A good drunk

"I'm precisely the kind of nice, upper-middle-class white girl whose relationship with substances has been treated as benign or pitiable, a cause for concern, or a shrug, rather than a punishment." I read this from Leslie Jamison a while back. She wrote it in Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, a memoir on alcohol addiction that has been translated into Spanish (The imprint of the days, Anagrama). I recognized myself, despite the differences: I've never been accused of having a painful, violent relationship with alcohol. Something in me has saved me. Perhaps it has to do with the gesture, the posture. The family they think I come from. The very white skin. The relative public exposure.

I continued with the book and it seemed to me a cruel witness to a successful, functional life, crossed by drinking: I did not find the destruction that I have always associated with the word drug, the fatal consequences of the addict, but rather a dependent life that swings between frustration and dissatisfaction, subtle impatience and the constant nervousness of wanting something more that always takes a long time to arrive: a drink. Another drink. A good drunk.

Alcohol must be the most present and, at the same time, the most destructive element in our lives. For many, it's the point of arrival to the question of inheritance and family: will I become like my father? And, for many others, the gateway to violence: how can someone transform so much? Where does that anger come from? But alcohol always wins because it is often an imperceptible, cunning evil: the joy it brings us, the celebratory toast, the get-together with friends, the unforgettable night of partying, outweighs that pleasant feeling of disappearing a little: not being completely there, or being more there. I thought of this historic and inevitable triumph of alcohol when I read the new Action Plan on Drugs and Addictions (2025-2028), recently presented by the Barcelona Public Health Agency. What's the point, I wondered, of regulating the sponsorship and advertising of alcoholic beverages in public spaces, if alcohol is everywhere? What difference will limiting its promotion at events involving the city council make?

I am still fascinated by the way people take a cigarette out of a pack printed with terrifying scenes: mutilated bodies, rotten lungs. The effectiveness of images in transforming political and social opinion is an endless debate: Susan Sontag herself corrected herself. If in 1977 she stated in About photography that access to snapshots of terrible events ends up desensitizing the viewer, who becomes distant and passive, in 2003 he changed his mind and wrote in In the face of the pain of others That images can shock consciences and provoke genuine reflection. I don't know if watching a video of a frozen beer makes me want to drink. I do know it's a recurring image, a familiar place: alcohol functions, ultimately, as a story to rest in. A friendly refrain.

I also know that I listen to a podcast sponsored by Seagram's (it starts with that pleasant sound of the ice cubes clinking against the glass and the gin spilling inside, very cool), that summer opens every year with the Estrella Damm advertisement and that they influencers supposedly fashionable, they kill themselves to share stories With their merchandising, I tell my friends we'll meet up for a beer, although I know, and they know, that I'll order a sparkling water. I know that when my grandfather sees me after a long time, he suggests starting a bottle of good wine to celebrate my return.

It's all very well that the municipal government and public money don't contribute to this. Public money shouldn't go anywhere that would foster destruction, but then we should talk about what we mean by destruction. Because with alcohol, as with everything, it works with subtle destruction, the kind that's imperceptible: the kind Leslie Jamison describes in her book, or mine, too, when I decide to drink knowing it will harm me. Why? Then one wonders what one's life would be like if alcohol had never entered the picture: how one would understand leisure, what image of happiness would have, what rest, work means, whether one would endure marathon workdays without any consolation prize at dusk, in the form of a can, a glass of wine. What would one be capable of? How many things could one do? What other life would one be writing?