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Source: Ross S – Speaker Talk – Date Unknown.mp3 File: ross-s-speaker-talk-date-unknown.mp3 Duration: 00:45:20
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It now gives me great pleasure to introduce a man as our next speaker, who I didn't meet until last night, but just from listening for a little while, I know once again you're going to hear a very fine message from Ross S. of Gary, Indiana. Ross? Yes, my name is Ross S. of Gary. Hi, everybody. If you feel the building shaking, that's me causing it. Last week I spent rather a busy week at the General Service Conference in New York, and they were kind enough one night, one Friday, the Friday night, the last Friday night, to let us have the night off, and I spent my little bit of free time walking around Times Square, just to see Times Square.
And I came across the pickup scale in the place of work. I put in a pen and I watched the lady step on the scale. The scale was a little bit different than what we normally see. It didn't have an arrow pointing to your weight or a card come out telling your weight what it's working like. There was a voice that said, you weigh 115 pounds. Then a man put a penny on the scale, and the scale said, you weigh 160 pounds. And I put a penny on the scale, and the scale said, one at a time.
I'm from a quiet little town just across the state line, a little hoosier, quiet little hoosier town called Gary, Indiana. You in Chicago might know what I'm talking about. Even you from New York could read the Time Magazine this week. We had a little shoot, a little spread in the Time Magazine about OB girls and gambling joints and after-hour joints. I spent a little bit better than a quarter of a century on the police department over there with the detectives. And being an alcoholic, I guess I knew a few of these places. My purpose this morning is to go through a chart that is received for me.
It's going to be a little difficult under the circumstances. I like to have the charts put together. Actually, it's a running account of from when we first start drinking until we wind up saying, I surrender, I give up, I want to be free of this drug alcohol and so on. The name of the chart, as they call it, the Jelnik chart, as you see over on the left here, Jelnik is the name of a man, a doctor, that researched in the field of alcoholism. Probably researched as much, if not more, than anyone.
Now why this is applicable to an AA meeting is because most of his research was done with AA members. And my present occupation is with an outpatient alcoholism clinic, a small clinic over in Gary. I work for the division on alcoholism in the state of Indiana Department of Mental Health. And in my employment there, the state sent me up to Flint, Michigan to the Hurley General Hospital to study a program on alcoholism up there.
And it was there that I first saw this chart. There was a psychiatric nurse that went through this chart on the board, on a blackboard. She just kept writing down certain things. And it began to impress me so much that I started to make notes on it. And when I came back to my job, part of my work, leading me over into the Indiana State Prison, and I got the idea of one of the inmates maybe helping me, and he did a very good job. He doesn't mind my violating his immunity.
Old Joe K. was over there. In fact, part of my talk in New York was on institutional AA. And Joe was one that helped me dig up a few statistics as to when AA started in the Indiana State Prison, because he said, I can remember the first time I left the state prison in 1942, and we did not have them. But when I came back in May of 1943, it was there. So sometimes along in that period of time that AA was started at the Indiana State Prison.
But Joe was real handy with the paintbrush and helped me develop this chart. And I hope you find it interesting. It's going to be rather difficult because I do have to move from the left side of the chart.
[00:05:17]
But anyway, to get into this chart, it takes a little while to go through it. I hope you find it interesting. Dr. Delman tells us, as you see right here on the left, that one out of 13 people that start to drink will become alcoholics. Up at Quinn, Michigan, when they brought out a few other statistics, such as the average age that a person starts to drink is 14 1⁄2 years. And you'll find as I go through the chart, when I get to this out-of-control thing here, the first part of this chart has been very helpful to me going into high school.
This chart was developed, or at least I developed it, to help me in the prison, to help attract members or inmates first coming into the prison, to attract them as to why they are there. There's a sign in the lobby of the administration building at the Indiana State Prison, just as you enter the door, that says, 85% of our new admissions are equipped with alcohol. This was rather startling to me. So I looked a little further, and last year I got ahold of one of the annual reports from the Department of Corrections, and I read in there that they watched 40 men who were paroled from the Indiana State Prison a year ago last July, and out of the 40, 16 of them violated parole within three to six months.
Out of the 16 that violated parole, 13 of them violated parole because of coming into contact with alcohol. So you can see the interest I have in alcoholism over at the Indiana State Prison, the place they depart. And as I say, this chart was developed by Joe when I mentioned the statistics of 14 1⁄2 years. This rather startled me. I don't believe I started drinking until I was 17, 18, 19 years. I don't remember how old I was when I took my first drink.
But to get a few statistics out of the way, which is always boring, but to make points as I go along, and let's quote them for you, they say that there are probably 75 million people, full-around figures, that drink in this country today. And the new figure that I hear now on the number of alcoholics is right at around 6 1⁄2 million. So as I chart through the chart, one thing I do not want to forget to mention is that if I start through the chart and uncover certain key words, I don't want you to compare yourself and say, well, I did not do this and I did not do that.
I wasn't guilty of that or that. Therefore, I am not an alcoholic. The chart is not meant to be that way. But the difference between the 6 1⁄2 million alcoholics and the 75 million people that drink is important because when we refer to these other people as social drinkers, I was at one of the Indiana State conventions a year or two ago. There was a fellow there from Texas who said that the so-called social drinkers, he said, you can take six little bitties out of any church you want to take them out of and give them about six double hookers and they can give this as antisocial as hell.
Which is pretty much the truth. But the first part of the chart, I think we can understand that this out-of-control behavior, we say we cross the fine line from social drinking into acute alcoholism. Now, this chart will take us down the road or the highway or the path, whatever you want to call it. And then we take our first drink until we, as I said, surrender. So we start out by saying that we take our first drink at an early age and if you remember your first time that you got drunk, you probably got drunk rather easily. That is, there was not too much intake of alcohol which gets intoxicated.
So we see a tolerance level here indicated by this brown line spreading apart. That is, when we first start to drink, we got drunk rather easily. But as we drank more, the contact phase, as it is called here, our tolerance level increased to where we could drink more and handle it a little bit better. But as we go along, and now to somewhat show you the difference between the alcoholic or someone starting to be an alcoholic, something that we might call early detection, why it's valuable in high schools and places such as that, is we come across with the first blackout.
I'm sure that most of the alcoholics know the difference between a blackout and a passout. A passout, of course, is where we drink enough of this drugged alcohol, and I refer to it as a drugged alcohol. Alcohol is a drug. When you drink enough of this, you're actually not just unconscious, but that's a passout.
[00:10:15]
Now, as I go along, too, I probably will have to talk in the first person. I just say, I did this, I did that. I do this only to make an example because I feel that by example I can make a point much better. So when we talk about a blackout, I can say that I live in the northeast section of here, which is about 10 miles from me, downtown area. And, for example, now I could be walking around from one bathroom to another and talking, conversing, maybe go so far as we can play a game of cards, then get in my car and drive home the 10 miles and wake up the next morning and someone say, well, what did you do last night? And I'd have to say, I don't remember. Now, this is a blackout. I was mobile. I was able to move around.
So the first thing to come up on the board after that, another indication of the difference between the social drinker and the alcoholic is, as you can see in the back, is a sneak drink. This could, at any moment, give me an indication that I might have been starved. Sneaking drinks, for example, one time when my wife was still with me this morning, I was having some visitors over the house. We would have people sitting in the living room. I would be making the cocktails for them. They were social drinkers, sipping their drinks slowly, but when it came time to refill their glasses, I would take them out to the kitchen, mix their drinks for them, put one shot of booze in their glass and make it with 10 plus 7, not the ginger ale or whatever the mix might be.
But for myself, I would maybe pour a little bit extra in my own and put one over here on the side and banged away real quick. For myself, this was sneaking drinks, and I started to ask myself why now, and I think the reason I did that, probably, I was probably kind of an introvert individual where I needed something to help me get into the spirit of the conversation in that living room, and I found it in alcohol.
So I wanted the drug effect of this alcohol a little bit faster than the so-called social drinkers. Then again, another example might be when we would go out with our friends to one of these cocktail residence combinations, we might be sitting back in the back end of the residence, and I would excuse myself, saying I must go to the washroom, knowing full well that the men's washroom was always out in the bar.
So I would go to the bar and take my quick double and bang away and go back to sneaking a drink, and once more, again, I believe, because I wanted that quicker drug effect than the so-called social drinkers. The next thing to point something like this out is, if you can see at the end, it says pre-occupy drink. Another indication that I was a little bit different, I believe, because of almost any social event that I attended or was going to attend, I would pre-occupy myself with a few drinks.
I dearly love college football. Not living too far from Notre Dame University, there's nothing I like better than the golden glass Notre Dame play football. But if the fellas were coming to pick me up and they were social drinkers, I always had to have a few drinks before they got there to pick me up, and then I was one of those that stuck the bottle in my pocket for fear that they wouldn't drink fast enough for me, and I, of course, would have my alcohol with me.
So, any social event that I went to, and again, this shows somewhat the introvert personality that I probably was, if I went to a dance, because I didn't have anything to drink, and I still don't dance. Nevertheless, if I went to a dance, rather than be a wallflower, I would pre-occupy myself with a few drinks so that I could get up and dance. Maybe because I was sober, I was afraid that people might laugh about the way I danced, because I didn't know how to dance too well. So, with a few belts in me, I didn't much care. This helps quite a bit. The next thing is going on the board, and it will definitely show you the difference between a social drinker and someone who is not, or on their way to becoming an alcoholic.
This says, Gulf Drink. Now, can you tell me what it's going for? I was kind of walking into a bar, and asking for a bottle of beer and a double shot of whiskey, and he has a double shot of coffee before the guys arrive in to get the bottle back on the back bar, and has it out there to be refilled again. What's social about this? I can't see much social drinking in that. Nevertheless, it was a way I drank, and again, because I wanted to quit the drink.
And, uh, again, because I wanted the quick effect of the drug, the alcohol, avoiding references, what the next thing says, avoiding reference to how I drank, what I drank, what I drank, avoiding references, they started talking about how, in these groups back at the, uh, Townsville Arms, uh, somebody started talking about how they drank, whether they drank beer, whiskey, wine, or what, I would much rather talk about, I wonder how more dangerous
[00:15:28]
they were drinking out over South Bend Saturday. I didn't want to talk about how I drank. I wanted to avoid any reference to that whatsoever. Now this next one is frequent blackouts. It's the same as this that we started off with, except now, the blackouts are getting closer and closer and closer together, and of course we're getting to the point where they call them the out-of-control stage. The point of no return, once we cross that fine line, we can no longer go back and be social drinkers. Drinkers and children are all aware of that.
They call this, or not to tell me, gave it a fancy word, the pro-dromo stage. I didn't know what it meant even until I looked it up. The pro- means before, and dromo means running, so running before we get out of control. This is our drinking pattern before we get out of control. Now the next thing that I know Joe K. put on the board for me is this word, and I had it put in red, alibi. Now this is quite a word, alibi, this is from excuses, self-justification, rationalization.
Call to question one. I brought along one of these four step guides. It's the Hazelden Foundation for Childhood. It's not from New York, but nevertheless, helps me make the point. It says that, and I'm going to just read this for one minute, the highly-departmental part of justifying our drinking behavior through mental gymnastics, excuses for drinking. The alcoholic causes and reasons. Pony is a three-hour film. Check these and then add your own, because there are probably thousands of them.
But one of them they list here is, a good alibi to have a drink where an excuse is, a few will spray me out. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to change. I don't think there's anything between the eyes or not, but they sure did me. It wasn't for my mother-in-law. I inherited this clinic that I work in, so it comes out of my ears, and I was kind of reminded of it on television the other night. There was a fellow that's quite funny to me, Johnny Carson, spoke down and told a little story about his mother-in-law in a drunk.
And the mother-in-law died in a drunk with a fume spiral, trying to make arrangements with the fume director to bury his mother-in-law. And they were having a little bit of trouble because of this intoxication. Nevertheless, the fume director said, Now, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to just bury her, or embalm her, or cremate her, or what? And the drunk said, Look, I'll cremate you. So, there's any number of these. If I could start all over again, doesn't that sound familiar? If I could just start all over again, a little drinking would allow me to think. Johnny can remember, I can remember when I was drinking.
I was one of these kind men, as most of us are. I had a real fine idea how to make a lot of money when I was drinking, real fine. But knowing full well that I would be in a blackout the next morning, I would write this down, I would write this idea down, so that I wouldn't forget it. And then in the morning when I got it and read it, well, I just needed to be sorted out before anybody, anybody else read it, because it would be just as bodily groovy as it is yet. A little drinking would allow me to think.
Might as well get drunk today, I might as well drink tomorrow. If some people didn't get on my nerves, if I had just done things differently, well, you could go on and on. As I say, you can have a thousand. You've got your own, I'm sure. Regroup. This, of course, comes when your antibody system begins to collapse. The boss starts raising pain with you, the wife is raising pain with you, the kids are raising pain with you, everybody is actually just raising pain with you, and you feel bad about it, you don't understand it.
So you decide to get, the next word says, extravagant. Maybe try to buy yourself out, drink 1 mL a day a box of candy or a book of flowers, something like that. Here, too, I think you might find this to be true. They say, if he just didn't drink and be the best carpenter in town, or if he didn't drink and be the best bricklayer in town,
[00:20:05]
I think this might come from the person who has been missing work because of drinking and he has this recoup from his boss, so when he goes back to work he gets extravagant with his body. And he goes back and he's a bricklayer and he just lays all kinds of bricks. And the boss says, gee, if he just wasn't a drinker, he'd be the best bricklayer in town. And we believe this to be true. Anyway, to get on to the next one, when he doesn't find his way out, can't get around everything, the word is aggressive.
Here's where he gets pretty fighting mad at his boss. Go home and cuff the old lady around, kick the kids around, get mad, get really in trouble. And what follows that? Remorse. Truly, the alcoholic is very remorseful. He doesn't understand himself. He's full of self-pity. This self-pity, when I stopped back here I forgot to mention that one out of thirteen people are alcoholics. The drinker will become an alcoholic.
They say that one out of five are females. This figure could be a little bit low, or maybe possibly low. Possibly because we don't get a good count on these female alcoholics. Because she's a little bit more sneaky. She's able to stay at home. And you can picture this. The old man comes home from work after an eight-hour tour of duty or whatever it might be. And she makes us two drinks and meets him at the door and says, Here honey, I thought we'd have a drink together.
She's already caught a cough of piss. She's been there drinking by herself. When I speak of remorse, I seem to find in my work anyway, that remorse means self-pity in some way. That it's more prevalent or dominant in the female alcoholics. They, for some reason or another, feel much more sorry for themselves. With the feeling of remorse, the next word that pops up on the board says, Waterwagon. Now this is rather a ridiculous term, if you stop and think about it.
Waterwagon. Is there any reason for a social drinker ever to say that I'm going on the waterwagon? Seldom. I imagine there might be an occasion after a heavy Saturday night drinking, and you wake up the next morning with a headache. And you might say, yes, I better go on the waterwagon. But for the alcoholics, this is a ridiculous term to stop and think about. There's no such thing as the waterwagon for the alcoholics.
Change of pattern comes up after being on the waterwagon for a while, and this is where we begin to tire ourselves. Change of pattern says, well, maybe I'll just drink on the day of the week that starts with P, Tuesday and Thursday. Or I'll drink on the day of the week that starts with F, Saturday and Sunday. And it soon becomes Tuesday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Like this. But the one big one that fools most of us, I believe, is when we're drinking the hard stuff.
When we're drinking the real whiskey. We say, well, we're going to change our pattern of drinking, and we're going to play off of the hard stuff. I'm going to just drink beer only. Why is that? Well, I hope that you all know that there's just about as much alcohol in a bottle of beer as there is in a shot of whiskey. So who are we counting? No one but ourselves. But we should by now be accustomed to that being in the two phase of alcoholism.
We are wasting great time, but who do we count as ourselves? I should, and maybe I will, uncover three of these at one time. The one over there, the last one I uncovered for those of you that can't see, says social decay, problems on the job, and pension changes. Now the reason I uncovered these three at the same time, I think that this would be one way that you could probably identify yourself as being in trouble with alcohol.
Probably the best way. If you are drinking excessively enough that there is social decay starting to set in, such as it did with me, I should have recognized, or have been able to recognize, that I was an alcoholic. Because my friends were no longer visiting me, I was no longer visiting my friends. We were not going out like we did at one time. The wife and I. Social decay, for some of you, has been thrown in jail times again.
I think this is somewhat of a social decay pattern. There's various ways to describe social decay.
[00:25:01]
I believe you can understand that. But excessive drinking is causing social decay in your life. You readily should understand. You are in trouble with alcohol. One of the worst problems on the job, where you begin maybe not coming in on time on Monday morning, maybe later you are starting to miss work the entire Monday, the weekends get longer and longer, then you start missing work on Friday, and you argue with the boss, you are arguing with the friends around you.
If you don't recognize that alcohol is causing this, then you should readily say, I am in trouble with alcohol. Family changes. It happened in my family. My wife left me. She was gone about a week, I guess, before I was confined to her former quarters. I used what word I can to try to get out of it. Anyway, I wound up in a mental hospital down in Loganport, Indiana. The wife was gone. The kids were.
One of them was in the Marine Corps. The other one was in college at the time. But they were. They knew what was going on, much more than I did, I'm sure. Anyway, family has changed, and there are different changes in family that come about. So if any one of these three are disturbed by your excessive drinking, I'm sure you should be able to recognize yourself as being in trouble with alcohol. And if you have all three, there's just no question about it, in my opinion.
I did seek help, and no reflections now on the medical profession, because I don't think there's a person in the room that has a higher respect for the medical profession than I do. But I went out to get help. Of course, one of the first places I went when I started to look for help, I'd go down to the local bartender, who was always obsessed with the catheter technology in town. He said, look, I'm sick, I'm nervous, I'm in trouble.
He'd say, I'd say you aren't for me. I was meant to be a hooker, so I could hang the way and fight my family's nerves down. But I did this. I would do this, too. I was so sick one morning that my wife helped me to the car and did not drive me to my family doctor, but took me over to another doctor. I was so ashamed to go to the family doctor. And here was the family doctor, or the other doctor, prescribing a medicine for me called thralidide.
Now, if you haven't heard of thralidide, I can't say this if you haven't heard something, but you have. Thralidide, if you don't know what it is, you know what thralidide is, what the embalming is. Well, thralidide is that guy's three brothers. I know that when I was forced into the mental institution where eventually I got AA, I was taken from my home by my captain up to the chief of police's office.
And he said, Oh, yeah, look at him. And I told him who the thralidide is. And I imagine I was 15 feet away from him, and I wondered why he told the story for me. His eyes were watering. He wasn't telling the story for me. If you ever smelt thralidide, you can smell it from here to the back of that room. His eyes were actually watering and burning. It smelled on my breath. But the seeking help is something that I know we've all, in AA, found, the proper help.
The next thing, of course, that's turned up on the board now is enreticum and resentment. And to me, resentment is the most damaging fault the embalmers can do. Again, I have the guy, a guy in here that I would prefer to read from because he makes it much more clear than I. It says, Under anger and the seven cardinal sins, resentment comes under anger and the seven cardinal sins. And for many outlaws, it's the most damaging fault in the entire repertoire.
It is a displeasure aroused by a real or an imagined wrong doing. And we get into these real and imagined wrongs. Definitely so. Imagined so many things. But they're accompanied by irritation and drama. Some of them remind me, remember, for your own, you're fired from your boss so you can hate his guts. Or you're fired from your job so you can hate the boss's guts. Your sister warns you about your excessive drinking.
You complain about the hurt. A co-worker is doing a better job and gets all the accolades. You have a drinking record and you fear that he may be promoted over you so you can hate his guts. You, uh, anger and resentment leads to bitterness, friction, hatred, unjust revenge, alienation of the children, and brings out the worst of our inventory and produces misery to ourselves and all concerns. This can even lead, I believe, some people into becoming a Ku Klux Klan.
It's the most horrible resentment. As long as you have resentment against an individual, or a group of people, against an individual, a group of people, a man, a woman, whatever it might be. You are still akin to whoever you are resenting, and don't ever forget that.
[00:30:03]
Until you break that resentment, you're going to be tied down. Now, to follow resentment, we go into this by attempting to escape. Well, escape what? I've heard a lot of them come into the clinic and talk about escaping their death, escaping their nagging wife, they drink to escape a boss that's always picking on them. Anyway, there's answers for these. These are nothing more than these alibis and excuses again.
I had one fellow sitting across the bedroom one day, and he said he was so far in debt that he just drank to exchange his credit and worry about his debt. Well, if you can tell me how you can drink yourself out of debt, I'll put in with you. The nagging wife, I don't know if the story is appropriate or not, but I'm going to tell it anyway. I'm always reminded of the story when I get to the nagging wife.
There was one alcoholic, one heavy drinker anyway, came home, or was drinking too much, that somebody had to his wife and said, look, maybe a little photo would help. Let him see the night when he comes home. Treat him nice. Be different. Don't raise your hand. Let him see it. Be nice and see if this doesn't work. So when he got home that night, he was about half loaded, and she decided to have a nice big supper waiting for him, got his hot liquor, his hot coke, his pipe, and so on.
Let him have a few drinks along during the evening, and about midnight, she said, well, honey, don't you want to go to bed with me? He said, yeah, sure. He said, I'll catch out when I get home anyway. Name change to fly. It comes up on the board again. Name change to fly. I was one of these wise guys that essentially the neighborhood knew that I was the biggest drunk in town, just like the rest of you.
So I bring home my files, and if you look on the bottom of the second or third page of our 12th session 12th edition book, pretty much describes the type of illness we had. It says that we had a mental obsession coupled with an allergy. Well, this mental obsession was really with me because I didn't go out and buy one bottle. I was the kind of guy that brought home my brown grocery bag full of half pints, maybe a couple heads of lettuce and a potato or two on top of it.
And in there I had a bottle of sips, and I'd pull the sips out, open it, take a drink just to let the family know they all went and had one drink. That was all. And then I'd put it right down in the middle of the kitchen table. Everybody could see it. But I'd take the half drinks, and I'd have one that sits in the house in the garage, another one that sits in the house in the bathroom, one upstairs, one downstairs.
So if his wife was in the bathroom, I'd be in the garage. She's up there, and I'd be down there. Wherever she was, I wasn't. That's the way it happened. This, of course, maintained my supply and played into the main thing, such as chain drinking. Chain drinking allowed me to make chains more often. And as you notice, we're getting into the crime phase of alcoholism. I know that while I was on a police farm, two different times while I was on a police farm, once way back in 1942, whether I was an alcoholic or not, I don't know.
But the city of Gary's police department sent me down to Indianapolis to the Indiana Medical Center, the University of Indiana Medical School, where I studied the gunkounder. The gunkounder is a device that measures chemically the amount of alcohol that you have stored in your body. The first time around, back in 1942, I didn't pay too much attention to this. All I wanted to do was to be sure and pass the course, which was a rather difficult course.
It wasn't an extensive course, but it was certainly concentrated and a rather difficult course. But I wanted to pass it that time. The second time around, after I got into the A, they sent me back down there in 1960 for a refresher. And it was quite interesting to me, this thing. In fact, the last day in the lab, the last test that we went through to actually have to pass this course, they came around and asked each one of us in the class, and this was state policeman, sheriff, city police officer, and so on, all over the country to come to this school, and asked us what we wanted to drink.
Whether it be wine, gin, whiskey, beer, how much do you want to drink? But they did have one state police officer who was part of the school that offered to get loaded. He got packed. Then they took a blood sample from this man and actually analyzed it, and told us that this did not tell us how much blood alcohol he had. That is, they didn't tell us his degree.
[00:35:01]
So we went, each one of us had to have him go around the room. We passed the room to the drunk officer, and we had to hit it right on the head. Well, it was interesting to know in that school, for me anyway, where alcohol will metabolize or burn off our bodies at the rate of one third of an ounce of pure ethyl alcohol every hour for every 150 pounds of fiber. Now that gets a little complicated, but nevertheless, you burn off a third of an ounce of alcohol for every 150 pounds that you weigh every hour.
There's a fellow drunk police officer, he likes to kid me a lot about this AA business and so on, and he comes to me and says, look, my wife weighs 140 pounds. Moons going with me, that's his wife. He weighs 210. His wife weighs so much, and I weigh so much. We're going out on the boat. We want to get a certain goal on how much should we take with us and what should we take with us. Then we'll drink just so much an hour for our certain weight.
Well, the fact is, of course, for others, other than alcoholics, I believe that you could, if you weighed 150 pounds, drink a third of an ounce of alcohol every hour in the wooden body. I try to rack statements, but this is what we learned at the medical center in Manhattan. But it was interesting to come to the school that a smaller man, and we often hear about a smaller man and a bigger man and how much they can drink.
Well, it's pretty much common sense. If you take a man who weighs 150 pounds and take another person who weighs 300 pounds, about like me, almost, I can drink, I think, probably twice as much as a small man. It's not anymore, of course. But it's like pouring a shot of whiskey into a one-floor yard and a shot of whiskey into a two-floor yard, and which one is the most common thing? And this is true. There are several ways to put it.
But this is the way it was explained to us. But it is a science. And the point I'm making is that this does not happen to me as alcoholics. We cannot do this. This tells me, anyway, that there is something physically wrong with me, I believe. This is a matter of opinion. Being an alcoholic and an AA meeting, I think I have a right to be wrong. The next thing to go on the board and talk about is ethical deterioration.
And we are now moving into the climate phase. I did not remove these two. They are fancy words to some of us. It's gross physical and psychological changes. So when we go into these in our prolonged centers, and I might say that my last center lasted from about May until November when I was in finance. But that is in the climate phase where ethical deterioration we can talk about. And I know that everyone has a certain code of ethics that they live by.
The theme of this conference is New York. This last conference was placing principles before personalities. Ethics are principles. Ethics are what we've learned to live by in AA. And if you don't really know what your own ideas to think back, maybe you were one that started with your drinking over here in the Conrad Hills where we stayed last night in a real nice place. But gradually your drinking habits led you down lower and lower.
And possibly some of you preached what matters to you. This is ethical deterioration. The psychological changes that I will talk about, I remind you that I am no more than a retired police officer. I am not a doctor. I can only talk to you about what we've learned in this conference and some of the things that I've come across in the planning. But the next words that I'll put on the board, and why don't I just take the rest of them off.
And talk about them all about the same time. The next one says thinking. This has another rather fancy word with it, paralogic thinking. Probably the easiest way to explain that. Paraphrasing from the word paralyzed logic from illogic. Let's put it that way. Paralogic thinking. Alcoholic jealousy. Here again we can get into real or imagined jealousy. Indefinable fears. Dreamers and shakes. And inhibitions.
Now the last one I read, inhibitions, I could have started with that word at the beginning of this chart. And the reason I haven't covered these all at the same time is because I want to talk about inhibitions,
[00:40:00]
which is the last one on the board here. Because inhibitions is involved in all of these. At the school for example, there's a man named Spiegelberg, a doctor, internationally known pharmacologist for that matter, that said that when we take a drink of alcohol, it goes down our throat, it goes into our stomach, and from our stomach it leaves our body and gets into our bloodstream. And it's just a matter of seconds that the alcohol is carried up to our brain.
And the first part of our brain that it begins to affect is the soprano lobe. This part, this particular part of our brain is what makes us different from normal animals. That is, when we're sober, we don't run down the street and stop at every tenth post and firefighter. We go down to the dentist to drink. And we just might stop over here at the Michigan Avenue and become an adult, as I say, and urinate.
Now that's about as far as it takes. And on the police department it says it is not uncommon to find a man doing this, the very same thing on our main street in Gary. It is not uncommon when they're drunk. Inhibitions, what are inhibitions? Inhibitions, he told us, were our moral brakes. So when we talk about paralyzing our inhibitions, which are in our primal lobe, our final grades of judgment are there, our memory is there, our conscience is there, and so on.
But these inhibitions that are our moral brakes, and this is where I find this character very handy overseas, Indiana State Prison, because now we can begin to talk about morals. So in prison, too, we can talk about illegal acts. We can talk about ethical deterioration. Tell me, really, what is the difference between an immoral act and an illegal act? I believe that if we look hard enough, we can find that most of our laws are derived or come from the Ten Commandments, if we want them right now.
Any immoral act, you can revert right back to the Ten Commandments. So when we talk about our inhibitions paralyzing our moral brakes and our moral brakes are off, let me give you a good example. A man might walk into a tavern and cold sober and be the only one in the tavern, except when he looks at the other end of the bar and sees a woman down there that looks like… maybe she waited tables at the last supper.
Let's make a difference. Maybe she was Miss America when we still had 13 states. She doesn't look too good anyway, and is cold sober either. But give him a cup of drink and he looks again and he looks over a cup of soup. Give him a cup of more drink and he can move over a cup of more soup. Well, to make the long story short, I think we can say that these two men are sitting on his lap and away they go to the hotel, our motel room.
But the next morning, when he wakes up and he's sober again, the sobering he was laying alongside of him, in my face, he's Miss America of 1776. Well, the immorals and the inhibitions are quite a big part in our lives, and what I'm saying now is we're going into this vicious circle. We commit these immoral acts, illegal acts, unethical acts, and so on, simply because we are paralyzing the better part of our brain, the final creative judgment, and so on, and we build up a conscience.
We realize when we sober up the immoral or illegal act that we did while we were drinking. And the more we drink, and the more immoral acts and inhibitions, unethical and illegal acts we build up, we begin to pedicure up inside and blood on the toes. And this is the vicious circle that we go into. And as you see at the end of the chart, there are three ways we go. Death, insanity, or recovery. I left this last one on the board.
It says religious need. To me, the most important part of our program, back again to what our theme of our last conference was, principles. We have principles. We have our religious principles. We have different principles. We have our principles in AA that are our spiritual principles that we apply. Our religious needs, to me, are the most important part of our program. If we are to recover, we cannot recover fully, I don't believe, without a definite change in our religious life or our spiritual needs have changed.
So for me, I didn't die. I almost wound up as a permanent resident in a state hospital. But I am recovering and still recovering thanks to God and AA that I'm able to talk to you this morning. And thank you very kindly for listening. and thank you very much for listening.
[00:45:05]
Thank you, Ross, for a very, very informative talk. I believe that we all got plenty out of this talk that Ross just gave us.