Reflections on a Wild Youth

I gave Koren Zailckas' Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood three stars on Amazon.com today. Here is my review:

This was a fun read, but not an entirely compelling one. Other contemporary addiction memoirs -- such as Augusten Burroughs' "Dry," Elizabeth Wurtzel's "More, Now, Again," and even Toby Young's "How to Lose Friends & Alienate People" -- weave substance abuse in to a larger personal narrative. In this book, substance abuse is the narrative.

At one point, the MTV reality show "Real World: Miami" is compared to a full-frontal lobotomy. The sad irony is that so much of the conduct described in this book makes for a typical episode of that show. The author and many of her contemporaries, especially her fellow students at Syracuse University, displayed a singularity of purpose in chasing the soft dragon of alcohol-induced highs and the attendant hijinx. But binge drinking is hardly a novel phenomenon; it is a natural consequence of prevailing unhealthy social attitudes toward substances -- grounded in fear and misinformation, and expressed in meaningless slogans like "just say no."

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is a fairly common-sense one: heavy drinking crowds out an individual's capacity to enjoy other pursuits.

Ms. Zailckas is entirely spot on when she observes, "I'm pissed at the government that would, through its allocation of dollars, have us believe that drug abuse is either a bigger issue or a more worthy one than underage drinking, neither of which is the case" (p. 334). Clearly, this nation's approach to alcohol and drug policy needs a massive overhaul: where "zero tolerance" is replaced with science-based prevention and education programs, and where substance abuse and addiction are treated as public health concerns and not as its own branch of criminology.

Until then, this nation will keep pounding its collective head against the pavement and wonder why it has a headache.