By Lewis Willis
I suppose you have heard about it by now. Almost every news broadcast of any length at all reported the news. In man’s quest for good health, many heard the best news possible to hear. A medical research panel concluded that those who drink two beers a day are healthier than those who do not drink.
The Chief Executive Officers of every brewery in the country leaped for joy. I suspect they commissioned a delivery to be made to every member of the medical panel who issued the report. Visions of escalating sales raced through their minds. No doubt they wondered how many new breweries would have to be built to accommodate the demands for their products which the population would make. It would probably be hard to imagine the number of congratulatory telephone calls, telegrams and letters which were sent to the Canadian brewery which authorized and financed the panel’s research.
Imagine that! If you drink two beers a day you are healthier than if you drank none at all. I wonder what would happen if you drank four beers a day. Would you be twice as healthy? I am not a researcher, and certainly not a medical researcher, but one of my first questions was how healthy was t e “two beers a day” group before they started drinking? What was the general health condition of those who did not drink? Is it possible that those who thought themselves so much healthier had lost their capacity to evaluate their general condition. I’ve seen a lot of fellows lying in the gutter who were “feeling no pain.” Or, is it possible that the findings of the panel might have been slanted in the direction of the interests of the brewery who paid for the research? Something must have been “fishy” about the research for many medical authorities questioned the validity of the panel’s findings.
It is significant that the conclusion drawn involved the consumption of two beers a day. Almost every state in the Union has legislated that if a person’s blood alcohol content is 10, he is considered to be legally drunk. By Ohio law that means a mandatory three day jail sentence for those who are caught, that is, if the judges have enough guts to enforce the laws. Of course, the jails would be so overflowing that those convicted would have to be housed like cord wood And the guys on the bottom of the stack would commission the American Civil Liberties Union to file suit over their treatment while in the drunk tank.
To reach this blood alcohol content of 10 at which one is legally drunk, a 150-pound person would only have to consume two 12-ounce beers in one hour. Therefore, if this person were to follow the medical panel’s advice of drinking two beers a day and drank his two beers in one hour, if he were stopped by a State Trooper, he could be charged with DWI and sentenced to jail. I wonder how healthy it is to spend three days in jail with a bunch of other drunks?
Can you imagine the mess on our highways if every driver followed the panel’s advice? The state tells us that their research has shown one’s vision, thinking capacity and ability to react to possible danger is noticeably impaired when the blood alcohol content is 10. These folks think they are healthier, but in reality they are legally drunk! Which brings me to my point.
When we have 200 million drunks on the road, you might like to join me when I go shopping for my next car. I’m going to shop at an Army Surplus lot – I want to buy me a Sherman tank! With seat belts, of course. Can you get a tank with radial tires? If all of us teetotalers were driving tanks, the drunks would watch out for us instead of us having to watch out for the drunks. That sounds like a pleasant thought to me. And, considering the number of innocent people killed on our highways in alcohol related accidents, driving a tank would be more healthy. Perhaps we should get an Army Surplus organization to convene a panel to research the effect on the national health if we all drove tanks.
A lot of parties are conducted throughout the country. More and more we hear of those who claim to be Christians participating with the crowd in consuming alcoholic beverages. In all seriousness, brethren, you can get drunk before you know it. Of course, you will just think you are feeling good, but the State says you are drunk! If you get in your car and start driving in that condition, you may injure yourself in an accident. Or, you may injure or kill some innocent person. Or, you may have to spend some time in jail, with all the embarrassment that entails. But, most important of all, you will have sinned against Almighty God! Galatians 5:21 says that “they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” When you decide you can engage in this kind of worldliness when the evidence of the Scriptures and medical facts are arrayed against you, you are deceiving no one but yourself with your social drinking. For each of these little episodes, the social drinker “shall give account of himself to God” (Rom. 14:12). I was just thinkin’, we need our best abilities, unimpaired by alcohol in our system, to safely get around in a world filled with social drinkers and other drunks! Let none of us be deceived by such nonsense as that which says we are healthier if we get a little drunk each day.
Guardian of Truth XXXIV: 5, p. 135
March 1, 1990