Alcohol Deaths: My Mournful Toll
Is it final? How many more lives will alcohol collect?
Bright flowers, people dressed in black, my friend’s mom wailing over the coffin, gloomy music from a marching funeral brass band — more than 50 years have passed since, but it’s still so vivid in my memory. My 5-year-old childhood friend runs to me shouting it was his father in the coffin. People frown upon him whispering to get silent.
The next day, my friend said his father would never be back. He drunk some poisonous liquid with his friends after work, and they all died.
That was the first alcohol death of people I knew.
Worldwide, 3 million deaths every year result from harmful use of alcohol, this represents 5.3 % of all deaths.
Alcohol consumption causes death and disability relatively early in life. In the age group 20–39 years approximately 13.5 % of the total deaths are alcohol-attributable.
The second was our neighbor. He and his wife got drunk, started arguing, then fighting, and his wife killed him with a knife. They had 3 kids. They were hiding in our house when it all started.
Later, there was another neighbor. A guy, who recently married a girl from our neighborhood, moved in their house. They had a party, got drunk, started quarreling. The new guy killed his wife’s brother with an ax in front of the family.
Then, two kids from my school got drunk, jumped on a scooter, went off the road at full speed, and hit the tree. 2 deaths.
Below is another alcohol deaths extract from my response to J.J. Lim’s article on Medium Methanol: The Alcohol You Should Never Drink, Not Even A Sip.
In 1982 I was summoned to the compulsory military service in the Soviet army…
One day, officers ordered an urgent parade. The whole regiment of about 600 people lined up outside the barracks. All division higher-ups were there. Our regiment commander, a colonel, was nervously walking backward and forwards. Then, in a very grim voice, he pleaded: “guys, sons, husbands, if anyone of you drunk any alcohol for the last week, please urgently address our medics”. He told that 32 persons suffered severe consequences of drinking methanol alcohol. 8 of them died. Several more lost their sight completely, the rest were under extensive medical care.
Later, several more guys died from methanol alcohol poisoning consequences.
It was established later that someone had found a barrel of alcohol amid fuel barrels. The news spread quickly and within a week more than half of the barrel had been drunk.
There was also an alcohol death near miss when I was in the army. One young and a stupid guy got drunk on a day leave to town and couldn’t reach back to his barracks. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a small booth with an old lady looking at him. She was a railway worker on night duty. She said she found the drunk guy on rails of a busy Moscow-Berlin route. Just by a miracle, she pulled the legless guy from rails just in time not to be run over by a train. That guy was me.
I witnessed another alcohol death when I worked at an electric machine plant. During the night shift, a drunk guy was sucked by the tinning machine wheels. He wasn’t rescued.
Later, my wife’s uncle died from cirrhosis caused by alcohol. One more dead.
An estimated 88,000 people (approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually, making alcohol the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The first is tobacco, and the second is poor diet and physical inactivity.
In 2014, alcohol-impaired driving fatalities accounted for 9,967 deaths (31 percent of overall driving fatalities).
In 2010, alcohol misuse cost the United States $249.0 billion.
Statistics is awful. All those deaths were not heroic. They were the deaths in the name of alcohol. When we add all broken families, fights, abuses, heavy hangovers, it looks like we, humans, have picked up wrong and the deadliest amusement tool.
I wish I had never tried alcohol. Looking back over my life, I cannot recollect any happy moment I couldn’t replay without alcohol to a better result.
I hope this information can help other people in choosing to drink or not to drink.