Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication

Coming Up

Here is a modern recreational tale. Three young men get together on a Saturday night. Their backgrounds are culturally diverse, but all reasonably comfortable. None of them has a criminal record, or comes from what sociologists used to call a broken home. They are of mixed ages (24-35), nationalities and sexualities; one is a mutual friend of the two others, who have not previously met. Two of them have come through a succession of relatively smart office jobs, but are now trying their hands at being self-employed. The third has held a responsible position in the catering industry, but is currently unemployed.

Two of them begin the evening in the apartment that one of them rents. They drink a bottle of sparkling wine and a bottle of white wine. While drinking, they also get through two grams of cocaine, snorting it in lines two at a time about every twenty minutes. They meet the third in a bar later on, and drink several rounds--perhaps half a dozen--of spirits with mixers. At around 2 A.M., they go on to another late bar, where one of them knows that drugs can be bought quite easily. Within minutes, they are offered ecstasy by a complete stranger. Following some gentle haggling over the price, they buy two tablets.

Outside the bar, a group of elderly bikers is selling amphetamine. They buy two grams of that as well. Back at the flat, they divide the tablets into six fragments and take two each. There is a further half gram of cocaine to finish, and the two grams of amphetamine. Whilst ingesting the drugs, they drink a further six bottles of sparkling wine between them over the course of the night. At 10 A.M., without having slept, they venture out into town again and, after lolling on public benches for a while, go to a bar and embark on a round of bottled beers.

This is not exactly a typical weekend. It counts in the running narrative of their leisure time as something of a "blinder." None of them suffers much in the way of aftereffects. There is, to be sure, the sense of vacuumed-out listlessness that follows prolonged amphetamine intake. Two of them have acutely constricted sinuses, a compensation reaction to cocaine-snorting. None has an alcohol hangover. They are all fit and fully functioning again by Monday.

In a paneled room in the nether regions of one of Oxford University's more ancient colleges, a group of graduates and undergraduates that forms its illustrious debating society gathers. The room is lit solely by candlelight, lending the proceedings a vague air of masonic clandestinity, but only intended in the interest of a period feel, to evoke the time of the seventeenth-century poet-playwright after whom the society is named.

An oak cabinet, stained with age, and referred to as the Ark, is solemnly placed on the table around which the group is assembled. From it is drawn, with ecclesiastical reverence, a large two-handled pewter sconce. All eyes are trained on the president of the society as she fills this vessel to the brim with strong beer. Raising it above her head as if it were the Communion cup, she intones a Latin invocation of greeting to the foregathered company that ends with the solemn announcement, "Nunc est bibendum" ("Now is the time for drinking").

The sconce is then passed slowly around the table, each celebrant gripping it by both handles and uttering a Latin formula in honor of the household gods of the society's patron presence, before drinking a respectfully deep draught of the beer and handing it on.

Following this, a short talk on some agreeably nebulous moral theme is delivered--Honor, perhaps, or Forgiveness--and then the entire table sets to with a will, arguing over the points raised in convivial disarray, untrammeled by presidential intervention, and lubricated by copious quantities of wine and vintage port. At whatever time the room must be vacated, the members will totter away across the quadrangle, still disputing with each other in amiable inebriation, perhaps straggling into the nearest pub to continue their exchanges, assertions and refutations thickening the already smoke-dense air.

At such august institutions did many of Britain's parliamentarians once cut their debating teeth, thumping the drunken table to make their point about Pride or Altruism, quite as if it mattered. (In the mid-1980s, the group's president was herself the daughter of a Scottish member of the European Parliament.) But what particularly fascinated the parvenu guest, with his alternative haircut and redbrick degree, was the way in which drinking was not merely an incidental adjunct to make a lively evening the more commodious, but had been ceremonially incorporated into the ritual so integrally that teetotalers need not have applied.