Quentyn and alcoholism.

[Smeapancol]

First of all, I have to say, I love this comic, RH. It's so adorable and also quite poignant. RH does a wonderful job creating very emotional scenes.

Ok, that that's out of the way, early on in the story, Quentyn and his friends drink a lot of ale and the next morning cannot remember what they did. The events that took place that night, obviously, are still an important mystery to the story. The fact that they all had blackouts, especially since this is apparently the first time Quentyn has taken a drink, makes it very likely that they are all alcoholics. It's very rare for nonalcoholics to drink enough to have a blackout--they get sick long before that point. By contrast, alcoholics, typically, are innately tolerant to alcohol and even on their first drinking episode would be capable of drinking enough to black out if they had enough available.

Right now, these characters would be early-stage alcoholics. This means that they are not addicted to alcohol yet, and the unusual effect alcohol has on them would manefest itself in other ways, such as ego-feeding behavior and recklessness. This makes questor about the perfect occupation for a young alcoholic.

Obviously, here I'm making the assumption that alcohol affects Racconins similarly to how it affects humans, but it would be interesting to see if this angle is developed further. If Quentyn doesn't become sober at some point, this is what the future likely holds for him:

Given Quentyn's bravery and cleverness, he will rocket himself to fame and success, as many young alcoholics do, with very few even suspecting of his disease. He will become the idol of many people, not just for his bravery, but also for his charm. He will involve himself in scandalous and frivolous affairs, as do the alcoholic celebrities in Hollywood. There may be allegations of henous or bizarre misconduct that others try to cover up, as with president Kennedy or Clinton, or with Michael Jackson or O. J. Simpson, all very likely alcoholics. Sooner or later (sooner if he turns to harder drugs) he will enter the later stages of alcoholism will be incapable of doing his job anymore. People will say that the stress of fame made him turn to the bottle, as they often say of alcoholic rock stars, but of course he had been drinking alcoholically for years before that.

[SolidusRaccoon]

Errr, umm, you are crazy.

Just sopme dumb kids who did not realize their limits. Frist time drinking, and got plastered. I would think they would be very wary again of drinking.

[Dapple]

Historicaly alcohole was often available from whine to bear for children.
They didn't have very good water treatment in those days, and the stuff they did had was way above the percentage then what we have in bear today.
I still like how it fits in the story, add alittle mistery and an excuse to go to Sanctuary, or was it Haven....I still get those two cities mixed up.

[Maxgoof]

Personal experience.

I would occasionally drink heavily in my college days. On several occasions it was enough to get me to throw up.

But at no time would I call myself an alcoholic. I felt no craving for it, which alcoholics do. Today, I do not drink at all, not because I'm afraid to, but because I choose to abstain. I have found that the night before is never worth the morning after.

Oh, I will occasionally sip someone's beer at a micro brewery, toast champagne at a wedding, or enjoy a non-alcoholic brew (like those a lot, actually) but alcohol holds no appeal for me. Never has, actually.

From my experience with friends who became alcoholics, you almost require a certain metabolism to be susceptable to alcoholism. I just don't see that in Quentyn or Kestrel. Fen on the other hand...

[Smeapancol]

IT's not unusual for people in their college days to drink enough to throw up. Having a black out (that is, you have no memories of what you did for a few hours during a drinking episode) is an entirely different matter.

As to metabolism, alcoholics DO metabolize alcohol differently, which is what makes them alcoholics. Having blackouts is one of the manefestations of how differently alcohol affects them. It's not something they aquire, however. They're born with it.

[Solarfox]

"Just repeat to yourself, "It's just a show,
I should really just relax."

[Wayfarer]

Let me just take a moment to go off topic and say...
Welcome, Smeapancol. Sanity isn't allowed around here usually, but silliness and absurdity are plentiful. We have a fun time.

On topic...
I really doubt that RH's intends for the traits you're pointing out in Quentyn and the others to indicate a natural susceptibility to alcoholism. (Dangerous move, commenting on the author's intention when you know they'll likely read it later, but in this case I'm hazarding a guess.)

When I read it, I just assumed that anyone, if they drank enough, could black out/pass out, etc. I could have been wrong on this, and I know different people have somewhat different reactions to alcohol, but stuff like that I would have thought to be purely dependent on the level of intoxication. Yes, I'm speaking where I don't know, so I'll move on.

Even if that's incorrect, though, I do have a theory as to why the three drank so much on what was at least Quentyn's first time. First of all, it wasn't ale they were drinking - Quentyn had loathed his first taste of ale, and after that had been given some blackberry sherry, which is what I assume the three were drinking for the rest of the night. I'm guessing the blackberry sherry was rather sweet and perhaps not very noticeably alcoholic in flavor, so that they were easily able to forget themselves and what they were drinking in their celebration, and drink too much.

'Course, all that said, I should probably qualify it with the statement that I've never had alcohol (would not yet be legal... and I'm not sure I'd want to... I once saw a person when they were drunk, and I just don't know that I want to even open up the possibility of letting myself lose all ability to reason like that). So just throwing out some thoughts for whatever they're worth.

[Tom Mazanec]

Many members of my family have been alcoholics. Myself, my lifetime consumption of alcohol would probably fit in one bottle (and I am in my late forties). This is an interesting take on the strip, I hope RHjr comments on it!

[Shyal_malkes]

here's what I know about alcoholism

...

Thank you

[Smeapancol]

Thanks for the welcome, Wayfarer! Normally I'm known as Dragonfly, but that name was taken so I had to use my last name.

Many members of my family have been alcoholics too, at least on my father's side. That's the main reason I'm so interested in the disease. Plus, identifying alcoholics is a very useful skill as it allows you to avoid people who are likely to hurt you.

[Kerry Skydancer]

Interesting. I understand your concern, Tom, Smeapancol, but the 'drink so much you can't remember what you did' meme is not well established as specifically a problem with alcoholism vs. alcohol abuse among people who haven't studied the issue. I doubt that RH meant to establish all three of them as potential alcoholics.

In any event, you're assuming that the Rac Cona Daimh have identical physiological reactions to the stuff as Humans, when they have already been established to have biochemical differences, in Lux capability of nothing else.

[MAcbeth]

I remember one of my friends getting incredibly hammered and over the course of the evening he kept on remembering that he owed me money. It was only $20 but I made about $80 off of him that night.
When he woke up the next afternoon the first thing we heard from him was this shout of "I've been robbed!" and he emerged showing us his wallet and the lack of money inside it.

So you see, drunks can be fun!

[SirBob]

No offence, but: oh, please.

I've heard this claim before, and it's been thoroughly discredited time and again. The notion that alcoholism is an inborn and genetically heritable trait is pop-psych nonsense. Its popularity owes to the fact that it's a convenient way for folks with alcohol problems to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own condition - "it's not my fault, I was born this way!", and so on. Certainly, some people are predisposed to alcoholism under the right conditions, and to some extent this predisposition is heritable, but no one is born an alcoholic, nor is a single bender sufficient to establish psychological dependency (let alone physiological dependency) in one fell swoop.

Now, being raised by an alcoholic parent or otherwise having an untreated alcoholic as a formative influence is another matter entirely, but we have no evidence of a history of alcoholism in Quentyn's family.

[Smeapancol]

It is a fallacy to argue that alcoholism being a genetic disease somehow absolves a person of his misbehavior while he was drinking. Quite obviously, it doesn't matter what sort of chemical reaction is going on in a person's brain when they committed some crime. He should still go to jail regardless, unless he was legally insane at the time. Just because something is not your fault does not mean it is not your responsibility, and just because a person's behavior can be explained by some cause does NOT excuse the behavior. In fact, alcoholics MUST take responsibility for their behavior in order to achieve sobriety. When an alcoholic has enablers who shield him from the consequences of his actions, he does not stop drinking.

That being said, I have spoken to several drug councellors and alcoholism researchers who all agree that, yes, alcoholism is a genetic disease. Although, scientifically, the relative importance of environment and genetics on a person's likelyhood of developing alcoholism has yet to be determined perfectly, the people I have met with lots of experience working with and studying alcoholism, such as Doug Thorburn of http://www.preventragedy.com have concluded that genetics is by far the more important.

This conclusion makes a lot of sense; environment, certainly, can make a person more tolerant to a drug but I don't see how cause the drug to have a very different effect on a person than it did before: alcohol makes one person buzzed and another violent.

There's plenty of other evidence to indicate that many (if not all) alcoholics were alcoholics before they even drank; alcoholics are far more likely to recall their very first drink than nonalcoholics, for example. Also, here's a study I just found which shows that the correlation of alcoholism among adopted children with alcoholism in their biological parents is much greater than the correlation with the alcoholism in their adopted parents. http://alcoholism.about.com/cs/genetics/l/aa990517.htm

Finally, in my experience, alcoholics CAN be identified very early on if you look at the right clues. I know one young woman, for example, that I identified as alcoholic when she was only 19 and before she drank more than once a month. Once she got a new boyfriend who was willing to supply her with alcohol, her drinking problem got much more severe.

As to some supposed environmental influences of alcoholism, some may be explained by the fact that alcoholism is rarely correctly diagnosed and often misdiagnosed, so one might conclude that environment may make a person better at HIDING alcoholism rather than changing their predisposition to alcoholism; for example, if an alcoholic child is adopted by a nonalcoholic parent, then he may learn much better to hide his drug abouse than if he is adopted by an alcoholic parent and appear perfectly healthy to the researchers.

[SirBob]

That being said, I have spoken to several drug councellors and alcoholism researchers who all agree that, yes, alcoholism is a genetic disease. Although, scientifically, the relative importance of environment and genetics on a person's likelyhood of developing alcoholism has yet to be determined perfectly, the people I have met with lots of experience working with and studying alcoholism, such as Doug Thorburn of http://www.preventragedy.com have concluded that genetics is by far the more important.

Doug Thorburn is a despicable quack who's made a fortune by exploiting the misfortune of others. If you check his sources deeply enough, you'll find that most of his data is made up whole-cloth.

[Wayfarer]

Smeapancol, may I ask a question for clarification?

Are you saying:
1) That one can be an alcoholic without ever even having tasted alcohol?
2) That one can be an alcoholic after having only had one encounter with alcohol?
and/or
3) That, in a person such as you are describing, the behavior most people would recognize as alcoholism will inevitably develop?

I don't want to get myself into an argument with points you're not making or things I've misinterpreted.

[Smeapancol]

'Yes' to questions 1 and 2, 'no' to question 3. It's usually impossible to diagnose alcoholism with 100% certainty. As I said above, blackouts are very rare among nonalcoholics. That means that nonalcoholics CAN have blackouts sometimes. If a young person has had several blackouts, that makes the probability that they will eventually develop into obvious alcoholism is pretty high.

As to Doug Thorburn, SirBob, it is true that lots of what he says has not been given nearly enough scientific study. This is a big problem that he does not take seriously enough. I don't think he really understands science all that well. On the other hand, his evidence isn't made up out of whole cloth. It mainly comes from interviews he has done with thousands of recovered alcoholics in AA. His method has worked very well for me, as far as I can tell. By picking up on some of the clues to alcoholism, I've managed peg many people as likely alcoholics, who later (sometimes MUCH later) proved to REALLY be alcoholics. In the process, I've avoided a couple people who would have been dangerous to me if I had stuck around. I know that's not very convincing by itself, but I believe Thorburn's ideas deserve to be taken seriously and studied scientifically.

[The JAM]

[...unWARP!!!]

Good evening.


Hmmm....

I remember one teacher stating that obesity could lead to alcohol dependency without drinking a single beer or shot or glass of booze. Her "brief" exposition stated that a high consumption of white sugar could lead to alcoholism: the sugar, being in such high quantities, ferments in the stomach and it turns to..............you guessed it: ethanol and carbon dioxide.

I don't know how accurate she was with that statement, so if anyone knows if this is right or wrong, it would be appreciated.


?Zacatep?ngolas!

Until next time, remember:

I

AM

THE

J.A.M. (a.k.a. Numbuh i: "Just because I'm imaginary doesn't mean I don't exist")

Good evening.

[WARP!!!]

[StrangeWulf13]

It is a fallacy to argue that alcoholism being a genetic disease somehow absolves a person of his misbehavior while he was drinking. Quite obviously, it doesn't matter what sort of chemical reaction is going on in a person's brain when they committed some crime. He should still go to jail regardless, unless he was legally insane at the time. Just because something is not your fault does not mean it is not your responsibility, and just because a person's behavior can be explained by some cause does NOT excuse the behavior. -snip-

Actually, the Rac Cona Daimh have much the same philosophy when it comes to capital punishment. Except they don't accept insanity as a viable plea. If you did it while insane, why would they want you around? A homicidal maniac is not a person who will contribute to society. And unlike our own judicial system, they are not convinced that spending outrageous sums of money on "therapy" for that individual would be anything but a tremendous waste.

If you commit murder in the Seven Villages, your head will be coming off. Period.

[Aurrin]

Actually, the Rac Cona Daimh have much the same philosophy when it comes to capital punishment. Except they don't accept insanity as a viable plea. If you did it while insane, why would they want you around? A homicidal maniac is not a person who will contribute to society. And unlike our own judicial system, they are not convinced that spending outrageous sums of money on "therapy" for that individual would be anything but a tremendous waste.

If you commit murder in the Seven Villages, your head will be coming off. Period.

And that's something I have to diagree with. The danger lies not in the clear-cut cases, but in the grey area at the fringe. There are two fronts to that:

1) What about 'accidental' murders? Because you can never fully predict the outcome of your actions, and because the body is at times and in certain ways a fairly fragile thing, sometimes actions taken in anger go a thousand times further than they were ever meant to go. A good example would be someone who found out his wife was cheating on him (you couldn't blame him for being angry) and so he punches the one who cheated with her in the jaw. But, in the process he falls and hits his head on a rock and is killed instantly. Technically, that's murder, but it's not indicative that the person who did it is a malicious, blood-lusting maniac. Not to say he wasn't at fault, but what happened wasn't a pre-meditated murder, or even meant to kill at all. The law *does* need to take such considerations into account, because almost anyone can be driven to do something that could spiral out of control under the right circumstances.

2) Who decides what a valid contribution is to society? Sure, there's clear-cut areas, but this is a very serious claim to make. What about someone on their deathbed? Okay, they're probably not going to contribute anything more in their lives, so does that mean you should dump them outside instead of wasting resources on helping them? What about the elderly? What about the sick? That's a very dangerous game to play because definitions of 'contribution to society' vary dramatically.

And while we're at it, suppose that someone was falsely convicted? You can say soothstone all you want, but its not infalliable, and guarantees only that the person is telling what they believe to be the truth. So you kill them, and then it's discovered that the person was innocent. You can't 'undead' them. At the very least, if they're alive, they can have a chance to try to pick up life again.