We have been screaming at the world through this blog that women are using more alcohol, drugs, and tobacco in the current generation than are men. This is a profound shift in social habit. Now, in an incredibly short period of time, that drinking is showing up in our culture in our most vulnerable age group...our newborns.

     Today, as you read this, for the first time ever, fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) is the number one cause of retardation in America...and probably elsewhere in the world as well. The cost of FAS in human terms is incalculable. The spirits of women destroyed from guilt because " ...just a few drinks" were consumed have been crushed, their marriages have been destroyed, and many have had to drive away after leaving their child in some brick building surrounded by green tiled walls. Economically? Well, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome costs more private and government dollars than any other mental defect.

   This has gotten so serious, so quickly, that the American Academy of Pediatrics last year made raising the awareness of the problem among high school and college age women their top priority. The AAP is one of the most respected of medical specialties. These professionals work long hard hours on behalf of children with less pay than most medical specialties because they, like the authors, just love kids. This is why, within the last year, the AAP has focused its efforts on identifying and preventing fetal alcohol syndrome. They have made it a major purpose to increase awareness of this tragic condition to women in the nation's high schools and colleges.

• Four times as many pregnant women drank frequently (7 or more drinks per week or 5 or more drinks on at least one occasion) in 1995 (3.5%) as in 1991 (0.8%) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Alcohol Consumption Among Pregnant and Childbearing-Aged Women--United States, 1991 and 1995," Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 4/25/97, p. 345).

   Do you want one last mind numbing fact to ponder tonight before you go to sleep? Guess what the number one symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome is in children whose mothers drank during pregnancy; give up? It is ADD, ADHD, or whatever you want to call that 'ants in the pants' behavior that causes our grammar school kids to line up every morning at school. One by one they march through the school nurse's office, eyes glazed, minds bouncing like ping pong balls, to receive their Ritalin!

   How can we stop this insanity? Please, stop enabling alcoholic women, people. Get yourself to a meeting of Al-Anon, Nar-A-Non, or Adult Children of Alcoholics tonight! There is a meeting probably less than five miles from your front door, it is free, and there is plenty of help there.

Call 1-888-4AL-ANON or access www.al-anon.alateen.org to learn when and where that meeting is held.

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We have all heard that liars figure and figures lie, but when we started delving deeply into the data about women and alcoholism we found many figures that just didn't...well...figure!

   For example, when it comes to DUI's (or DWI's) the number of arrests never matches any data on the incidence of alcoholism among women as compared to men. The trends are certainly there;  in 1977 only 8% of DUI's were for women, and by 2007 that percentage had doubled to 15%.  But that still means that there are 85 DUI arrests for men for every 15 for women in a culture whose youngest generation (the ones proven to do most of the drinking) have a higher usage rate for alcohol among females than among males! We started digging to find out how this could happen.

   Here is what we found. The difference is not truly in the number of women who are stopped who could be arrested for DUI. The difference lies in factors involving the policeman making the decision about whether to arrest or not, and his personal biases!

   A study by the National Highway and Safety Administration (US DOT Report H5-801-230) shows clearly the real factors involved in Officer O'malley's decisions. Decisions like, does he put the cuffs on Grandma? How about that cute YUPPY on her way back from Happy Hour to her condo?

Here's the first quote from the DOT study.

   "The officer's personal use of alcohol is inversely related to his level of alcohol-related enforcement. Patrolmen who drink make significantly fewer arrests than those who do not, and those who drink frequently make significantly fewer arrests than those who use alcohol only occasionally."

 This says that all of us have a better chance of "skating" when stopped drunk if the officer himself is a drinker!

The study elaborates concerning women. It points out that most officers are male, and that they tend to decide not to arrest anybody who is less aggressive, also anybody who looks, acts, sounds, and smells like their wife, mother, grandmother, sister, or the girl next door!

Looking deeper into the stone, what is the most dangerous result of women not receiving the DUI's they clearly earn? It is this; dui's are red flags that alcoholism is a problem. Women, because they donnot receive them, are allowed to progress deeper into the disease of alcoholism before they show up on society's radar screen.

In future posts we will show the same denial among other professionals such as physicians, clergymen, judges and attorneys. When are we all going to stop denying and admit that our women are right now...in this generation...more often alcoholics and addicts than in any other gereration in the past? Put another way, do you really believe that the latest starlet with this problem is an exception?

 If you are a man living in denial about the alcoholism and/or addiction in a woman in your life, please get help. Call Al-Anon, a support group for family members of alcoholics at 1-888-4AL-ANON or visit www.al-anon.alateen.org right now!

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Yes, it all fits. He is spending time away from both his family and his work during evenings, and when she learns that these meetings are mostly attended by lonely women, there is this gigantic "aha."

If there are no men-only meetings in the area, then a desperate Al-Anon man is forced to attend meetings made up mostly of women.

Somewhere deep inside she knows that neither she nor her husband have been capable of providing either the emotional or physical intimacy that they had before the disease progressed. He must be getting that elsewhere.

I remember one of those early-in-my-recovery Friday night meetings that ended in one of the worst battles we ever had over "my program."

After the meeting there was a tradition that those who didn't want the meeting to end would drive across the freeway to a Denny's for coffee. I had never attended one of these social meetings, but on this particular night I was invited.

I remember standing right outside the door of the meeting room in the parking lot talking to a small group of ladies the moment I was invited to join them. I gladly accepted, much preferring to continue interacting with healthy sober people...women or not, to what I knew by 9:15 would be a wife with four or five hours of cheap wine under her belt.

Unfortunately, the ladies all piled into their cars and left me alone with this newcomer. This lady proceeded to tell me that her alcoholic husband was not only violent, but insanely jealous! I remember imagining him sitting in the darkness across the street looking through a high-powered rife scope sight at the area just between my shoulder blades.

I still had those serious doubts about my masculinity that every male Al-Anon has in the early days of recovery, and I was wondering to myself what James Bond would do in this situation?  I decided that James Bond would calmly invite the newcomer to ride with him to Denny's. So that is exactly what I did.

But the eyes that I felt between my shoulder blades were not those of a jealous husband. They were those of two women. One was my wife, the other our neighbor, Evelyn Meyer, whom Deb had asked for a ride to the hospital. She had told Evelyn the whole sad tale. She suspected that her husband was having an affair with another woman, and that they had been meeting on Friday nights at a nearby hospital.

To make matters worse, I remember the newcomer doing some crying.

When I finally came home that night I walked in the front door to the words "...I SAW YOU! I SAW YOU drive away with that woman, and Evelyn is my witness! This went on, again, deep into the night. I remember thinking myself really clever at one point when I told her "...yes, yes, I am in love with that woman. I'm in love with her and with every other woman in there!

I'm in love with Betty, and Mary, and Gladys, and Pat. I love them all!

This "affair," which almost every alcoholic wife imagines, allows her to shift the shame from her disease to her husband. Tragically, sometimes what she suspects is true, but often, as it was in this situation, her accusations are just another flavor of her bluster. The most tragic outcome happens when she manages to threaten and bully him into abandoning his recovery process. That outcome perpetuates the disease in the family and dooms them all to continue downward in their elevator.

If this sounds familiar, call to find a meeting where you can start your own recovery process. Al-Anon people will help at 1-888-4-Al-ANON or check out www.al-anon.alateen.org

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But the following story illustrates how really important my drinking with her was to my now x-alcoholic wife. 

 "After about eight weeks in the program, working with my sponsor, I was wondering if my own drinking was offering a ready excuse for Deb. I discussed this with Scotty, and he said that this may be true. He remarked "...Why not just quit drinking with her and see if she responds?"

I really believed that she would not even notice. For example, I had started the process of stopping smoking earlier, and she didn't even seem to notice for weeks, so I really didn't know whether my drinking with her would be that important. So that weekend, while I did the yard work, I just left off the cold beer.

We had a fight that weekend, but I wasn't sure that the issue was whether or not I was drinking with her. We fought constantly anyway.

But to my amazement, when I started to leave early on Monday morning for a week of work in another city, I found a gift waiting for me on the kitchen counter. There, with a little note were six sparkling green bottles of Heineken beer, my favorite. The note said something like "a surprise for you!" There was even a little heart at the bottom!

I left the beer there, and when I returned the following Friday night I walked into a stinging hornet's nest. She had left the beer and the note there for five days, had looked at it every day, and had built up a rage that exploded in a well rehearsed verbal blast at me the moment I walked in the front door. We fought all weekend over whether or not I would drink with her. I guess my drinking with her was an issue after all.

Ken P.

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   God showed me this principle one Tuesday when I attended two Al-Anon meetings in one day. I slipped out of the Medical Center where I was working and attended a noon meeting at an Episcopal Church. It was a typical meeting for that day (the late 70's)...about 25 women and me.

   I shared during the meeting, and as we all walked across the parking lot to the Luby's cafeteria for lunch a woman made it a point to walk up beside me. She just sort of "lit into me" in an accusatory tone, but what she said was "...You're the only man I ever heard who made any sense. All other men just want one thing, and they are not even capable of thinking about anybody else."

   That night I met a man I was sponsoring, and he began right away unloading his own brand of disgust for the opposite sex. "Women only want two things from a man...a d&$%*@ and a meal ticket!"

   Since that Tuesday I have viewed alcoholism as a disease. It is a disease of all human beings, and neither sex has a monopoly on the misery.

Quote from Winston Churchill; "The battle between the sexes would be over and done-with, there would be a clear-cut winner and a clear-cut loser...if there were not so much fraternization between the enemies!"

If you need help with your "stinkin' thinkin' " of ANY kind, find the nearest Al-Anon support group to your home. You can get details easily by checking out www.al-anonalateen.org or calling 1-888-4AL-ANON.

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   Scott Peck's first sentence in his seminal work , The Road Less Traveled was "Life is difficult." Program people understand this. Only those of us who have finally been reduced to desperation understand the internal forces that have to work  against a codependent man that finally drive him to surrender and seek help.

   I  must have really looked like the "deer in the headlights" as I sneaked into my first Al-Anon meeting in the little upstairs room at an AA club one night in Dallas, 300 miles from my home. I was there, not so much because I was seeking growth or recovery...I didn't even have those notions available at that point in my mind. I was there because, after one horrible night in my livingroom I had surrendered and found the Al-Anon office in Houston. There God arranged for my first sponsor, Scotty L., to walk into the room. It was Scotty who just stayed after me to attend a meeting. I owe him so much today.

   It was upstairs. It seems like it  always is the first time. Looking back I see the symmetrical juxtaposition of God's universal plan. I had to take those old rickety wooden steps one at a time just like I had to take the 12-steps  over the next two years.

   The upper floor was poorly lit. The room was overcrowded and too loud with what I thought as pure banter. They were all women, they were all older than I, and I knew none of them. All of these cheesy posters were stuck with thumbtacks high on the walls around the room. When they read the 12-steps I realized someplace inside that this was a terribly serious undertaking, this taking of these steps. In fact, I remember thinking to myself something like "...how could I possibly really do all of that...how could I admit even a fraction of my own faults to somebody else?"

   About this moment there was a burst of laughter from across the hall. This was where the real action was happening. The big room across the hall was where the AA's met, and they sounded like they were having a great time over there. As I sat there in this little room that felt oppressively serious I was thinking something like this; what the Hell am I doing here? I've done all of the right stuff to prove my manhood. I've worked myself through college, sired three sons, and coached, managed and umped Little League games. I have carved out a career in a gut-wrenchingly competetive profession. I once carried a drunk engineer up some rickety wooden stairs out of a dark underground bar on K street in Sacramento while drunk myself. More steps. What am I doing here?

   When it was finally over I was out the back door without a word to anybody that night. I remember nothing eccept the feeling of being overwhelmed and guilty at furtively going to this meeting while away from home. I worried about betraying my wife, and, most of all, I feared the emotional pain I knew that she would cause me if she ever found out that I had told myself  about her drinking, and then those ladies at the Al-anon office, and even Scotty!

   Thank God, the years and the program have been kind. I no longer have to live with active alcohol consumption in my home, and, because of the Al-Anon program, I am surrounded by love every day! I will never know all of the miracles that led me here, but I do know that there are other men right this moment  who are where I was then.

    If you have not yet climbed those rickity dark steps, please seriously consider doing so. You have nothing to lose but your agony. 

   Call Al-Anon World Service office at 1-888-4AL-ANON, or access their excellent web site at www.al-anonalateen.org to learn where there is a weekly meeting near you.

Ken P.

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