It`s no secret that the Irish have a reputation for drink.
It`s also well known that Jews don`t.
And it certainly takes a lot of alcohol to get ”drunk as an Indian.”
As these cliches illustrate, the study of ethnic drinking is a mine field of prejudice and stereotyping. Almost every nationality, race and ethnic group has preconceived notions of its own and others` drinking practices.
Often the stereotypes are outright falsehoods. Yet there are demonstrable cultural patterns to the use of alcohol, and one of the intriguing mysteries of alcohol research is the question of how ethnic and racial groups pass on their drinking habits.
Are those practices inherited or are they learned by one generation from another?
Researchers now are challenging centuries worth of conventional wisdom about different cultural groups and their approach to alcohol. They are asking how much a people`s drinking depends on social customs and on their economic situation in society. How much of it involves learning and how much biology?
”It is possible to say Irish have an inordinately high rate of alcohol problems and Jews have an inordinately low rate,” said Dr. Collins Lewis of the psychiatry department at Washington University in St. Louis. ”But you run into all these variables, and to attribute drinking problems and practices just to ethnicity can get you into a bind. . . .
”Economics, for instance, is a major factor in drinking,” said Lewis, who is also medical director for the alcohol and drug dependency program at Jewish Hospital. ”But it`s largely unknown how drinking practices all relate to culture, environment, patterns of drinking and genetics.”
There are, however, objective and statistical data that apply to some minorities and subgroups within the United States.
It is, for instance, statistically correct to say that the rate of cirrhosis and chronic liver disease is overwhelmingly higher among blacks than among whites, even though the rate of heavy drinking between the two racial groups is about equal.
Also, people of Oriental descent, as a group, are known to miss an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol. That genetic difference, noted in more than half of the Oriental population, can make drinking uncomfortable and thus some are less likely to drink.
Does that mean that alcohol affects all groups differently, that biology favors some and frowns on others?
Research on ethnic drinking practices began as early as the turn of the century in this country. Research on large groups of immigrants, especially the Irish, was done through the 1940s.
More recently, the interest and research have focused on minority groups, especially blacks, Hispanics, Eskimos and a wide-ranging group lumped together as Asians and Pacific Islanders.
Members of minority groups are relatively easy to identify, often live in homogenous communities and often have, within their group, many similar socio- economic factors.
There are also medical reasons for research.
”Some minority groups appear to be at higher risk,” said Fleetwood Roberts, the assistant chief of the extramural research division at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Md. ”Their economic loss is higher, and deaths are higher–that`s why people are concentrating on them.”
A report last year by a task force in the Department of Health and Human Services on black and minority health pointed to stark numbers in cirrhosis and chronic liver disease, two traditional gauges of alcoholism.
In the latest survey, the rate for every 100,000 white males was 15.4 deaths. For black males it was almost double–29.4 deaths. For American Indian males it was almost triple–43.7 deaths.
Females in each of those groups had lower rates, but the differences among the races stayed the same.
The group with the fewest alcohol-related deaths were Asians and Pacific Islanders, both male and female, who had less than half the rate of whites.
Hispanics were not included in the survey, said a Health and Human Services spokeswoman, ”because many states don`t list Hispanics as an ethnic group.”
”There`s nothing available in terms of scientifically gathered data,”
said Antonio Garcia, executive director of Chicago`s Hispano Alcoholic Services, 2755 W. Armitage Ave.
His organization has been seeking drunken driving arrest rates and the number of liquor licenses granted in Chicago`s Hispanic neighborhoods. ”We have to talk about ethnic drinking problems whether we like it or not,” he said.
” . . . We also need to develop appropriate programs,” Garcia added.
”Now we have upper middle class, white, Anglo-Saxon programs for upper middle class, white, Anglo-Saxon alcoholics.”
”You have to look at the whys and that doesn`t come out in mortality surveys,” said the Health and Human Services spokeswoman. ”Minority populations usually are living in lower socio-economic areas, they have less access to health care and fewer financial resources. Usually they come to medical attention and care later.
”The mortality rates may not necessarily be linked to racial groups or to biology or to ethnicity, but to their socio-economic level,” she said.
Denise Herd, an anthropologist at the Alcohol Research Group at Berkeley, Calif., who is contributing to a major federal study of black and Hispanic drinking practices, said some researchers still question whether blacks and American Indians metabolize alcohol differently.
The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reports that alcoholism is one of the black community`s most serious health problems, contributing to a range of ills from hypertension to homicide.
There always is a great deal of suspicion in studies of drinking and ethnicity. ”Because something is ethnic, it is not necessarily genetic,”
Lewis said.
Public interest groups are studying ethnic research and use it in arguments before Congress and regulatory agencies to lobby for stricter controls on advertising, for new labeling bills and for increased taxation that would, they claim, decrease consumption.
Much of the research is anecdotal and speculative. The actress Mercedes McCambridge, for instance, was once chairwoman of the National Council on Alcoholism and she said it was rage and ”the essential loneliness in all of us” that leads to alcoholism. She also believed that heavy drinking is common to people from lands bordered by cold water.
Irish immigrants to this country not only left a poor homeland but came to a society that kept them at the bottom for many years.
Dr. George Valliant of Dartmouth College explained research showing that young Irish-American men actually had no greater physical problems with alcohol than any other northern European group, but they experienced greater social problems because of their drinking.
In his book, ”The Natural History of Alcoholism,” Valliant described how Italians educate children about drinking from their youth, usually introducing wine as a natural part of a meal.
”In contrast,” he wrote, ”the Irish forbid children and adolescents from learning how to drink but they tolerate–and covertly praise–the capacity of men to drink large amounts of alcohol. Alcohol use is a guilty secret.”
Another factor that appears to play a cultural role in drinking practices is religion.
The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that prevailing theory relates ”Jewish sobriety to the early initiation of children in a family-centered, religiously oriented, moderate drinking pattern.” Studies in the last three decades note differences in drinking habits even between Orthodox and secular Jews. Orthodox children drink wine earlier as part of their religious ritual, but they tend to have fewer problems with alcohol as adults.
Scientists claim that ethnic research faces unique problems. Many ethnic communities are traditionally closed to outsiders, including treatment specialists and government surveyors.
Social researchers, for instance, believe it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish accurate alcoholism rates among Asian-Americans, a term that encompasses 20 nationalities including Chinese, Japanese, native Hawaiians, Samoans, Koreans, Cambodians, Thais and Filipinos.
Statistics on a federal Indian reservation, on the other hand, are easy to gather.
Researchers who believe drinking habits are learned claim that Indian drinking perhaps mimicks the white trappers, settlers and soldiers who first sold them alcohol. That pattern has been passed through the generations who lived a bleak reservation life and now, the researchers suggest, many native Americans use alcohol to express the frustration of their position in society and subservience to a white majority.
Another small group of Americans who had little previous experience with alcohol are the Eskimos. Alcoholism is now considered a major problem in the stark and cold villages and cities of Alaska.
”Alcohol abuse strikes terror in the hearts of everyone,” wrote a village public safety officer in a letter to a state legislative committee studying alcoholism in rural Alaska. He recalled three ”good friends” dying of alcohol-related drownings, six in plane crashes that involved alcohol, and one friend whose murder was also related to alcohol.
Beyond cultural and genetic factors, Valliant also explored occupational hazards surrounding alcohol dependence.
Bartending and the diplomatic service put people in close contact with alcohol throughout the day, he wrote, and that could lead to increased problems. Also people with less structure in their lives, including writers, journalists and the unemployed, are more likely to drink at odd hours and have increased rates of alcoholism. Other jobs, such as housepainting, traveling sales and roofing, may attract alcoholics because they are freer of close supervision.
The occupational speculation carries less emotional baggage than ethnic theories, most of which remain unproven. One federally sponsored research paper on alcohol and aggression in ethnic groups pointed to drinking patterns that everyone could understand.
It outlined two studies done on recent immigrant groups. Both groups of men, one from the Dominican Republic and the other from Guatemala, had a tradition of ”macho” drinking in their native lands.
Once they arrived in the United States, however, the Dominicans changed rapidly and dramatically, concentrating on new jobs and saving money. On the other hand, many of the Guatemalans continued to spend money and drink heavily on weekends.
There was no major ethnic variable, the researcher explained. The main difference, he suspected, was that when the Dominican men came to the U.S. they brought along their wives.
