Alcohol, Chemistry and You
Case Study - Jolene, Alli and Warren
Dr. Matt Hermes

Problems

Case Study

Binge Drinking
Principal findings from a survey of college student drinking recently completed by the Harvard School of
Public Health. survey include the following: 

1. Overall, 44 percent of U.S. college students engaged in binge drinking during the two weeks prior to the survey. (For men, bingedrinking is defined as having five or more drinks in a row, and forwomen as having four or more drinks in a row.) 

2. The extent of binge drinking varied widely among U.S. colleges, froma low of one percent of students to a high of 70 percent. At almost one-third of the colleges, more than half the students were binge
drinkers during the past two weeks. 

3. Drinking patterns established in high school often persist during college.
4. Compared to other students, college students who were binge drinkers in high school were almost three times more likely to bebinge drinkers in college.
5. Being white, involved in athletics, or a resident of a fraternity or sorority made it more likely that a student would be a binge drinker. 
6. Very few students--even those who binge drank three or more times during the past two weeks said they had a problem with alcohol at the time of the survey. 

7. Compared to non-binge drinkers, a higher percentage of binge drinkers had experienced alcohol-related problems since the
beginning of the school year.  

Smokey is a little guy with a handlebar moustache and a crooked back. He chooses the moustache to draw attention from his bald head. The crooked back chose him as result of being thrown from a bull when he was young and wild and in living in Wyoming. 

You can talk to him standing in the door of the ambulance in Glenwood Springs, CO, arms folded and a tired look in his eyes.

Jolene: "I get to know the alcoholics," he says.  "We're a young town and some of them get so bad, so young.  I take them to the hospital and I visit them there and they get to know me.  Some of them call me when they need help before they call the ambulance.  Take Jolene.  She couldn't stop drinking.  She worked at the community college here, in the administrative office.  She knew the kids and she drank with them.  Fifteen years of that and her body went. 

"I took her to the hospital one night when her roommate found her blacked out and bleeding at the bottom of her stairs.  She stopped drinking for a while and she told me she went to Alcoholics Anonymous.  But I noticed she began to get really puffy, not fat but puffy like she was retaining all kinds of fluid. She called me last November and she was drunk.  She was crying and she said she wanted to go to an AA meeting.  Would I take her?  Well I knew where they were so I dropped her off there.  An hour later a call came in from the church where the meeting was.  She had passed out and we took her to the hospital.  She never regained consciousness and in three days she was dead.  Doc Hammer, the emergency room guy said her whole system had shut down.  Her liver was shot and her whole system stopped working.  She was 36 years old." 
 
  

Alli: "The thing about Allie was he always crashed the same way. Literally," Smokey says. " Allie is a plumber and when he isn’t drinking he is a sweet, happy guy. And then he starts drinking, and two things happen. He gets depressed and then he crashes his car.

"Last year he had a year or two without a drink and I saw him coming out of the liquor store with a paper bag under his arm. Uh, oh, I thought. He was doing plumbing in my house then and one day he disappeared for two hours. I went looking for him and he had crawled under the house, into my crawl space, and he was just lying there, his face into the ground. He was unable to move, to do his job, to call for help. And the next month he t-boned his car on route 40 – he pulled right through a red light. I was in the ambulance and when I got there, he was bad! Not hurt, but wild, biting, kicking and foul, foul language. He blew a 0.26 – up in the dangerous range and we had to put him in restraints in the hospital!"

Smokey said he has lost touch with Allie for now but found out he had been in the State Hospital in Pueblo for six months. And he had heard that Allie was now two years from a drink. What had happened, Smokey said, was that Allie had been taking a new medication, called Naltrexone that stops the desire, the craving to drink in many people, and he was taking his anti-depressants, too. And he was also going to AA.

Allie was in Arkansas now, he had met a woman in the hospital and he was living with her outside Ft. Smith.

Warren: "I never had Warren in my ambulance," Smokey said. "Oh yes I did. It was the time he had lost his driver’s license for his second DWI and he had to get to work. He was living with his mom way up on a hill over town and he drove down the hill on his bicycle, drunk. He crashed where you make the turn to the post office and lay there, bleeding and stunned. They patched him up. But he was a mess. I was over his mother’s house on the Fourth of July to see the fireworks and he was just one scab all over."

Smokey said right after that he drove Warren to Utah to make a court date, then dropped him off at a Rehab. Warren left there the next day, telling them he didn’t have a problem with alcohol, he was just having a string of bad luck. He was back in town within a week and got arrested breaking into the pool hall over by the trailer park. He was always playing pool there but he still forgot that the owner lived in the back room. The owner marched him out, hands behind his head and into the arms of a uniform.

"Warren’s in the county jail now, "Says Smokey. "I go over there one night a week to volunteer and he looks good. He says no more drinking for him, but he also says he can control it any time he wants. I don’t know about that. There’s a certain look in the eyes of a person that’s not done drinking yet. And I’m afraid Warren still has that look. He’ll be out around Thanksgiving and I hope he doesn’t use the holidays as an excuse to start drinking again".

Note: Smokey is real although he no longer rides Colorado ambulances. He prefers golf in Nevada. Jolene, Alli and Warren are real, too, in a sense. Their names are changed but each is based on a young person from a small Colorado town. Jolene died in 2000 as described. Alli still drifts in and out of depression and sobriety and the real Warren is, in fact sober and was married in July 2001.
   

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