Alcohol

Some Statistics

Extract from the Book, "Proposals and Notes on Constitution of Pilgrim Welfare Fund and Duties and Functions of Pilgrim welfare officers on Ships", Pages 106, 107, 108, & 109, printed by the Anjuman-i-Khaddamun Nabi, Pakistan, Karachi-2.

I give below an idea about the expenditure on wine in Karachi City as appeared in Leader of the 8th August 1961.

Karachites Drink 2780 Bottles of wine a Day

Karachi August 8, 1961: Karachites spend about Rs. 70,000 on Liquor Every Day, it was gathered today:

Of this, nearly Rs. 20,000 goes in foreign exchange on the import of foreign liquor, almost everyday. (i.e. Rs. 73 Lakhs foreign exchange -are spent annually on import of foreign liquor for Karachi City only.)

The consumption of country-made liquor is, however, greater than imported liquor. The consumption of both the imported and country made liquor is on the increase in the sprawling city.

On an average 480 bottles of imported wine are now consumed daily. Each bottle costs Rs. 45 to 50, This does not include the duty-free imported Liquor consumed by foreign missions in the city.

In addition, about 800 bottles of Pakistan make, foreign style liquor, each bottle costing Rs. 20 to Rs. 30 are drunk every day,

The largest daily consumption is of country made liquor; in all, about 1500 bottles, each available at Rs, 10/- are consumed; This liquor is sold loose, while others are supplied in sealed bottles.

The beer is also in great demand and on an average 2400 bottles are drunk here every day. The prices of beer range from Rs. 3 to 5 per bottle. Of this, about 20 per cent beer is imported and the rest is country made.

30 Shops

There are about 30 shops in the city dealing in liquor. Of these, 14 sell country made liquor, while the remaining 16, deal in imported wine and beer.

The city has got about 30 bars where the liquor is served. About 10 hotels also serve the drinks.

The consumption of liquor and the number of liquor drinking persons in the city is the highest in the country.

The wine merchants in the city, it is estimated, pay about Rs. 50 lakhs annually as provincial excise duty on liquor. In addition, custom duty and sales tax are paid to the Government on imported liquor, at the rate of Rs. 275/- per dozen bottles. An assessment fee is also charged from that on liquor-APP.

(At the end of 1963 the number of shops in Karachi alone stood at 130, while that of the whole of West Pakistan 411).

Consumption of Drinks in America

We give some interesting figures about per capita consumption of Drinks in America in 1958 as appeared in the magazine 'Listener' July- August 1960 issue.

Milk 140.8 qt.
Coffee 114.8 qt.
Beer 59.2 qt.
Soft drinks 47.2 qt.
Tea 27.2 qt.
Frozen fruit juices 5.2 qt.
Distilled spirit 4.8 qt.
Wine 3.6 qt.
Vegetable and tomato juice 3.6 qt.

In 1958 the population of the United States drank 29,944,020,000 gallons of Alcohol, 5,053,000,000 gallons of milk and 4,919,000,000 gallons of coffee.
(Figures from the West Virginia issue).

Here we also give the figures as appeared in the magazine, 'Listener' July-August 1960 issue, concerning Retail Stores in America, wiz Alcohol Shops :

Retail Alcohol Dealers 4,27,881
Grocery Stores 2,79,440
Service Stations 1,84,747
Liquor Stores 31,240
Women's Ready to wear Store 29,788
Furniture Stores 23,465
Shoe Stores 23,847
Depot Stores 2,761

Yearly Expenses in America

We give below the figures from "Listener" September-October 1960, about "How Americans spent their money in the year".

Clothing $ 20,800,000,000
Gambling $ 20,009,000,000
Education $ 19,700,000,000
Recreation $ 15,900,000,000
Automobiles $ 14,500,000,000
Alcoholic Beverages $ 10,700,000,000
Tobacco $ 6,000,000,000
Religion and Welfare $ 3,600,000,000

According to the figures of England, Japan and America, given above, we can come to the following conclusion for the information and guidance of Pakistanis for discarding unnecessary habits and to check the unnecessary wastage on gambling, drinking, tea, smoking and other harmful addiction :

(a) No doubt according to the figures given above, Englishmen who are so rich as compared with us, drink 247,000,000 cups of tea per day which works out to an average of 21 cups per head as they have a population of 5 crores against which we guess that Pakistanis must be taking many more cups of tea. We Pakistanis takes about 400,000,000 cups if we take 4 cups per day per head. Japanese smoked 134,900,000,000 cigarettes in 1961, and 126,500,000,000 in 1960 against which the number of smokers of cigarettes in Pakistan is increasing by 14% per year while its population is increasing by 28 % per year, as per para 17 above, and according to the Estimates of the Planning Commission (as per Para 17 above) Pakistanis would be consuming 30 thousand million cigarettes by 1975.

Expenditure of Alcohol

America which has double the population than that of Pakistan spends about $ 10,700,000,000 per year on Alcohol whereas in Pakistan when Karachites who are about 25 lakhs in population, spend Rs. 70,000 a day, which comes to % 1/2 Anna per head per day for our whole population of Pakistan. The yearly expenditure on Alcohol comes to a gigantic figure of Rs. 570,312,500, (over Rs. 57 crores) which is a very big national loss.

(Extract from the Book Proposals and Notes on Constitution Of Pilgrim Welfare Fund and Duties and Functions of Pilgrims Welfare Officers on Ships Page 106, 107, 108, & 109)

The Truth about the Beer

Extract from Life and Health February 1969, pages 10, 11 & 27.

The People of the United States almost unanimously agree that beer is a part of life, that there is no harm in it, that life actually is merrier for it. I challenge the people of this country to take a second look at this beverage in order to guard their precious health, their children's heritage, and the morals of young and old.

If we would look around us we would see many of the results of excessive beer drinking, but we do not like to look at unpleasant proofs of our own folly, and so we do not say much about what this extensive habit is doing to us and our children. It is not in fashion today to be honest with ourselves and squarely face the sure future if we go on as we are doing and including cases of beer for every party, drinking what we consider to be a harmless glass of beer with our lunch, taking beer along on our picnics. Is this a harm less practice? What is it actually doing to us today? What of the future?

Sale of Beer in England

England had an experience in the 1800's that can show as where we are headed. Hoping to stay the wave of intemperance that was covering the country in those days, the leading statesmen reasoned that they should afford greater facility in the sale of beer, with the idea of slowing whisky sales.

England's leaders were so sure of themselves that they proclaimed : "It was giving the people what, under present circumstances, might be called a moral species of beverage." That was Lord Brougham's opinion in advocating the new measure.

The Duke of Wellington said he was "sure the measure would be attended with the most beneficial consequences to the lower orders."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (treasurer) declared that the measure would produce "a more wholesome beverage, and would improve the morals."

When the bill was passed, the Duke of Wellington proclaimed it "a greater achievement than any of his military victories."

After these optimistic and sincere efforts, what was the outcome when the beer bill went into effect? Disappointing is a mild word for the results of the measure.

A gospel minister who had favoured the bill, the Reverend Sydney Smith, said : "The new Beer Bill has begun its operations. Everybody is drank. Those who are not singing are sprawling. The sovereign people are in a beastly state."

One writer declared that "from his own knowledge he could declare that these beer shops had made many, who were previously sober and industrious, now drunkards, and many mothers had also become tipplers."

The English press, which before had favoured the bill, changed its attitude and wrote against it.

The Globe said : "The injury done by the Beer Act to the peace and order of the rural neighbourhood, not to mention domestic unhappiness, industry, and economy, has been proved by witnesses from every class of society to have exceeded the evils of any single act of internal administration passed within the memory of man. "

The Liverpool Mail said : "A more pernicious concession to popular opinion, and so prejudicial to public morals in the rural districts, in villages, hamlets, and roadsides of England never was made by the blind senators of a bad government in the worst times."

The beer bill was supposed to lessen the number of public houses for the sales of distilled liquor. A select committee of the House of Commons after investigation reported: "The Act without destroying a single public house, had added fifty thousand still more baleful houses to the list of temptations so baleful to the people."

A magistrate, G.F. Drury, said : "The Beer Bill has done more to brutalize the English labourer and take him from his family and fireside to the worst associations, than almost measure that could have been devised. It has furnished victims for the jails, the hulks (ships used as prisons), and the gallows, and has frightfully extended the evils of pauperism and moral debasement."

In 1869, or forty years after the beer bill had been passed, a committee for the Lower House of Convocation of the Province of Canterbury, re ported : "This measure though introduced in 1830 for the avowed purpose of repressing intemperance by counteracting the temptations to excessive drinking of ardent spirits, afforded in public houses has been abundantly proved, not only to have failed of its benevolent purpose, but to have served throughout the country to multiply and intensify the very evils it was intended to remove."

The London Times in 1871 speaks thus of the free beer-shop bill which was authorized by the government in 1830. "The idea entertained at that time was that free trade in beer would gradually wean men from the temptations of the regular tavern, would promote the consumption of a wholesome national beverage in place of ardent spirits, would break down the monopoly of the old license houses, and impart, in short, a better character to the whole trade......The results of this experiment did not confirm the expectations of its promoters. The sale of beer was increased, but the sale of spirituous liquors was not diminished."

In 1850 the 'Reverend John Clay, chaplain, Preston House of Correction and a student and authority on social science, speaking of the pass age of the. beer bill in his testimony before the committee of the House of Lords, said "Instantly 40,000 dens were opened, each of which breeds more immorality and sin in a week than can be counteracted by the ministers of religion in a year."

In a biography of Chaplain Clay published by his son is the following statement: "Drunkenness is the main topic of his first and almost every subsequent report. For some years it was only the old-fashioned drunkenness of the public houses which he had to describe, but after passage of the beer-bill in 1830, and the consequent springing up of an enormous crop of beer-shops, his fear of the great national sin turned almost to consternation.

"In 1853 the Committee of the House of Commons concurred with the lords' report, and declared that the beer-shop system has proved a failure."

Lord Rosebery was free to say that "if England does not master the brewer, the brewer will master England."

These are Lord Brougham's remarks to the House of Lords : "To what good is it that the Legislature should pass laws to punish crime or that their lordships should occupy themselves in trying to improve the morals of the people by giving them education? What could be the use of sowing a little seed here, and plucking up a weed there, if these beer-shops are to be continued to sow the seeds of immorality broadcast over the land, germinating the most frightful .produce that ever has been allowed to grow up in a civilized country, and under the fostering care of Parliament."

America's press in former years spoke out more clearly than today, just as England's did.

The president of the Connecticut Mutual Life Insurance Company, then one of the oldest and largest companies in America, Colonel Greene, made this especially interesting remark "It has been my duty to send records of and to make inquiry into the last illness and death of many thousand persons of all classes, in all parts of the country.

"I protest against the notion so prevalent and so industriously urged that beer is harmless... In one of our largest cities, containing a great population of beer drinkers, I had occasion to note the deaths among a large group of persons whose habits in their own eyes and in those of their friends and physicians were temperate : but they were habitual users of beer......

"When the observations began they were, upon the average, something under middle age, and they were of course selected lives. For two or three years there was nothing very remarkable to be noted among this group. Presently death began to strike it; and until it had dwindled to a fraction of its original proportion the mortality in it was astounding in extent and still more remarkable in the manifest identity of cause and mode. There was no mistaking it; the history was almost invariable - robust, apparent health, full muscles, a fair outside, increasing weight, florid face - then a touch or cold or a sniff of malaria, and instantly some acute disease with almost invariably typhoid symptoms was in violent action, and ten days or less ended it."

The Voice, a New York paper, sent this published article to several life insurance companies presidents asking whether their impression about beer correct about beer corresponded with that of colonel Greene. Nine presidents of the leading life insurance companies replied in letters published in The Voice dated October, 1884, endorsing and practically repeating the experience of Colonel Greene.

The Pacific Medical Journal, a publication endorsed and used in the form of a circular by the officers of the Home Life Insurance Company of New York, said : "The fashion of the present day."

Count the Cost Good will, like a name, is got by actions, and lost by one.

In the U.S. sets strongly towards the substitution of beer for other stimulating liquors. An idea appears to be gaining ground that it is not only nutritious but conducive to health, and, further, that there does not attack to it that danger of creating intemperate habits which attends the use of other drinks.

"Many years ago, and long before the moral sense of society was awakened to the enormous evils of intemperance, Sir Astley Cooper, an undisputed authority in his day, denounced habitual beer drinking as noxious to health. He said: 'Of all intoxicating drinks, it is the most animalizing. It dulls the intellectual and moral, and feeds the sensual and beastly nature. Beyond all other drinks, it qualifies for deliberate and unprovoked crime. In this respect it is much worse than distilled liquors.'"

Drinker's Stomach

Dr. W. T. Ridenour, who served during the first world war as surgeon of the Twelfth Ohio Infantry, was medical inspector of the Department of West Virginia, served as health officer for the city of Toledo, Ohio, and was a lecturer on physiology in the Toledo medical school.

He said: "In making a post-mortem examination, a physician instantly recognizes a beer drinker's stomach by its greatly increased dimensions. The liver is the great laboratory, the great workshop of the body. Any derangement of it means the immediate derangement of all the rest of the vital machinery, There can be no health anywhere when the liver is out of order. Beer drinking overloads it and clogs it up producing congestion."

"My first patient was a saloonkeeper . on Cherry Street, as fine a looking man physically as I had ever seen - tall well built, about thirty five years old, with florid complexion, and muscles well developed. He had an attack of pneumonia in the lower lobe of the right lung".

It was a simple, well-defined attack, which I regarded very hopefully. Doctors are confident of saving nineteen out of twenty such cases. I told my partner, Dr. Trembly, about it, and to my surprise he said gaiety, He'll die, I asked what made him think so. 'He's a beer drinker'; answered Trembly, and he persisted in producing a fatal termination of the case in spite of all my assertions to the contrary."

"Beer drinkers are peculiarly liable to die of pneumonia. Their vital power, their power of resistance, is so lowered by their habits that they are liable to drop off from any acute disease such as fever, pneumonia, etc. As a rule, when a confirmed beer drinker takes pneumonia he dies. They make bad patients."

Alcohol and Crime

"Eliminate liquor and at a single stroke you relieve the Juvenile Court of more than 50 per cent of its business. Directly and indirectly more than one half of the cases of juvenile delinquency in this country can be traced to the use of intoxicating liquors. There is no other influence for evil, as demonstrated, in the treatment of juvenile delinquents that compares with that of the liquor traffic." In these words is expressed the opinion of Judge Fred H. Taft, of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court after his long practical experience of the problem of Juvenile delinquency.

This opinion expresses typically the attitude of indiscipline and lawlessness under the influence of alcohol as evinced by the youth in the so-called civilized countries of the West. It is also to be borne in mind that the juvenile delinquent does not command much spending power to indulge in his nefarious activities. But what little he gets, by fair means or foul, suffices to turn his head when he can get access to the excitement, adventure and misplaced sense or power and daring of which alcohol creates an illusion in young immature minds.

Delinquency and carousing increase, as a matter of course. when the juvenile offender is induced by the befogging influence of liquor, to view life as a pleasure hunt for the revolting mind, insisting on "having the experience," He hovers about from one form of pleasure to another in his fruitless pursuit of satisfaction, little knowing that one cannot satisfy one's desires by satisfying them.

Not indulgence in but control over appetites is the fundamental axiom of psychic satisfaction. Lack of parental interest in the moral training of their offspring's, improper discipline and home atmosphere, provide the fertile soil for juvenile experience in liquor experience and consequent delinquencies.

In a survey carried out by Lieutenant- Colonel A. J. Cowden and associates, under the aegis of the Salvation Army, the Social Workers found that out of 653 unwed mothers, studied by them, 110 were school girls, 99 home girls, 214 servants, 61 waitresses, 45 factory girls, 35 office workers, 22 clerks, 12 telephone operators, 11 nurses, and the rest in minor other jobs - mostly in their teens. Forty-two percent of the unmarried mothers, another survey of the salvation Army, were found to be school girls of an average age of sixteen.

The Police Commissioner, Grover Whalen of New York, has the following words; while remarking on the problem of juvenile delinquency. There is growing up the so-called speakies problem and this is a serious one. In the old days, you could wipe out a vicious saloon. Now-a-days all you need is two bottles and a room and you have a Speakies. . We have 32,000 Speakies in this city. From the speakies comes dining and dancing and out of that grows the hostess game. The hostess problem verges seriously on a vice that we wiped out many years ago.

Drunken Fathers and Mothers

The home atmosphere exerts a powerful influence on the moral stamina of the budding personality. Drunken fathers and mothers can Hot but beget drunkards. The evil is imposed on the young by hereditary influences, operating through the medium of the inexorable forces of the psycho-physical set up of the mighty gents, which though tiny in size, transmit parental traits faithfully.

Add to this the visual perceptions of the environment and nursing and the picture of the direct temptation is completed in salient details. "It is an astounding fact that government, which will not permit brewery slop to be sold to cows because it produces swill milk does nothing to combat the superstition that the milk of the mother is not harmfully affected by beers, ales and porters. Such milk is deficient in the tissue-building constituent that is so essential to building strong vitality," says Dr. Ira S. Wiles, one of the editors of the Medical Review of Reviews.

In a survey of 259 alcoholised patients of Bellevue Hospital in New York city, it was found that 6.5 percent started drinking from one to twelve years of age, 23 percent began to drink from twelve to sixteen years of age, 39 percent began from sixteen to twenty-one years of age.

The percentage of those who got into this habit beyond these age groups was 31.5. In a study conducted by Mrs. L. A Rufe, it was revealed that no less than 4458 children out of 18 503 on rolls of twenty three Public Schools of Philadelphia, admitted that they drank alcoholic liquor-a finding which according to the said investigator is very much lower than the actual state of affairs.

As to how the liquor business-men view the younger generation as their real dupes, the following statement of R. H. Wallace, duly de posed before the Notary Public in and for Ross County, should serve as an eye-opener: that he was present in Worthweivs Hall, Columbia, Ohio at a meeting where representatives of the liquor dealers were present, discussing their plans.

At that meeting one of the representatives of the liquor interests spoke on matters of interest to the Saloon business with substantially these words: “The success of our businesses dependent largely upon the creation of appetite for drink, Men who drink liquor like others, will die, and if there is no new appetite created, our counters will be empty as well as our coffers. Our children will go hungry, or we must change our business to some other more remunerative one. The open field for the creation of appetite is among the boys, after men have grown and their habits are formed, they rarely ever change in this regard, and I make the suggestion, gentlemen that nickels expended in treats to the boys now, will return in dollars to our tills after the appetite has been formed”.

The Liquor Trade

And this is not a mere suggestion, the liquor trade acts upon it. In addition to the well known tendency of the liquor trade to promote drinking by women, by families in the home etc. the Board of Temperance has a picture of a nursing bottle containing whisky which was distributed by a saloon keeper at Troy Ohio, and which was taken from one of the school boys. The bottle originally contained one ounce of whisky. The boy had consumed about one half of it, and the other half remained in the bottle when it was taken away from the boy by his school teacher.

These bottles were circulated among the boys in the School and the one in question was taken from the son of a prominent church worker. The bottle is three inches in height and one and three - fourth inches across. On its front face there is a three-corner star, blown in the glass, enclosing the initials M.O.' A rubber tube has a turned bone nipple at the upper end and a glass extension tube at the lower end, which reaches the bottom of the bottle, so that all the whisky can be sucked out. It is manifest from the bottle that it has been turned out by a factory in large quantities for the purpose for which it has been used.

In adding this illustration to the affidavit of the above mentioned deponent, the reporter- an eminent social worker in the field of Temperance - ruefully speaks of still, "more missionary work of the same sort" being carried on among small boys in other places as well. Different sorts of attractive toys, dolls, bottles, have been used by the liquor dealers as containers for sweetened liquor and distributed freely among school boys and girls in the service of creating an appetite among the juvenile groups.

The liquor trade can flourish only by insistent creation of appetite among the younger generation. Huge sums are spent by this trade in the West to bolster up patronage by advertisements and appeal to the Social instinct of youth. Youth is the particular period of life, when the drink habit can be easily planted and as such the profit-paying appetite is sought by liquor interests to be cultivated among the young.

It has been established by sociological surveys that it is during adolescence that the taste for alcohol can be engendered by proper inducement, through advertisements and persuasion. "It is a noteworthy fact that in nearly 90 percent of confirmed in-eleriates, the addiction to drink began between fifteen and twenty-five years of age," says one eminent Sociologist.

Advertising, has, for its purpose, the creation of appetite, where none exists previously. Whatever may be said as to the position of the habitual drunkard vis-à-vis his new for alcohol, there can be but outright condemnation of the efforts to induce an appetite in those who, left to themselves, would abstain from this obnoxious product. It is a distinct loss to Society if an habitual abstainer is induced to become a consumer of alcoholic liquor. "No newspaper can view with complacency & use of agencies which converts abstainers into drinkers, and defeats the resolution of drinkers who may be attempting to counter the drink habit."

And what purpose has liquor advertising other than that which is tersely expressed in the above quotation from the pen of a great social worker. The reading matter, the illustrations are all so designed as to convey the appeal and suggestions in favour of the product - to induce drinking by those who in the absence of such prompting would abstain. What can be the objective of such advertising except to promote drinking among those classes or individuals who are abstinent and to provoke the latent appetite where already existent.

The Liquor trader is shrewd enough to gauge the value of such advertising and the effect that it produces. Typical of this shrewdness on his part is the suggestion by -one of them to his brethren in trade in the following words: Why not advertise wine as a summer drink? Many a family that does not today use a drop of wine could be taught by attractive copy, illustrated with tempting coloured drawings to use our light red and white wines in punches and lemonades.

The "Brewers Journal" outlines a course of advertising designed to mould public sentiment in favour of beer and create home consumption by those who have never before drunk wine. It says pertinently, "Nearly every adult in the community may be considered as a prospective buyer. Some will respond quickly others will require time in order to convince them of the desirability of beer." The following sample of an advertisement will illustrate seductive appeal made to the ordinary citizen in general and the youth of the country in particular.

"For all folks who want to stay young. No home should be without this wonderful youth and health preserving stimulant. Pure Malt Whisky is a Wonderful health preserving stimulant. strengthening the liver, kidneys, and bladder, enriching the blood toning and building the entire system, promoting a good appetite, keeping you young, and vigorous, invaluable for over worked men, nervous run-down women and delicate undeveloped children, hard-playing, fast growing youngsters."

Such advertisements are often accompanied by illustration displaying children of tender ages as drinking. China-ware and articles of appeal to children and young girls are distributed along with the advertisements. Promises are held out that inquiries and orders for supply of the liquor shall be strictly confidential matters. So are the packing's promised to be in deceptive designs to throw off guard any inquisitive parental authority. "Numerous advertisements show minors and other young people, both boys and girls, drinking beer at picnics, on shady porches, on fishing trips, at different kinds of social occasions, and one shows a delivery man bringing in a case of beer and saying to the house-wife, "Madam, this is most wholesome thing that comes into your home."

The Tribune wants to eliminate from its advertising columns all traces of evil or even suspicious association. We feel that liquor advertisements will not help to attract to us either the readers or the advertisers whose patronage we especially desire,

The editor of the Chicago Herald states his platform thus.

A newspaper must have a Social consciences. There is no better investment than a single standard of honour, honesty, truth and integrity from the title to the last agate line on the last page. Those who reap the seedless fields of honesty gather golden harvests. Truth, cleanliness and decency are the greatest dividend payers on earth. And with this declaration the liquor advertisements were expelled from the columns of the Chicago Herald.