You know me. I come in many colors and many flavors, and I mold to fit whatever you put me in. I am mobile. I am available to all ages, legal or not. You or others find ways to get me, and drink me down. Some of you are responsible and I pose little or no threat to the masses because of your responsibility. But let me tell you about the others I have killed, maimed, destroyed and ruined. Let me give you statistical information on the damage I do to society and your ability to think, work, function, and live. Let me point out the destruction of families, dreams and present and future realities.

You first hear reference of me in the Bible, and throughout time since. The morality of the late 1800 s started a crusade against me, saying the spirits in me brought out the evil spirits of man.

Please allow me to introduce myself; I am Alcohol, a spirit for man to taste. For some I am fun, for many I am addictive and reduce them to waste.

Based on the facts from the1996 U.S. Department of Justice�s �Analysis of National Data on the Prevalence of Alcohol Involvement in Crime� written by Lawrence Greenfield (Statistician), it seems that my �good friend� Larry has a lot of negative things to say about me. But thanks to my mind buzzing-qualities, many of you don�t pay much attention to �good ole� Larry and his babblings. Of course it helps to have countless magazine ads and commercials showing smiling faces, guys getting the girls all because of drinking me! And let�s not forget those high profile sporting events sponsored by Yours Truly! Seems like I�m always there reminding that you can�t have fun without me. It�s always nice to have your own army of advertisers working on my behalf.

Larry thinks it is ever important that you keep in mind what a vicious circle

I am. And to remind you of all the different branches of my circle; and the different ways, positive and negative, I affect you and society. Although Larry really has nothing nice to say about me, he insists this story must be told.

Because of who and what I am and what effect I have on you, you enjoy me usually in mass quantity. Of you who do, some of you I effect in unthinkable ways, and change your life for the rest of your days. All though my unmatched powers of the early 1980�s with high DWI deaths have not been equaled, I still am strong and I survive.

Larry says that of the 11.1 million of you who were violently victimized by an intimate partner, a partner under my direct influence victimized 67% of you. And 50 percent of you were attacked by non-marital relatives. Those who were violently attacked by acquaintances in 1996, just to let you know, 38 % of you were hurt by someone under my control that year. I know you were out just minding your own business, but in 1996 of those 11.1 million violent attacks 31% of you felt my wrath through the hands of a stranger.

Of course my hosts that year were, as always, different and each used a different weapon of choice for their crimes that year. The most commonly used weapon of choice was my host�s hands and feet 79.1% of the time. Others I have inhabited liked guns 3.7% of the time, yet others preferred knives (6.9%) and blunt objects (6.4%). And yet others, well let�s just say any other type of thing they can use as a weapon they used 3.9% of the time in1996. I will not be telling Larry about how many people didn�t speak up that year to help him with his account of the true numbers, but he would be surprised.

Remember I said I was mobile in the beginning of this book? The report that Larry has put together says that my hosts were arrested on the road behind the wheel 1,467,300 times in �96. So out of a population of 179 million licensed drivers that year, I changed the lives of 1 out of every 122 drivers. Of course, I am not willing to tell Larry how many times he and his police friends missed me that year.

National statistics are nice, but you probably want to know about something more local. Well, first let me congratulate you citizens of Washington D.C.! You had the second highest percentage of road fatalities. Of those, I controlled 49% of you that died that year. Louisiana had 2% more than you. By the way, I killed a total 41,907 people that year.

I don�t even want to tell Mom and Dad about the amount of college students that learned the hard way about me during their four years of school. Let�s just say your children aren�t any safer staying in the dorm than they are out of the dorm. I love the carelessness of the collage age student. But the ones who ruin it for me with more crime, violence, DWI�s, spouse beatings, child abuse and rapes are the 30 to 40 year olds. One would think that my more middle-aged hosts could handle me better, but I guess the pressures of life, work, spouse and kids lead my people to party hard, drink up, and mess things up for me. These guys give me a bad name and it usually starts at the 11:00 pm hour 8.9% of the time. Then there is the group of people that I depress so badly that they just jump out a window or put a gun to their head. Don�t forget, I can bring out aggressive anger or total anxiety and depression with suppression of normal common sense thought.

Like chocolate, I create cravings -- you must have me. I impair your control. I can start to affect your ability to limit how much you drink of me. Through constant regular consumption of me you become ever more tolerant of me, and that means that you drink more of me to feel the effects I give you. You�re starting to crave more of me, but just as I start to affect your relationships -- your health, your work and finances -- you want to run away from me. Where do you think you�re going? Oh no, I am not done with you yet, let me pull on my leash and remind you. Hmm, where to start first? Should I increase the craving sensation, give you a little withdrawal pain, some hand shakiness or (my personal favorite) nausea and lots of it? I�ll make you feel real bad that you left me. But which one first? I know, I�ll give them to you all at once so you come back to me quicker, my little co-dependant!

Speaking of dependants, remember I said to keep in mind I was a vicious circle? Well here come some of the branches of my circle. Of course it depends on you where the first branch starts, but I will list them here for you and try to show you the branches that grow off of the bigger branches.

For simplicity sake I will give you a scenario of one of my favorite ways to I like to infest my victims and the world around them. Let�s start at the point of my gaining control of my victim after I have given them the sickness.

My victim�s name in this case is Jake. He�s 38 years of age, works for a power company and usually enjoys one or two of me in the evenings at home after work, and more of me on the weekends. Thanks not only to my addictive properties, but also to troubled times in Jake�s household -- work to wife -- he thinks he needs to unwind with me more often to relax. Like I said before, tolerance increases and thus more of me is consumed. My hooks are placed in Jake.

Oh, I almost forgot, his wife Shelly -- she likes me too, and usually binges on me on the weekends. She is too busy with the kids to have me during the week, but eventually I will get my claws in her.

I should mention Jake is 220 lbs and that he is 5 ft 10 inches tall and that his wife is 33 years of age 120 lbs and 5 ft 4inches tall and they have a family of 2 children, Ryan eight and Carrie six. When things between Jake and Shelly get going badly, Jake can get pretty mad pretty damn quick while I am controlling him. And Shelly is letting me control her too during the argument. Basically Shelly just runs her mouth off. One thing leads to another and Bam! I have helped Jake hit Shelly after we have shoved her into the kitchen hutch breaking the wedding plate that sits upon it and over into the corner she goes for her beating. Oh, just in case you were wondering where the kids are -- they stand in corner about 6 feet away trembling, crying and screaming �Mommy, Daddy please stop!� Times get tougher because of the weekend problems; more drunken fights, more often; and the kids are witness to it all.

I keep this hold on the family rather regularly for the next few years and increase my grasp on Mom and Dad slowly. Shelly is working now and the kids are ages 11 and 9. Shelly works for a real-estate company, and after showing her properties for the day, she likes to stop off at the local bar and drink me down. After all, she�s had a rough day and she deserves it. The weekend gathering of family conflicts continues to develop at a steady pace. And Jake stops off after work now to have a few of me and gets home at six-ish instead of the usual 4:30.

And the family goes to the bars on the weekends for up to 8 hours at a time. The kids don�t seem to mind, they get quarters for the video games and they are asleep in the car while Dad and I drive home.

But after one bad weekend, Shelly decides she�s going to stay out until 3 a.m. regularly, so she can slug me down and drown the family problems away. She eventually moves up to being gone days at a time from her family and loosing her job and scrapes through the years.

The kids were not doing well in school. Both had been average students, but their grades were dropping, especially Ryan�s. And because of Jake�s frustration with his wife being out all the time and Ryan�s bad grades, Ryan started feeling my wrath at the hands of Dad, but I must say that kid is tough. Many other kids I�ve met and killed in my time can�t take repeated direct blows to the head and walk away from it every time, worse for the ware, but still walking.

Ryan is 13 now and Carrie is 11. Carrie thinks it�s her fault that Mom and I decided to leave the family and go party all the time. But I will stay with Jake in the background for now, he has the potential of being a functioning alcoholic since the wife left, he looks for her and me in the local bars to try and resolve things for his family. Ryan makes dinner for himself and his sister every night now after school since Dad isn�t home from work at 4:30. He and I are at the bars till around 10 p.m. these days.

In a few years when Ryan turns 18, he will be moving out -- just two weeks after graduation. I guess he didn�t like Dad and me too much. He will not talk to us for five years and he will work three jobs at a time to support himself and keep away from us. Three years after Carrie�s graduation, I will kill Jake.

You see he had a broken heart since the wife left and we had a lot of boilermakers to make it go away. Of course he developed many health problems like liver disease, hepatitis and jaundice and septicemia. Of course I punished him on the way out with the shakes and nausea and so on for leaving me.

Just to let you know, I helped Shelly to not talk to her kids for over 10 years by keeping her mind in my thick fog, and I helped her to use the law in her favor; she never divorced Jake. There is no such thing as common-law divorce if your spouse leaves and never divorces the other.

When Jake died, he had a Will so the kids would get the estate. I made sure that Shelly played nice and said no fight out of her for contesting the Will, but two weeks later I gave her reason to change her mind, after all she wouldn�t have to work anymore.

We could party and do what we enjoy, after all what does she care? She has been without her kids for 10 years now anyhow. So we took it all: the house, car, life insurance and pension; we kicked Carrie out of Dad�s house and left them with nothing but sorrow. After all, I have to ensure my survival since I killed Dad. I have to keep alive in others by any means possible.

Man, the next 7 years Shelly and I partied hard, we were together every night and every day. We had a DWI -- hit an old couple and got sued for $22,000 dollars. And we hit a park bench that we destroyed but didn�t tell public works about. We woke up together and went to bed together. But as usual my mortal enemy, the human body, doesn�t appreciate me over time and consistent use. She developed a 3-inch ulcer and had to stop drinking me for 3 weeks, not by her choice, either � hospital staffers don�t like me. I made her suffer for that. And she never left me again. Even after I kept the ulcer around she just didn�t let food part her lips for over a year, and when my body enemy made her unable to walk and incontinent, she still never left.

The last time we were together she was reaching for me and fell off the couch and sliced her face open on the edge of the coffee table. She refused to go but the E.M.T�s asked her if she had been drinking and she said yes. They said that gave them reason enough to take her away from me since I guess they thought she wasn�t coherent enough to make a sound decision about her face thanks to me.

I hear she died 3 weeks later painfully the way Jake died, when asked by a friend if she wanted to see her kids prior to her death, she rose up and screamed No! She even denied she had kids on the hospital paperwork. She died. The hospital took what money she had, since she had no insurance. Society foots the rest of the bills and her kids got nothing but her ashes, and the pain of always wondering what could have been, had I not stepped into the picture.

After all, they don�t know what a good role model family is, and how to teach their kids things like others do. And besides, I feel sort of proud knowing that I can contribute to society�s economy by providing patients for the psychiatric counselors and the pharmacy companies for years to come for the damage done to the kids. Who knows, maybe I will see those kids again in the future, or their kids since I do tend to run in the family.

So let�s take a look here; from the circle I branched out to the family beatings, contributed to filling the bar owners� pockets, who in turn fills the alcohol makers� pockets so he can clone me for others to drink, and to have money for my army of advertisements. I made a wife leave her husband and kids and not speak to them for ten years, not even a birthday card was sent. Caused the consciousness of my drinkers to be altered to serve me.

I systematically kept the family apart and helped my hosts to provide no guidance, care or nurturing for their kids, thus utterly destroying their kids� childhood by forcing them to pay attention to me and my hosts, wondering what we were going to do to them next. And during that process, messed up their lives so much that I will be helping the psychiatric medical community for years. Especially since they lack in proper social skills and are unsure of everybody and everything due to their lack of guided upbringing.

I caused a DWI that totaled two cars and almost killed two elderly people; I wiped out a park bench that the public pays for. I caused a lawsuit and who knows maybe that person will come to me to take away the pain and through them I can affect other lives. I also help raise the cost of healthcare because my last victim didn�t have insurance or enough money to pay the bills so society gets the bill for her. And possibly, if those kids aren�t careful in their actions or in the actions of raising their own kids, I may see that family again. After all, if the kids had no guidance how can they raise their own kids properly when they come of age?

I told you I was vicious, like my makers I care nothing about my impact on society; I am a statistical nightmare. I profit from the death of people, as do my makers. I affect everything in society in some form or another. I do not care if we party and you get killed and in the process kill others while behind the wheel, or kill during a fit of drunken rage. You see I may get more of society�s masses through it. For example: you kill Sally during a DWI. Let�s say the second anniversary of her death a friend is out having a drink while mourning the second anniversary of her death. He goes from the bar, having had a bit too much to drink and hits another car killing the 4 occupants, each of them 18 years old coming home from a movie. And years later something similar happens to a friend or family member of them and so on and so on.

You see the courts get money; the lawyers collect their fees, taxpayers pay for your incarceration if you live, and the medical facilities collect what they can. The insurance company looses money from the loss of the cars and the impending lawsuit and raises everybody�s premiums. The funeral home makes a bundle off of the four you killed. I kill people�s dreams and you give me the potential of having more slaves in my control. You see you not only killed the four in the car but the parents of those children, their friends, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles boyfriends, girlfriends, sons, daughters and coworkers of those that died. Many are affected, each one depressed, each looking for a quick fix to make it feel better. Come to me I will make you all forget about everything. And the cycle starts again, each with a different beginning but always with a similar end.

I wish I could say I am sorry for things I affect in your lives, but how can I do that when I am what I am, and I am not sorry for it. After all, my life is always a party! You should lighten up and come join me sometime. Pleased to meet you...won�t you guess my name!

The End

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have seen the attempt in the past for prohibition of alcohol. And even though, I enjoy the taste of a beer from time to time, it is my firm belief that the lawmakers of this country must work to change things.

The alcohol content per serving should be lowered to make it safer and less addictive and the companies involved should be held responsible for their addictive product and its effects on society, similar to the tobacco industry lawsuits have.

This includes the banning of advertisements on TV and at sporting events and in magazines whose reader population is mostly 25 years old and below. The laws should be changed to harsher sentences and treatment should be given and follow-up mandatory for all offenders.