I’ve read a few things lately that I never really thought about and seem to explain why the readership on this blog has remained fairly low. The obvious culprits are my inconsistent writing habit, the fact that I’m fairly long-winded, and am just a horrible, horrible self-promoter. Some of those things I have tried to correct with limited success, some of them I just don’t have the time to address properly.

But I was reading this post by RBC’s Keith Humphreys wherein he quotes himself from a previous blog post there in a sentence that really stands out to me:

One of the things I have observed is that many political/public policy blogs are comfort food for a pool of regular readers. If you create a site called “immigrantsaredestroyingourcountry.com” or “legalizecocainenow.com” or “Allrepublicansareevilmonsters.com” you will over time accrue a readership, potentially a large one. Your role as a blogger is to repeat, in a thousand different ways, the message captured in your blog title. Your amen corner will then comment enthusiastically, over and over, in post after post that you are oh so right about what you think.

Now, this isn’t a public policy blog, although I do sometimes talk about public policy-related issues. But this is a “beer blog” or a “liquor blog” and most blogs of this type tend to be written by evangelists. Fans of craft beer or good bourbon who want everyone else to also be fans of craft beer or good bourbon. They tend to be industry cheerleaders. In this world, brewers are rock star and distributors of craft beer are local educators and heroes. Liquor should be sold 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to anyone who’s big enough to carry it out of the store. Our enemies are moderationists and temperance groups, some churches, and politicians who dare mention excise tax increases.

But that is not what this blog does. As a matter of fact, my oppositional nature compels me to speak frequently of the positive impact of excise tax increases and the negative social impact of alcohol addiction. If I have just read an article on the evils of marketing, I want to defend marketing. I want to defend culture and psychology and I want to defend selling Pliny the Elder on Ebay and along the way inform the world that that the beer business rockstar Stones, for all their business success, don’t seem to understand basic economics. I want to defend Untappd one day and lambast beer tickers the next.

I’m disagreeable.

This isn’t a cheerleader’s blog. This is a blog for introspection, for rational thought, for honest self-appraisal. It is about the drinking life and it’s largely celebratory. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be honest. I still love the drinking culture even though I see its limitations, its weaknesses, its faults, its harms. I think a mature people should be able to have mature conversations about the things they love, and to me that means weighing both sides outloud, in public, in front of you. It isn’t enough to know that alcohol is a killer and a contributor to much criminal activity. I think we have to say that whenever we talk about it’s good qualities. An accurate appraisal of a rose bush cannot forget the thorns.

I don’t read cheerleader blogs. I’m not a choir that’s interested in being preached to, so I don’t read blogs that cheerlead things I already love. Nor am I interested in being preached at by bloggers who are cheerleading the other side. I know “the enemy” often has good, rational reasons to like the things they like, but you won’t find them on cheerleader blogs. So I  seek out contrarians on both sides of any argument. I want to be convinced. And I want to convince you…of something. I want to try and take you from wherever you are, to wherever I am, but that presupposes you aren’t already where I want to take you. I want to find people who disagree with me and convince them to think about it differently. I’m not interested in changing minds or opinions per se. But I do want you to see the merits in another way of thinking about old subjects.

I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I think that my flaw is “I’m too honest” and that’s why my readership hasn’t exploded. I mostly blame all the other things which are just bad blog etiquette, but it certainly doesn’t help that I tend to be so damned contrary.

*If you ever read a question in a headline, the answer is “no.”

George Washington, it seems, had a bit of a booze problem. That is not to say he was a problem drinker. On the contrary, he also seems to have been quite temperate. No, his problem was a hypocritical streak about as wide as the Potomac.

Biographer Ron Chernow, in his book Washington: A Life speculates that the man who would become the first president learned to hate liquor when he saw how indolent, insolent, and desert-y it made his Virginia Regiment during the French and Indian War. He would eventually deliver 50 lashes for militia men under his command caught drinking, in the spare time, in gin shops. (66)

As president, of course, one of his first tasks was to enforce with violence the levying of a whiskey tax which had resulted in a small insurgency in Pennsylvania (more on that later)*

So this temperate man who hated booze and understood its powerful corrupting influence must have been quite strict in how he thought whiskey, wine, and beer should be enjoyed, no? Indeed he was!

He, for example, opened a distillery on his Mt. Vernon property. You can even visit the distillery today if you’d like. There’s nothing quite as charming or heroic as a guy who will sell you a drink with one hand and then beat you for drinking it with the other.

And let’s not forget how he won his first elected seat in the Virginia House of Burgess. In 1755 Washington ran for the House of Burgess and was trounced, receiving only 40 votes. His competitors won 271 and 270 votes. Three years later, so as not to relive the shame of his earlier defeat, Washington deployed what had been and would continue to be a potent grassroots vote getting weapon: booze.

On election day, July 24, 1758, the absentee candidate [Washington was off fighting the French and Indian War, still] engaged in the popular, if technically illegal, custom of intoxicating local voters. His campaign forwarded him an expense account for thirty-four gallons of wine, three pints of brandy, thirteen gallons of beer, eight quarts of cider, and forty gallons of rum punch, costing the candidate a sizable thirty-nine pounds of Virginia currency. Accepting this expense, Washington hoped that his backers had plied all voters impartially with strong beverages: “My only fear is that you spent with too sparing a hand.”

Nothing like living up to your family motto, I suppose: Exitus acta probat.**

*On another blog a cadre of friends and I are reading presidential biographies. One per month, chronologically. I haven’t gotten to the Whiskey Rebellion yet, but when I do, you can be sure I’ll have something to say about it here.

**This was seriously his family creed. Apparently the Washington’s were one of the families in Game of Thrones.

One of my favorite international relations writers is Stephen M. Walt, the head of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. I find his writing accessible and intelligent. He is also one of the bloggers at Foreign Policy. Like all bloggers, at least the social and political commentariat of which Walt is a part, have taken an interest in Andrew Sullivan’s recent decision to take his blog private. In Sullivan’s decision, Walt sees a larger trend for the media environment, one that makes him think of the craft beer explosion.

You know that your thing is really a thing when people from outside the world of your thing start to use your thing as a metaphor for their thing.

Huzzah!

As a beer blogger, I find it doubly interesting that the craft beer explosion is being compared to the changes wrought on the media environment by bloggers. Walt is almost certainly too busy to have noticed what beer bloggers have done to the world of liquor writing, but what he has to say on the blogs he reads and the newly available abundance of talented writers in his areas of interest and expertise is almost certainly doubly true here in the beer blogosphere where the number of truly good writers could previously be counted on two hands but now are practically innumerable.

In other news, Walt badmouths PBR in his post, so I hope some nice person straightens him out on that score at some point lest I start to lose respect for his judgment on other matters.

Yesterday I linked on my Facebook page to this Slate article and used it as an excuse to link to this old post of mine. I cited with approval the following sentence from Troy Patterson’s story:

“I’d like to complicate the matter by simplifying things and posit that those who prefer clean, dry PBR to bland Bud or fetid Coors Light are acting as rational consumers and that PBR-deniers are the true poseurs. “

One friend asked,

“I enjoy Hamm’s and Old Style on occasion, but I’ll be damned if I join the lemmings and drink PBR. Is that the thought process they’re referring to?

And another friend responded:

“Now there’s an interesting psychological question… is everything “lemmings” do bad, just because they are following someone else doing it?”

The short answer is “no.” Lemmings being lemmings is not universally bad. The slightly longer answer is that blindly doing the opposite of what the lemmings are doing is just as bad (or good) as  blindly doing what the lemmings are doing; they are both cognitive shortcuts that serve our socio-emotional needs more than our rational ones. The Too Long answer is below. Stop now if that was good enough for you.

I think there’s value in groupthink* and certainly I’m not alone. We even have a few axioms that support groupthink from a “common sense” perspective: “No use reinventing the wheel,” comes to mind, as does the instruction to “learn from others’ mistakes.” The “bandwagon” and “testimonial” approaches to advertising are crucial strategies in gaining new customers, even in today’s distrustful, even cynical, age. And everyone knows the power “word of mouth.” All of these point to a the cognitive efficiency of relying on trusted others to make decisions about unknown commodities. When a testimonial–often from an “expert”–supports the use of a product, its power relies on how much we trust the speaker. When there is no speaker who can or will speak with authority on the value of a product or service, we rely on the wisdom of crowds, after all, “a million people can’t be wrong.”

Of course, a million people can be wrong and often are. Repeatedly. This is one of major values of social media. The ability of individuals to harness the power of groups of like-minded people. The logic being that while it’s possible for a million random people to read Twilight and enjoy it, it’s not at all likely that a group of one million people very similar to me and my friends will do so.

So when my first friend claims she won’t drink PBR despite its popularity and low cost (and its success in objective** assessments of its flavor) there’s obviously more going on than a simple analysis of PBR’s relative merits. She’s making a cultural decision to not be associated with the kind of people for whom PBR is a legitimate beverage choice. There is an implication that she does not trust their decisions, but, since as I argue in the linked post, their choice is rational (and I generally believe that people are rational) the real implication of her choice is that she does not trust how they arrived at their decision, i.e., she believes that they are making a cultural decision rather than a rational, product-driven choice.

Indeed, this is how groupthink always appears to us.

I remember the first time I witnessed country line dancing in the wild. My mom used to love country line dancing and would practice to video tapes at home. For whatever reason, I understood this drive to participate, the desire to practice alone at home, and the general principal of “To this song we do the Electric Slide.” What I failed to know at the time was that these dances could be selected spontaneously and simultaneously by large groups of people even when the song in the air was not the one to which the dance was originally attached. When I first witnessed it, I was horrified. Humans had been reduced to birds who know when to instantaneously turn left, or a school of fish that know to dart right. No communication, no leadership, just…instinct. Country line instinct. It always appears non-cognitive, subconscious, driven by base instincts–specifically fear. The desire to buy the same product as everyone else is driven by the desire to appear unified with the group, not subject to individualized derision. Or at least, that’s how it appears.

And to some extent, it’s true. In this regard, choosing to be seen drinking an alternative product signals a deliberate choice to “think for oneself.” It’s social bravery. It is also a statement of individuality  It’s the guy in the three-piece suit at the punk rock show–a truly democratic statement. It says “I am individual, I am my own self but I am here with you; we can enjoy different beers, while we like the same music.”

On the other hand, it bespeaks a certain hubris, a tacit “understanding” that others’ decisions are subject to their socio-cultural environments while ours are attributable to our cognitive faculties (read: higher functions). In psychology this is related to the concept of the Fundamental Attribution Error, which is also related to the fact that we attribute socio-cultural homogeneity to groups we are not a part of while attesting to the fragmented nature of groups we are a part of (Democrats are very unified; Republicans can’t stop backstabbing each other!) (See Also)

Because I know my brain (like your brain) compels me to embiggen the perception of the role of my own cognitive processes, while diminishing them in those around me I tend to try and rein in my analysis of group behavior to account for this perfectly natural bias. Behavior is really a sum of cognitive and non-cognitive choices–with a balance toward the latter (for myself as well as others).

My attempt to unbias my view returns me again and again to a rationalist model. And in consumer products price is a confusing signal that most of us don’t understand. In “luxury” products (like beer) higher prices denote quality and compel additional purchases. So when you see a cheap beer that is also popular, that presents something of a puzzle. Similarly when you see various groups agreeing on their choices, so you can’t just attribute the success to niche marketing…that presents something of a puzzle too. Finally, in the case of PBR, you have PBR’s success even as craft brews are earning increasingly larger market share. Craft beers are mostly ales (PBR is a lager). They are mostly darker than PBR; they mostly have higher ABVs. They are mostly manufactured by breweries significantly smaller than PBR (which, the last I knew, was being contract brewed by, among other breweries, Miller). The only way to square all three of these things, in my opinion, is to return back to the fundamentals.

And with food, the fundamental value is flavor. I think people think that PBR tastes good, or at least tastes “good enough.” Price and taste are perhaps the two most well-balanced attributes inside a can of PBR.

I think that simply refusing to order a PBR to not be associated with “hipsters” relies just as heavily on our more basic emotional decision-making apparatuses as choosing a can of PBR to be associated with them. I don’t think there’s anything wrong or “bad” in this style of decision-making (within reason of course). The preference is to be responsive rather than reactive, but we all have reactive moments. It’s part of the human condition. Gut reactions, groupthink, social signaling–these are all just as important in our consumer decisions as judgments of the relative value of price, flavor, nutrition, safety, etc.

However, if your knee-jerk reaction to hipsters leads you to order Hamm’s instead…Well, then yes, a failure to follow the lemmings is “bad.”

*As the link demonstrates, I am blurring the lines between groupthink and crowdsourcing which are really two different things, even if they share some conceptual overlap. Don’t bog yourself down in the semantics, I’m really talking about making decisions based off of the prior choices of independently deciding individuals, regardless of their chosen method.

**I am well aware that there is always an element of subjectivity when it comes to assessing the value of a consumable, whether that’s movies, literature, or beer. But good judges and fair critics attempt scientific dispassion. At the very least we can look at regular and consistent assessments of value…or rely on crowdsourcing to mimic, if not entirely duplicate, the results of an objective measure.

…Now what?

Unlike much of the craft beer hunters, tickers, snobs, hipsters community, I did not buy an entire six pack. I was the beneficiary of a friend’s largesse and I have but one, perfect bottle, perfect in every way, but mostly perfect because it resides, for now, as a dream of things to come. So I cannot drink one now, share with friends, and come back one and then two years later to judge the quality of its maturation.

Do I drink this bad boy to coronate 2013 or do I drink it next Christmas?

This guy is probably wondering the same thing as I am.

The craft beer revolution that has been going on in this country for a few decades has finally started spreading around the world and now you can be a part of it. If you have a few bucks to spare, why don’t you help out these fine folks taking punk rock and Belgian-style ales to El Salvador.

Be a beer accionista!

The murder of Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne is a tragedy, full stop. So my attempt to put his death in perspective and my long-standing opinion that the War on [Some Kinds of] Drugs is one of this country’s greatest policy failures should in no way be interpreted as me saying that his death is “senseless” or to undermine the nobility of his service or the gravity of his sacrifice.

A lot of ink is spilled on the otherwise innocence of the US pot smoker. Andrew Sullivan, for example,  calls the citizens of Colorado and Washington who choose to smoke pot “law-abiding” when, in fact, they are not. According to state law, they are breaking no law, that is true. However, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug by the federal government. You can believe, as I do, that this is a mistake and that it should be reclassified or taken off the schedule altogether. What you cannot do is decide that it is not the case. And people who break the law, justifiably or not, are not “law-abiding.”

The reality of marijuana being illegal is that the people who choose to grow, smuggle, and sell it are criminals. It is logically possible that growing, smuggling and/or selling marijuana is the only crime they commit, but that is incredibly unlikely. Incredibly. Were it not for Prohibition you probably would have never heard of Charles Luciano. His success as one of the most ruthless businessmen in a ruthless industry is why Lucky Luciano is famous—that and his success at managing the largest heroin distribution network, the so-called “French Connection,” once booze became a legal and less profitable business.  We can choose to believe that pot smokers are engaged in a peaceful industry that results in almost no death per year unlike that horrible demon rum, but the reality is that illegal industries cannot appeal to police, courts, and other government institutions in order to protect property rights and enforce contracts—so they do it with guns. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 65,000 people have died in Mexico since 2006. This doesn’t count the number of people who have lost loved ones or been otherwise terrorized by the cartels. It doesn’t count the number of people who have died in China or Afghanistan for heroin, or those in Colombia during the reign of Pablo Escobar.

And it doesn’t count Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne, age 34.

It may be true that few to no people die from marijuana, but thousands die because of it. The guys that murdered Horne are killers and Horne was trying to keep them and the product that writes their paychecks out of the country. Again, you can argue, as I do, that it is pots illegality and not pot itself that killed Horne. Fine. But pot being illegal is the world we live in and no amount self-righteous criticism of that law’s incoherence or hypocrisy can turn smugglers into good guys.

NPR’s take on the story (linked above) is that Horne should never have been in harm’s way. He was too far north, the notorious borderlands with their tunnels and submersibles and wall-defying SUVs too far south. But in fact, this is exactly what we should expect in an age with more apprehensions along the border than ever before, with record-setting interdictions. It makes a certain market sense—why would drug smugglers attempt to cross where the density of guards are thickest? Why not take the extra time and money to go where nobody would expect them? More tragically, we have seen exactly this phenomenon play out over and over again. Probably never more dramatically than after fall 1981 and the launch of Operation Greenback and the creation of CENTAC 26. Here’s Ron Chepesiuk in his 1999 book Hard Target: The United States War Against International Drug Trafficking, 1982-1997:

Drug trafficking made homicide a common event in South Florida. The number of murders in Miami had skyrocketed, going from 349 in 1979 to 569 in 1980 to 621 in 1981, with about 40 percent of the murders related to drugs. So many people were being murdered in Miami that the mortuaries could not handle all the corpses…In September 1980 Miami attained the dubious distinction of heading the FBI’s annual list of the nation’s ten most crime-ridden cities with the nation’s highest murder rate (70 per 100,000 residents).

But after several high profile interdictions and the successful prosecution of several smugglers and dealers by CENTAC 26

…it appeared that the ever-resourceful drug traffickers were shifting the battlefield of the war on drugs, bringing to other parts of the country the violence, the drug addition, the corruption, and the dirty money that had plagued South Florida….To their dismay authorities in such states as Maine, Georgia, Tennessee, New Mexico, and Louisiana were having to interdict cocaine and marijuana shipments. They worried about how many drug shipments were getting through to be sold in the towns and cities of their states.

In New England, 100 tons of marijuana was seized in the first nine months in 1982, compared to only 9 tons the same period the previous year.

Moreover, as Chepesiuk (and common sense) continue, as the field of opportunity increased, the level of protection for those areas decreased. The more miles of borderthat needed patrolling, the thinner the line of protection became. And less law enforcers means that those who are there are more at risk.

Horne’s death is tragic. All the more so because of its inevitability given our current policies.

I promise to get back to blogging about booze soon (but I insofar as I stay on this marijuana angle, I’llkeep drawing the connections between the old alcohol Prohibition and the current criminalization regime for marijuana and the rest—so you can’t say I’m not trying).

One of the most interesting, potentially tragic, and undeniable truths of the human condition is that the pursuit of intoxication is relentless. Perhaps more interesting, is that types of intoxication are sought after. Pill-poppers move from pill to pill and back, drinkers drink, smokers smoke. Obviously there are a significant number of users that choose multiple drugs. The second drug of choice for many users of illegal substances is alcohol.

Many pro-marijuana-legalization advocates use this near certain truth to argue that alcohol abuse will drop if marijuana is legalized. And the liquor industry, which has been one of the lead opponents of pot legalization seems to agree. Their argument is that there are many current drinkers who would prefer to be pot smokers but are dissuaded because of the high costs associated with marijuana use. The reality is less clear.

For one thing, many people, it turns out, would prefer to do both. So while it is true that a lot of current drinkers(-only) would prefer to be pot smokers(-only), it is also true that a lot of current drinkers(-only) would prefer to do both legally. And exchanging on a 1-for-1 basis alcohol abusers with pot abusers would provide society a net gain, each 1-for-1 trade of an alcohol abuser with a pot and alcohol abuser may actually be worse. And we don’t have any good estimate of how much movement in either of these groups will likely see.

There is some evidence that the number of people who would switch from drinking-only to pot-only has been slightly exaggerated in the literature. One such evidence is in the existence and market success of synthetic cannibinoids. Those who are concerned about prison, high fines, or drug loss associated with pot use but still really want to be pot users have (quasi-)legal outlets. This suggests that the number of drinkers-only who would rather be smokers-only is smaller than pot advocates have estimated.

This sort of type-specific intoxication has a historical precedent too. When Phylloxera nearly wiped out the French wine industry and made wine prohibitively expensive in the US, US drinkers (of which there were a great many, drinking amounts that would offend 21st century observers) they did not, in large numbers resort to marijuana, opium, heroin, cocaine, or other drugs–many of which were legal or in states of legality (legal in some provinces, or legal to use but not retail etc). Instead, Phylloxera was the harbinger of two important drinking culture shifts: the Golden Age of the Cocktail and the beginning of the American wine industry.

Similarly during Prohibition drinkers, once again, did not shift to more accessible or more legal intoxicants to replace the booze that the government forbid them to buy or sell. Instead it was the birth of the US homemade wine market. Now whether we should consider homemade wine more like Spice or more like hydroponic weed is an interesting question. To me it’s more like the former than the latter. By that point the US drinker had largely shifted to cocktails or unmixed whiskeys, gins, etc. The reversion to wine, in my opinion, should be viewed as a shift to an accessible, similar, but ultimately inferior product.  It’s a weaker argument for the case presented here than the Phylloxera–>Cocktail case, but it’s in the family.

This recent Slate article on the phrases “blind drunk” and “drinking yourself blind” is fun and I recommend it. It’s short! But the deliberate addition of methanol or other dangerous substances to illicitly produced alcohol is a reminder of one of the real harms of marginalized/illicit industries more broadly. Or to be more specific about it, marijuana.

Of course there are fewer and fewer Americans opposed to marijuana legalization and two states on November 6 took the great leap forward to legalizing recreational use. Of course users, producers, and retailers could all still face federal charges since marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act–but we’ll save that for another day. But for those that remain, they should know that making an intoxicating substance illegal may have a suppressive effect on use, it does not reduce the use to zero. Those users that remain are forced to deal with the kind of people that break the law for a living. Doubly problematic is the fact that, although news features routinely mention drug profits in the billions of dollars, most of those dollars are earned by an extremely few people at the very top of the distribution racket–specifically the price goes up 100 times at the US border (changing the retail price from about $3/oz to $300/oz). In other words, the incentive to maximize profit through adulteration is pretty high.

It’s actually amazing we don’t see more stories like this one.

And yes, the tragic irony that both the Slate article and the ABC News story both talk about adulteration using lead, a product that not only causes blindness but that lingers in the system, transfers from mother to child in utero and plays no small role in increasing behavioral problems, including criminality in adulthood.

Obviously I can’t argue that legalization will end risky, even fatal, product adulteration. Booze is legal practically everywhere and yet there is still an illicit market in moonshine. This illicit market in alcohol (and the one in cigarettes) is caused primarily by high licensing  rates (alcohol) and high excise tax rates (cigarettes). It remains to be seen how largely and effectively marijuana would be taxed were it legal everywhere.

It is also true that the adulteration of other products like MDMA and heroin is easier to get away with and often with higher risk of mortality and not many people (yet) are using that as an argument to legalize the hard stuff. Nevertheless, in addition to all the other good reasons to legalize marijuana, decreasing the amount of lead and other adulterants smokers are taking in should be considered.