He’s drunk. Insanely, mindblowingly, staggeringly drunk. Somehow it seems rational to him to suddenly stop in the middle of the street, a bit wobbly, and outrageously discuss foreigners coming to Chile.
“Eh, you American, no?”, he manages to burst out while staring at some blond foreigner almost desperately trying to escape.
Unfortunately these kinds of events are not very rare in Chile. Due to alcohol being so intimately part of habitual culture, especially food-related, in addition to low prices, things tend to turn out this way.
“It’s very cheap to be an alcoholic here in Chile,” says a friend of mine, trying to explain the culture regarding alcohol in this country.
“I use alcohol every day.” He shrugs. “Always wine to lunch and dinner and then mostly a few beers in the evening in company of good friends.”
He’s nowhere near the typical alcoholic on the street, but I’m pretty sure his consumption would be regarded accordingly by the standard measurements used elsewhere. In a surrounding like that, a good deal of alcohol-dependent inhabitants are inevitable. This staggeringly drunk man is by no means a one-off occasion, daily occurring and plainly visible.
Tragic and awful, and an appalling reminder to why IOGT International exists, doing the work we’re doing.
Yeah, it’s so important to break alcohol myths and to break the alcohol norm. We need to work globally to change this harmful alcohol culture.