In Black America; Alcoholism in the Black Community

Doch I'm John Hanson. Join me this week on in Black America when we examine the disease called alcoholism. Because of alcohol abuse, I think back over my career now. I wish if God would give me a chance to do one thing over my life, all I would like to do is try to be the picture that I was for 10 years with the dodges and deal without drinking. Alcoholism in the Black community this week on in Black America. This is in Black America, reflections of the Black experience in American society. When Joe says that an alcohol there are 13 million alcoholics,

well I'll argue with that, I would say there's close to 20 million alcohols. I think he's being a little conservative there. I'm saying that my travels and being involved directly in the communities all across the country, I'm saying there's more than 13 million alcoholics about there. That's a significant amount of people. And we're talking about maybe 15 to 20 to 30% of being Black folk. Now that ought to be something for us to think about. We ought to be worried about in the city of Austin as 40 to 45,000 people. If 15 to 20% of that populist is having problems with alcohol and yes other drugs, well then we have a problem in the city of Austin. And the governor ought to be concerned about it, the mayor ought to be concerned about the city council, the commission, all ought to be concerned about it. Most certainly the people living in those respective communities ought to be concerned about it. And what are we doing?

We're sitting on our collective fannies, our butts. I'd like to say another word but I can't here today. Doing nothing about it all very little. And that worries me. Don Nukum, former professional baseball player, whose professional sports career was cut short due to alcoholism. Alcoholism is the number one public health problem and the number one social problem in Black America, according to the National Black Alcoholism Council. The National Black Alcoholism Council says that alcohol has been so ingrained in Black American culture that its impact and role have been overlooked. Because alcoholism is a mysterious disease, a disease of denial, federal researches estimate that there are 9 to 10 million adult problem drinkers in this country and perhaps 2 million of them are black. I'm John Hansen and this week, a look at the disease called alcoholism in Black America. Prior to my first drink, I was in athletics.

I went to college on the Athlete Scholarship. So alcohol didn't fit in with my lifestyle. I was kind of raising a Christian home so I was against alcohol for all reasons. But it was in college, I took my first drink. And some people become alcoholic gradually. But somewhere along the line, I think it's a psychic thing of using alcohol and not just drinking it, but using it to do a specific thing for you. And I think that I was in a unique class because I remember the first night I took a drink. My first drink did something for me that I liked and I proceeded to use it in that fashion from then on. So compulsive drinking was all the drinking I ever knew. Joe McQuainy, Executive Director of Serenity House in Little Rock, Arkansas. Alcoholism is an eco opportunity disease.

It is a mystery disease. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Rockville, Maryland, it is estimated that 9 to 10 million Americans are problem drinkers. Of that number, 4 to 5 million blacks are abusers of alcohol. In any major city in this country, 10 to 12 percent of the population are alcoholics. Within the black community, the figure goes up to 14 to 16 percent. Blacks usually consume more than a third of the alcohol in this country while drawing less than a six of the income. Recent studies indicate that the highest degree of drinking now takes place in the age groups 16 to 20 years. The first drink now comes at age 8 to 10 years, with girls trying alcohol almost as often as boys. Within the field of alcoholism study, considerable debate exists about whether there should be specific treatment and rehabilitation programs for alcoholics among the minority population, particularly blacks. Alcohol abuse and alcoholism represent a far more severe crisis than is generally recognized by the black community.

I spoke with Joe McQuainy, Executive Director of Serenity House in Little Rock, Arkansas. Serenity House is a halfway house for recovering alcoholics. Well, approximately, some extend about 1959, about three years before recovery. I, as far as I can think back, probably come to the idea that alcoholism was, it really had me by that time. Why did you decide to start drinking? Were you drinking moderately or were you drinking on weekends or just after work or what? Well, alcoholism is very strange, very peculiar that most of the young people in high school were drinking prior to my first drink. I was in athletics, I went to college on the Apples Scholarship, so alcohol didn't fit in with my lifestyle. I was kind of raising a Christian home, so I was against alcohol for bar reasons, but it was in college, I took my first drink.

And some people become alcoholic gradually, but somewhere along the line, I think it's a psychic thing of using alcohol. It's not just drinking, but using it to do a specific thing for you. And I think that I was in a unique class because I remember the first night I took a drink. My first drink did something for me that I liked, and I proceeded to use it in that fashion from then on. So, compulsive drinking was all the drinking I ever knew. Some people will drink socially for a period of time before they start doing it. And some people very rare bunch start off from the beginning, so I really, for all the intentions, I always wasn't alcoholic. Was it difficult for black to obtain treatment 20 years ago if he was an alcoholic? Definitely. The only treatment in the higher area there in Little Rock was a state hospital.

And it was not an alcohol treatment facility there. At that time there was an alcohol unit in the state hospital for the white, but the black alcoholics were just locked up with the mental patients. And there was no resemblance of any talk or anything about it, or anything about it. I just locked you up and bars on the windows and you just kind of shook it out to the best you could and then let you go. What about alcohol anonymous? Well, alcohol anonymous is, like I say, is open to all people. But, you know, they hadn't made inroads into the black community. It was anonymous organization. It was open to all, but still yet far as without the type of organization that it is or fellowship, which it has no outreach, it has no publicity. It was that they had denied the black. It was that the black had never made entry into that area.

So, I was the first person in that area that made inroads into the alcohol treatment. You call off of a program that is being widely used throughout the United States, also in Arkansas, where you're from? Could you tell us something about that? Yeah, well, recovered dynamics is a program that we developed. And it's been a very rewarding thing, but it came through my personal desire to better do what I do. In an over a period of eight and nine years of study and day-to-day work and experimenting, I began to develop some ideas of the applications developing a treatment method in a uniform way that we could evaluate to progress the client and give him the information in a precise method. And one thing led to another and someone asked me, after four or five years of development, and then I had implemented it to a certain extent in the treatment facility there, so people got involved and very enthusiastic about me documenting it.

And I didn't have any intentions of this because I was just thinking about my specific use, so we began to document it and put it into a written form where it could be used by other people. Public attitude is one of the main or one of the single most troublesome obstacle among the treatment and the prevention of alcoholism. Why is the public so lack of days ago so tolerant with the alcoholism, or with alcohol in particular? Alcoholism is an age-o problem. Alcohol is so much a part of our culture. It's hard to know what you're talking to, whether a person that successfully uses alcohol or doesn't use it at all, is seemingly very disinterested in a person who has a problem with it. This is, I guess, his human nature, and it's this lack of understanding by the general community that is actually causing the destruction.

You know, a disease is like anything else, like all of our major health problems. Many, many years ago we had a disease called tuberculosis. We had certain stigmas and ignorance and misunderstand and associated with tuberculosis, so people that had it died because they hid because of the stigmas. So we know that the people now in design dying from tuberculosis at that time, they were designed from the stigma associated with it. So in the same case of alcoholism, it's not just the alcoholism which is destroying people, it's the general attitude and ignorance of society that is aligned is to happen. So it's a matter of changing, and I think there's a great deal being done. We hear a lot on the media, such as this, is involved, education in our schools, through the councils on alcoholism and local programs. And in the national effort, we are beginning very slowly to get the geopolitics to learn something about it, to accept the fact that alcoholism is a disease and is a disease probably the most untreated, treatable disease in the United States.

It's alcoholism a serious problem in the black community. Alcoholism is probably the most serious health problem in the black community. We don't see it as alcoholism, we see it as crime, we see it as murder, we see it as automobile accidents, we see it as a family violence, we see the, we are constantly in the black community treating all of the things that alcoholism causes. And when you've got a problem, you don't treat the symptoms of the problem, you try to treat the problem, and then these symptoms that we waste a lot of time and effort. But it's definitely alcoholism. Being a black alcoholic is it somewhat, say it, unique, they have a unique problem, say more so than a white alcoholic. Yeah, alcoholism is a disease and a disease in itself.

It has a unique, you know, inflection on a group or a certain group of people. The attitudes of the black community toward alcohol is different. Alcoholism is the accepted disease in the black community. It's just a hazard of being a black drunker. And there's no, you know, they don't believe in treating it, they just believe in alone, let them drink. So the black alcoholic is usually nurtured by the black community, he's usually supported. You know, they buy them a drink and they do things for them and the family does things for them and then they lie on the diet and they all go to the fuel and cry. And so, is there a support? They are enabling the illness to persist in the individual. So these attitudes need to be changed. There are, as we say, two groups of people in the black community, the drinker and the non-drinker. And the attitudes of the non-drinker toward the drinker are as it is as a scene.

And this is a drill-in with, you know, religious settings at a black church. The black church did not accept alcoholism as a disease on a whole. It sold as a scene and this is reinforced. It's a family, two in alcoholism. Number one, regardless of who, when we have an illness in the family, it's like any other disease. If the victim doesn't respond or seek help, usually one of the other family members will do this. The alcoholism is unique in that not only the victim denies the illness, the family denies along with the victim. This is total destruction. Somebody within that family union has got to step forward and make some move toward treatment. What the alcoholic does or not. And I think that they want a greater inroads to the alcoholic is the black family. The black family has been displayed by the service experts. I think that probably they studied the knowledge of the black family probably came from the welfare roles.

These were the people they examined because these records were at hand. And they said, this is an average black family, but it's not. Our black community leaves addressing their self to the problem of alcoholism in the black community. One thing that is, maybe that, you know, you were bringing back a lot of things, maybe we didn't talk about it. For some reason, another of the black church plays a vital role in the black community. All the great changes in the history of black men in America have originated in and around the church. You know, a civil rights movement. All this great, the church is in a great moment. It seems, you know, the church plays more than a spiritual role in the black community. It has to fulfill this role as something more than it is. And this is why, you know, I'm so glad to see that maybe we need to direct the change there attitude

because they're probably going to be the vehicle if we make this great change in alcoholism and drug addiction. Joe McQuainy, Executive Director of Serenity House in Little Rock, Arkansas. Prior to the recognition by medical groups of alcoholism as a disease, a treatable disease, there were no treatment systems as we know them today for the black alcoholic. The black alcoholic was sent to the correction centers for 30 days or put in the city hospital to dry out. More affluent black alcoholics bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The first intensive treatment centers for blacks emerged in the late 1930s, and today there are thousands of them throughout the country. Currently, there is very little information on the problem of the woman alcoholic. From the information we do have, it is stated that those women who do drink heavily are likely to have men who encourage them to drink heavily, or are likely to pursue a more active social life where frequent and heavy drinking is expected. I spoke with Ms. Cheney Allen, founder of the California Black Commission on Alcoholism,

and founder of the California Women's Commission on Alcoholism. Since 1971, Ms. Allen has been associated with alcoholism and counseling education centers. Ms. Allen is the author of the book entitled, I'm Black, and I'm sober, published by ComCare Publication. The autobiography is a vivid story about a minister's daughter finding the disease of alcoholism and winning. All the materials that kept coming across my desk, I just simply couldn't use it with my clientele. It was a material written by like PhDs and doctors and upper milk class white people that the poor blacks couldn't identify with. And it was too educated, because men in my clientele alone was third or fourth grade students, and I just couldn't work with the material. So I decided, okay, I'm going to try to do something about it.

What I'll do is I'll get up, try anyway since I stayed drunk and out there in the streets for 20 years. So I decided I'm going to try it. I didn't know how to write a book. But I just set down number one, I prayed. I asked God for knowledge. I asked God to do for me what he did for King Solomon, which is supposed to be the wisest man in the world, my father being a minister and he told me, he's not so smart. Anything he asked God to do, God helped him, and he'd do the same thing for you. So I tried it. The first came out as I'm black and I'm drunk, and it wasn't edited, but I published it myself. I saved my drinking money and put the book out there. And when I did, about the first 500 copies, in two months, I was trying to get 500 more printed. One of my friends had a printing press in his kitchen, and that's the way it was put out.

I mean, different friends, that's how we correlated the book and did the best we could. Coming from a good Christian background, how did you happen to become an abuse of alcohol? Well, I had to learn in later years that people are led to alcohol, just as people are led to certain foods, certain medications. Of course, I didn't know it. And if there's anything like a person being, some doctors say, yes, some say no. But if there's anything like a person being born in alcohol, then I'm one of those people. I never did drink socially. In the beginning, I was in trouble with alcohol, and was drinking just a little, but I'm allergic to it. A person is allergic to alcohol, because it is a two-fold illness. It's a physical allergy of the body, coupled with a mental obsession. A person is both physically and psychologically addicted with this stuff.

This is a two-fold illness. So that's what happened to me. When I picked it up, the disease just took off. And Webster teaches, if you're allergic to something, it's going to cause an abnormal reaction. That's what Webster teaches. If a person allergic to certain foods, let's say strawberries, and you eat them, they break you out, that's abnormal. If you're allergic to penicillin, you're going to get an abnormal reaction. If you're allergic to alcohol, you're going to get an abnormal reaction. Now, the abnormality of this alcohol is you're going to keep drinking until you get drunk. And the average alcoholic have no intention of getting drunk before they get drunk. They want to do just like anyone else who's not allergic to it. They want to have a couple of cocktails and enjoy themselves. No one wants to drink or do. Drink themselves in jail. That's abnormal.

To drink to the point of falling out drunk someplace, that's abnormal. Drink to the point that you spend up all the money from your family and abuse your family, it's abnormal. So this is what I'm saying. I didn't know I was an alcoholic for years. Were there any support systems when you knew you had a problem with alcohol that you could go through? Yes. My number one support system that I could go back and say again is God. It's number one, as God for help. From that I was directed into the program. When I got into the program, I worked with my 12 steps and other, my sponsor, and other recovering alcoholics. And this is how, thank God, I've been able to stay sober since August the 30th, 1968, which was 15 years ago. Do you think the black community perceived that alcoholism is a problem in our community? Are we turning a deaf ear to the problem?

Our communities know that we have a problem. The average even the black alcoholic, they know they have a problem. All alcoholics know that they are in trouble way before they scream for help. But they may not know exactly what to do. Because you see, as a black, I was taught. And blacks are always taught usually. The alcoholism is a sin. We come in from the religious point. Alcoholism is a sin. Whereas they told me, you see, the way I understood it, there's no place in heaven for the way with the woman, the drunkard, the divorcee, the adultery. Well, hell, I speak. There's no use to me keep praying because I was guilty of everything. I did them all wrong. You see what I mean? So this is what I'm saying. So now we're trying to say that alcoholics and help them to understand that alcoholism is an illness. It's a disease.

Once I ever was able to understand that, then the first question I asked is that anything I can do about it. And the answer was yes. What? Then what they told me to do, I started doing that. I started following. That's how I'm becoming to the program we call them babies. Because you don't know, you don't know which way to go, you're lost. Physically, mentally, morally, bankrupted. Because I was just at sick. I was not a home drinker, I was a bar drinker. And that one out there knows bars getting drunk, gets in all kinds of problems. Until I had no health left, no self respect. Because I reached the point. Well, we'd be sitting and talking to the bar and then I would go into a blackout.

I'm going to bring that out, blackout, the memory of blackout. That is not passing out. We're talking about two different things. The pass out is the farmer going to sleep. You may fall out behind the wheel. You may fall out in the middle of the floor and go to sleep. You may go to bed and go to sleep. Some people sit up in the chair. They're lip hanging down, slaver running out of it, but they're going to sleep. That's passing out. But I never would pass out so much, but I was a blackout. And that is when you continue to function, but you don't remember. You could drive the car home and couldn't remember how the car got there. And this is often said in the black neighborhood. I had to look out there wanting a man to see my wheels was out there. I don't know when I drove home last night. Or something crazy that you did. And while you was in a blackout, and your friends got to tell you about it. You know that reminds me of an old song years ago.

Years ago. And I didn't understand it then. I was drinking then. And this song had to come in maybe from an alcoholic. The song said, I sure had a wonderful time last night. At least they tell me I did. You see? So your friends or someone who got to tell you what you did last night. You was doing it. Now that's serious. There have been rape, robbery, accidents, everything committed to our persons in this blackout. There was absolutely functioning. And this is caused from brain damage. Did you suffer any physical ailments from the problems of alcoholism? Did I do it? Do you? Did you? All right. Yes, I did. My body. I'm August 30, 1968. I'm 142 now.

I waited 91 pounds. Because I'm the type of alcoholic who cannot eat when I drink. I no longer felt the urge to go to the bathroom. I lay there in my own body. Ways wet bed. Felt the bed vomit. Beum. Fluttered into death as many female alcoholics will do because alcohol will really regulate a lot of women's menstrual flow. Vomiting blood also which I still have. I woke up and I always felt diabetic, became diabetic. Everything I'm saying is alcohol related. Surgery done on my feet. They still hurt from alcoholism because of course I regulated a clogged blood. Anywhere the blood flows it gets lumpy. Anywhere that lumpy blood flow it damages. So the whole body was damaged. And I just reached my bottom. That's when I asked God. If he would reach his mighty hands at one more time and pick me up off the floor and give me better reason of health and self-respect.

I also understand that you attempted on suicide. Yes. I attempted suicide in 1962. I could not stand another day of drinking and I reached a point where I couldn't stop. I knew that my whole life was out of control. I was headed nowhere. I was sick and I couldn't put it down. I was hooked. And I didn't know any way out. I didn't know how to come out. No one had ever told me I was an alcoholic. I had never seen a person in my life in 1962 said there was an alcoholic. I knew nothing about any program. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what was wrong. Except I knew I had to be going insane. Because you see the average alcoholic, when they know they're out of control, the average alcoholic will stop and ask themselves or tell themselves, I had to be crazy to do what I did last night. And the truth of the matter is, they are.

Ms. Cheney Allen, author, teacher and founder of the California Black Commission on Alcoholism. If you have a comment or would like to purchase a cassette copy of this program, write us. The address is in Black America, Longhorn Radio Network, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 787-12. For in Black America's technical producer, Cliff Hargrove, I'm John Hanson. Join us next week. You've been listening to In Black America, Reflections of the Black Experience in American Society. In Black America is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at UT Austin, and does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Texas at Austin or this station. This is The Longhorn Radio Network.