www.roanoke.com

Donald J. Stadler

Stadler lives in Roanoke County and is a semiretired management consultant.

With the spate of psycho-prattle about Mel Gibson's "alcohol abuse," I am compelled to share an experience in his defense.

That experience came through participation in a program developed in the early 1970s in Vermont while I was administrator of the state Department of Health. Our goal was to reduce driving under the influence-related accidents and highway deaths.

Alcohol, at the time, was a contributing factor in more than two-thirds of all highway fatalities in Vermont. We quickly discovered social drinking was not the problem, and our mission became getting "using," hard-core alcoholics off the road. Here's why:

n We are a different person when we drink. Alcohol affects not only motor skills, but judgment, perceptions and attitudes.

It is not unusual for dark thoughts to come bubbling up out of our brain stem to wreak havoc in the cerebral cortex after a few pops.

The staggeringly funny comment that occurred to us on sight of the officer's nose is, of course, inappropriate, but as the saying goes, "Well, it was New Year's Eve, and it seemed like a good idea at the time."

That was Gibson.

n Alcohol affects behaviors and performance, not just attitudes.

Everyone knows alcohol causes physical impairment of the reflexes, depth perception, visual acuity and psychomotor (muscle memory) dexterity.

Oddly enough, for some people, one drink (BAC blood alcohol content of .01 to .02 percent) actually improves these things. Go figure. However, beyond .02 percent, everybody's skills decline.

Studies in Vermont in the early 1970s proved conclusively that no one remains unimpaired at .10 percent and above. Gibson's BAC was .12 percent.

n Alcoholic attitudes and behaviors take practice to develop. Someone might be an alcoholic from his first drink, but it takes training to build up actual consumption.

For most of us who drink, a BAC of .03 is about as far as we go, even if we drink daily.

For most of us, a raucous evening out with the boys (or girls) will put us at .07 percent or .08 percent (think five drinks in two hours), and we get giggly and wake up with a hangover. However:

n Alcoholics are different physically. We begin to tolerate higher and higher BAC levels.

Face it, alcohol, while not a poison in itself, produces poisons in the liver through chemical change of the alcohol. Most people cannot physically tolerate the chemical transformations of alcohol through the poison stages (as we burn off one drink per hour).

It is safe to say that without significant physical conditioning to the poisons and by-products of alcohol, we would not be able to tolerate a BAC of .15 percent (think 11 drinks in two hours). We would be physically incapable of reaching .20 percent (16 in four).

Alcoholics have physiologies different from most of us. The DUI educational classes I gave in Vermont were eye-openers for me.

The average BAC for the class was always .21 percent to .24 percent. That takes practice.

These people were no virgins. They were not people who had "just one too many" to drive. They were problem drinkers.

n Problem drinkers are people who drink because they have a problem or have a problem because they drink.

People who don't have problems either control their drinking ("My rule is two, and never more"), or they don't have to -- that means their natural body chemistry makes them feel uncomfortable after a drink or two and they automatically stop.

Alcoholics, through practice, have ratcheted up that point of intolerance to where drinking almost always equals significant impairment. These people, we found, were the problem.

n Alcoholism is not a moral failure -- it is a disease. It respects no social class, sex, age, income, religion, color, education level, IQ or family status.

In Vermont, part of the program was the training and education of police and judges to deal with the highway problem at the root. Our answer was to steer convicted DUIs to the one program we knew worked: Alcoholics Anonymous.

Yes, I feel sorry for Gibson. I can empathize. I am sure he, right now, is going through the "grief cycle" (denial, anger, grief, acceptance) that everyone in my classes went through or partially through.

This may be a necessary part in dealing with the disease. There is no cure. After all, the alcoholic is learning he will have to put aside the one pal who was at his side through (in some cases) the loss of his family, job, friends and even his own self-respect.

After two years of our Vermont program, highway deaths were down 25 percent. A lot of people stayed alive to have Sunday dinner with their families because we took people like Gibson off the road until they got well enough to drive again.

When Gibson's clean and sober, we'll get a lot more swell movies. Let's just look forward to that and get off his case.