was run as a lottery, based on date-of-birth selected randomly. I do not know how the government randomized the numbers, I’ve always imagined it being done via one of those rotating minnow trap cage things that was spun before each little piece of paper was drawn and the “lucky” winners announced to great fanfare) in a panic. When she calmed herself down with cigarettes and possibly tranquilizers, she formulated a plan. She bought a one-way set of train tickets from New York City to Toronto, packed a small travel bag with clothing and toiletries, and telephoned my dormitory on the Rutgers satellite campus in the quaint and/or historic metropolis of Piscataway, New Jersey. Usually when she called we would do 15 minutes of chitchat and then go our separate ways. This time she told me just to listen. If my number came up below the draft cutoff (to get the necessary quantity of cannon fodder, the government set a cutoff at the number of days expected to yield sufficient dimwits to meet their needs), I was to say nothing to anybody. I was to take the bus to the Port Authority building in Manhattan, transfer to the Pompton Lakes/North Jersey line, walk home from the bus stop next to the paint store in downtown Pompton Lakes, pick up the bag and tickets, get back on the bus to the city, and get on the train to Canada.
But that’s not why we’re here (despite the bloated number of words in the paragraphs above). We’re here to discuss the age for legal consumption of alcohol in New Jersey. Which, oddly, had a lot to do with the Vietnam War. From the 1800s through 1973, the drinking age was 21. By 1973, the military draft took everyone 18 years or older, in conjunction with the voting age [1]. There was heavy pressure to let people you were training as adult military conscripts and sending off to die in the steaming heat of rice paddies in the Mekong Delta drink, so the age was dropped to 18. It went to 19 in 1980 and jumped back to 21 in 1983 [2].
In other words, the legal drinking age bounced up and down during my (extended) college career. During the pre-1973 gotta-be-21-to-drink years, a couple entrepreneurial dorm residents operated a weekly run (usually on Wednesdays so we’d be prepped for the start of the weekend on Thursday) to New York State (a couple hours away by high-speed motorway) to purchase primarily cases of something called “Boone’s Farm Apple Wine” and “Boone’s Farm Berry Wine”. The bottles sold for somewhere south of a buck apiece, our smugglers took a 25% premium, so we basically paid a buck and a quarter per bottle. Because there was a finite amount of alcohol available every week, things seldom got out of hand (well, wait, they still got thoroughly out of hand, but it didn’t really have much to do with serious overconsumption). Then in 1973 the dam broke. Now we were on our own, with no need for intermediaries willing to risk their arrest records in return for not very much money. And without logistical constrains on the availability of beverage intoxicants.
Because we bunked in a campus well away from downtown New Brunswick and the main Rutgers campus, the selection of booze in our general area was somewhat constrained. In fact, the nearest purveyor of alcohol was a tiny store front shack that sold every available size container of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. And that was it. You want wine? Whiskey? Actual beer? Keep driving through the pasturelands to the next town down the line.
Because it was cheap, handy, and really not too bad…did I say that out loud?!...I became quite the devotee of Colt 45. I started the year drinking about a liter-and-a-half a night. But I found, over time, that I habituated. To achieve the same level of intoxication, I had to drink more and more Colt. My tolerance for alcohol rose steadily and consistently as the school year progressed. Costing me more and more money. Fortunately, Colt 45 was cheap enough to support an alcoholic habit.
Many toxic chemicals (which is a category properly characterizing beverage alcohol) exhibit this process of rising tolerance. Nor is this property trivial or merely an inconvenience. With alcohol specifically, a heavy drinker going cold turkey and simply stopping drinking can die from the withdrawal effects [3]. The generally intense withdrawal symptoms from opiates, while horrible in the experience, don’t usually have the potential to kill.
And opiates is part of the reason I’ve dragged you through the above rambling trip through my subconscious. As you’ll remember from this column a couple weeks ago, I take a lot of medicines. Quite a few of them are psychoactive, including dilaudid (a powerful and pure manufactured opiate), Xanax (a tranquilizer), Mirtazapine (relaxant and sleep inducer), melatonin (sleep inducer) and others. I had gotten in the habit of taking my meds three times a day—once in the morning, once in late afternoon, once in mid-evening. Lately I’ve been combining the afternoon and evening meds (including the heavy dose of multiple varieties of sleep inducers), taking them around 6 pm as the TV news comes on. Taking higher total doses of some of the meds (like painkillers and antihistamines) is necessary at night because if I get the proper dosage, the pain and mucous drips stay away and I stay asleep. The problem with this was that I would fall sound asleep by 8 o’clock, bolt upright with my computer in my lap, whatever books I’m reading or researching spread out on my bed, the TV blaring, all the lights on. Then I’d wake up around midnight to pull myself together, shut down the computer etc. and get back to sleep. Cathy noticed this phenomenon and asked what I had changed about my meds, making the (spot-on) assumption that I’d changed my daily dosing procedures. She was concerned about my discomfort after sleeping bolt upright. I figured she had a good point, and that I was drugging myself into a stupor and so missing potentially useful reading/writing/researching/movie/TV watching time.
So this week I started revising my dosing routine so that the heavy sedatives and sleep inducers don’t get taken until after 8 or 9 o’clock PM. This has had the interesting effect of inducing withdrawal symptoms. I was getting weirdly dizzy and nauseous by the late-evening time I took the last round of drugs.
So I’ve actually had to spread the doses out, taking some of addictive drugs at a lower dose several times during the day. Still, the sleep inducers tend to slap me into submission right after I take them. If I am smart (and Cathy pointed out today that I have not been handling this intelligently), I would put the computer and books away immediately, so when the drugs put me to sleep, I’m not risking tipping over from the elevated hospital bed to the floor.
I’m gonna try it starting tonight. I’ll let you know how it goes next week.
Thanks for being here, everybody. Remember to use ‘em while you got ‘em because they are NOT forever. And you’ll get more free time to enjoy yourself if you adjust your drug doses so you don’t get knocked out immediately upon taking them!
References
[1] http://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/news/th-amendment-lowered-voting-age/article_20a91b9c-2c80-11e4-9319-001a4bcf887a.html
[2] http://www.drinkingmap.com/drinking-age-in-new-jersey.html
[3] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000764.htm
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